Category Archives: Reputation

How much is your privacy worth?

Fascinating post on MSNBC about the price users put on Privacy…The post talks about experiments where users were asked how much they value their private data. Customers were asked the question in two ways:

  • How much are customer willing to pay to protect their privacy?
  • How much do customers want to be paid to share their private information?

As expected customers wanted a whole lot more money to share their private information while very few were willing to pay to anything to protect that information. I think people have this assumption about privacy that its something they just have…and I think its an artifact of how things used to be before everything changed because of technology. We now need to reexamine our assumptions about how much we really value privacy and come up with a more rational value (rather then have endowment effect and other psychological factors skew our judgement) … This is too important for everybody.

Benefits of Forgetting

Interesting and scholarly study from Kennedy School of Government’s Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, titled “Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing”. In the study, the author points to change in our default societal behavior, from forgetting unimportant things to remembering everything.

In March 2007, Google confirmed that since its inception it had stored every search query every user ever made and every search result she ever clicked on. Google remembers forever.

“хранить вечно“ (to be preserved forever) the KGB stamped the dossiers on its political prisoners. The Communist state would never forget the identity, believes, actions and words of those that had opposed it.

Like the Soviet state, Google does not forget. But unlike the Soviet Union that ceased to exist fifteen years ago, Google has become an indispensable tool for hundreds of millions of people around the world, who use it every day. We seem to have accepted that our digital society may forgive, but no longer forgets.

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This has resulted in a drastic shift in our data retention behavior. For millennia it was difficult and costly to preserve. We would only do so in exceptional circumstances, and most frequently only for a limited period of time. For almost all of human history, most of what humans experienced was quickly forgotten. Today, however, retention of digital data is (relatively) easy and cheap. As a consequence, and absent other considerations, we keep rather than delete it. This is the central point: In our analog past, the default was to discard rather than preserve; today the default is to retain.

Credit bureaus store extensive information about hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens. Daniel Solove writes that the largest US provider of marketing information offers up to 1,000 data points for each of the 215 million individuals in its database. We also see the combination of formerly disparate data sources. Solove mentions a company that provides a consolidated view at data from 20,000 different sources across the world. It retains the data, he writes, even if individuals dispute its accuracy.

Companies keep our air travel reservations on file even when we decide not to buy the ticket, together with rich information about us and our previous travel patterns.21 Millions of cameras in public places – the UK alone is said to operate between 2 and 3 million produce records of our movements that are kept. Law enforcement agencies store biometric information about tens of millions of individuals even if these have never been charged with a crime. Search engines retain each of our search queries, and keeps archival copies of our web pages long after we have taken them offline.

This is only the beginning. With the advent of ubiquitous computing, of cheap GPS chips in our cell phones, cameras and cars, of RFID tags in everyday objects, and of tiny, networked sensors that surround us, a more comprehensive trail of our actions will be collected than ever before. Given low cost of storage, ease of retrieval and potential value in accessing information, much of the data that is being collected will be kept for months if not years, as our societal default has shifted from deletion to retention.

This has drastic consequences beyond the obvious ability to know much more about other people’s preferences, behaviors, actions and opinions than in the analog world of incremental forgetting. Living in a world in which our lives are being recorded and records are being retained, in which societal forgetting has been replaced by precise remembering, will profoundly influence how we view our world, and how we behave in it.

If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves. Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us speak less freely and openly. This is the temporal version of a panoptic society, in which everything is being watched; it is a society in which most of what is being recorded and collected is being preserved. Regardless of other concerns we may have, it is hard to see how such an unforgetting world could offer us the open society that we are used to today.

So what is the solution? The author suggests a combination of legislative and technical approaches that restore the default of forgetting in our society. So if some entity or person wanted to remember things beyond certain time period, they would need to do some special action like writing down in digital terms…I think this makes a lot of sense and could prevent common people from becoming more and more like stage coached politicians who  plan and practice each and every one of their moves and utterances…What do you think?

