I was honored to be invited by the Poynter News University to present a webinar on the way that location based servies are (and will) change the news world. Pretty far out stuff! I hope you’ll join me. I’ll be flying out to Florida to present in person, but it’s all about the online attendance so I hope you’ll spend some time on April 1st joining us for this discussion.
I just had my 2nd conversation this morning before coffee about this fabulous Economist special report on Big Data: Data Data Everywhere. The person I was corresponding with asked me why I was interested in this topic. Here’s my answer. If this is something you’re interested in, I’d love to know what it is about Big Data that captures your interest, too.
What got me excited is just that this is a topic I think is fascinating. I’ll tell you frankly: I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we’re working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we’ve got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I’m hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we’ll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today.
How about you? Are you interested in Big Data? Where does your interest come from?
Related: Check out Ta-Nehisi Coate’s critical analysis of one of the most prominent recent examples of social media data analyzed. I’m still reading it, myself.
Working on a new bio, anybody got any feedback on how this reads?
Marshall Kirkpatrick is the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb, one of the top technology news blogs on the internet and syndicated daily online by the New York Times. Marshall has established himself as one of the web’s leading voices on bleeding edge technology thanks to his ability to find signal buried in real-time noise – primarily through the use of innovative research systems built for crowdsourced data mining and first mover’s advantage. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two dogs, two cats and three chickens.
This is from Urtak and looks a lot like Hunch. I think it’s a pretty compelling user experience. Poll creation is pretty weak, but easy. Let me know what you think and I’ll tell you what I think of it once we’re on the other side.
Checking in at the admin side, I now see that I can’t even find my poll to check results. Oh well, I sure like the idea anyway.
It’s messy, I can’t figure out why it’s cutting off the first few words of my first sentence above.
I’m experimenting with a new system for discovering and getting to know important new people. I’m pretty excited about it. Of course it’s about Twitter because Twitter is paying my mortgage. I wrote a little song about it, goes something like this:
Just kidding, no song. I totally should write a song about it, though. If this system works well over time maybe I will do a little warbling about it after all. Thoughts?
I’ve been meaning to share links to some of the blogs I’ve been coming across a lot lately and really enjoying. Check these out, you might like them as much as I have been. Got suggestions for other blogs that readers here and I should be subscribed to as well?
Yup, those are my (roughly) 5 favorite new blogs. How about you? Anything you’ve discovered lately that is becoming a must-read?
I just noticed some posts around the web questioning my characterization of Mark Zuckerberg’s on-stage declaration that the age of privacy is over. I left a comment on one of those blog posts that I thought I should post here as well. I thought pretty hard before posting that coverage of Zuckerberg’s statements that I did. I asked myself: is this a fair way to characterize what he just said? I concluded that it was and I stand by that still today.
So just for the record, here’s the rough transcript I posted last month of Zuckerberg’s literal comments, followed by my justification for why I’ve summarized them as I have.
“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’
“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.
Here’s why I believe he was saying, in those vague but important words, that the age of privacy is over.
Zuckerberg did say that the era of privacy is over, he just said it one step away from literally and directly. He said this: our new privacy stance (X) is based on where we think the world is today and if we were to launch the site anew today, then that policy (X) is how we would have launched it.
What is X? It is a policy wherein your profile photo, friends list and most importantly fan page subscriptions are irrevocably public and a variety of other types of user data are now by default public. He doesn’t say “the era of privacy is over” directly, he says “our new privacy policies reflect the way the world is today” – but the phrase “our new privacy policy” equals: no more privacy about some things and public by default on others.
It is a fundamentally more public position on privacy and one that Facebook team members have told me point-blank on a press phone call – yes, they are hoping to move people towards being more public and less private.
So let me know, am I mischaracterizing things? I don’t think I am. I don’t think I’m putting words into anyone’s mouth, I think I’m doing journalistic work interpreting the meaning behind public utterances regarding a topic I’ve been paying close attention to for a good while.