Hit job – web style

This is a familiar enough story (Via SF Gate)…And the people hit have few avenues for relief:

The first postings appeared soon after Sue Scheff, who runs a Web-based referral service for parents with troubled teenagers, advised a woman from Louisiana to withdraw her twin sons from a boarding school in 2002. Scheff is “a con artist,” “a crook” and “a fraud,” according to the messages, which peppered blogs and Internet forums for parents of troubled teens.

Soon, calls to Scheff’s Parents Universal Resource Experts dropped by half, said Scheff, 45, who lives in Weston, Fla. “People would say: ‘You know, I just read this about you online. How do I know I can trust you?’ ”

Scheff, whose 6-year-old service usually draws a lot of traffic, is a victim of an emerging phenomenon: online smear campaigns, which can wreak havoc in the victims’ professional and business lives at the touch of a few keystrokes.

We need an identity and reputation infrastructure that puts all opinions, expressed by all people, in perspective based on what they have done in the past. Such a system will help online communities maintain decorum by penalizing participants who don’t add value to the discussion (much like discussions in real community) and rewarding those who do…This is quickly emerging as an important requirement for wider adoption of social media…

Web Attack – What to do?

Great article in BusinessWeek how Internet and Social media (despite the occasional nastiness) is making business become more accountable:

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Home Depot’s (HD ) CEO goes into an emergency huddle with his crisis management team after 14,000 bilious customers storm an MSN (MSFT ) comment room.

The venom of crowds isn’t new. Ancient Rome was smothered in graffiti. But today the mad scrawls of everyday punters can coalesce into a sprawling, menacing mob, with its own international distribution system, zero barriers to entry, and the ability to ransack brands and reputations. No question, legitimate criticism about companies should get out. The wrinkle now is how often the threats, increasingly posted anonymously, turn savage. Even some A-list bloggers are wondering if the cranks are too often prevailing over cooler heads.

Most companies are wholly unprepared to deal with the new nastiness that’s erupting online. That’s worrisome as the Web moves closer to being the prime advertising medium—and reputational conduit—of our time. “The CEOs of the largest 50 companies in the world are practically hiding under their desks in terror about Internet rumors,” says top crisis manager Eric Dezenhall, author of the upcoming book Damage Control. “Millions of dollars in labor are being spent discussing whether or not you should respond on the Web.”

In the beginning, the idea of this new conversation seemed so benign. Radical transparency: the new public-relations nirvana! Companies, employees, and customers engage in a Webified dialectic. Executives gain insight into product development, consumer needs, and strategic opportunities. All the back-and-forth empowers consumers, who previously were relegated to shouting at call-center minions. Venom can be a great leading indicator.

Trashing brands online can also be high theater. Rats cruising around a Greenwich Village KFC/Taco Bell (YUM ) on YouTube (GOOG ). MySpacers (NWS ) busting their employers’ chops. Faux ads bashing the Chevy (GM ) Tahoe as a gas-guzzling, global-warming monster. Millions of people watch this stuff—then join in and pile on. Is it any wonder companies lose control of the conversation?

When the Web turns against them, executives are faced with the problem of how to manage the blowback. They have two choices: ignore the smaller furies and hope they won’t metastasize, or respond outright to the attacks. It’s rarely a good idea to lob bombs at the fire-starters. Preemption, engagement, and diplomacy are saner tools.

…But what happens when the uproar grows so noisy that the mainstream media is bound to pick it up? That’s exactly the position new Home Depot CEO Francis S. Blake found himself in last month. MSN Money columnist Scott Burns accused Home Depot of being a “consistent abuser” of customers’ time. Within hours, servers were caving under the weight of 10,000 angry e-mails and 4,000 posts, which took the company to task for pretty much everything. It was the biggest response in MSN Money’s history. Blake’s predecessor, Robert L. Nardelli, the guy who famously didn’t allow comments at the company’s annual meeting, simply would have ignored the mob. But Blake knew the controversy could quickly mushroom.

The only way over it, he decided, was through it. So Blake penned a heartfelt and repentant online letter to all Home Depot customers, essentially copping to the company’s less-than-stellar service. He promised to increase staffing and begged for the chance to make good. He created a site to deal specifically with service. He thanked Scott Burns.

In crisis-management circles, the gamble was viewed as a win. Blake actually generated rare applause on an unofficial Home Depot employee site called the Orange Blood Bank, where workers are more likely to post riffs knocking the company. (“You can’t do it, and we’ll never help.”)

I think this is a good thing for all parties, if you take longer view of things…This makes people more accountable and that is always a good thing.

A-List Bloggers Vs Blue Collor Blogger

There an interesting argument going on in the blogosphere. Its captured nicely in the exchange between Tony Huang (deep Jive Interest) and Jason Calacanis:

Blogging is damn hard work, and harder still when you have kids to feed and are working lousy hours at work — and you don’t have the connections, notoriety or credentials to fuel your blogs success.

And let’s not discount it. When you have the ability to meet people most people don’t; when you have the inside track before most people do; and when you are actually *creating* news as most of us *can’t*, that’s what really separates “A-listers” from the rest of us.

I’ve come a long way in blogging, but I’m not blind to the fact that the vast majority of bloggers — even those who bring something new, refreshing, and regular to the table — may find barriers to blogging success in spite of hard work or their talent. I’d like to believe in the democracy of blogging, but the fact is that there are certain advantages that some bloggers have that others don’t. Not having them doesn’t mean you can’t be an A-lister, but I have yet to find one that didn’t have any.

I agree with Tony to a large extent although I am not sure blogging being hard etc. has anything to do with A-List bloggers trying to keep other blue collar bloggers down. Jason’s take on the A-List controversy:

What a joke… a couple of years ago Scoble, Jarvis, and I were the blue collar bloggers! We were hustling trying to get our vocies heard and a couple of years later–after blogging daily/hourly–the supposed “A List” got some traction and attention.

Here is a tip: THEY EARNED IT!!! They busted their butts for years blogging in an intelligent way. They were not given their seats at the table–they took them!

There is no “A List” — it’s a myth.

I think the basic issue really is that blogging is hard, and its getting harder to build the traffic with the proliferation of blogs. I guess it was easier when there were far fewer blogs. I this is just a manifestation of a lot of people feeling frustrated with the difficulty of blogging and building traffic. The other question is that do the A-List bloggers owe anything to the community in terms of helping deserving bloggers get more traffic? I am just not sure if the popular bloggers really owe anybody anything although it would be nice if they were more helpful and behave less as prima donnas.

But really, how could an A-list blogger help drive consistent traffic to another up and coming blog? Sure they could link to a particular blog to share the page-rank juice, do a hat-tip to another blog or even have guest writers…but if A-List bloggers did it consistently would it really work? Wouldn’t people start ignoring some of these links and guest writers? Given that some of the A-List bloggers are really busy, would having a guest writer on a blog even mean that the A-List blogger supports the writers views or even finds them interesting? I am just not sure that give the technology landscape right now, its possible for any blogger to really prop-up another outside and independent blog in a consistent fashion.

What do you think? Am I onto something or just high on something :-)?

Improving Online Communities

An online community, or for that matter any community, is built upon shared experiences of its participants. In the real world, people in a community typically interact with each other by gathering at same physical location, at the same time. In online communities, it is easy for users to interact with each other without any geographical or temporal limitations. But in return for the benefits that Internet (or even telephone to a lesser degree) provides in terms of ease of communication, it takes away from the richness, texture and context of the conversation. As such a number of startups are trying to address the problem with online communities and restore richness, texture and context to online communities. (Richard calls this market segment, meta social networking).

Who reads my blog

MyBlogLog started off with the agenda to provide blog analytics. They launched MyBlogLog Communities mid last year, to enable readers of blogs to join and share their experiences with other like-minded group of readers. The idea was that if readers like same content, they probably have plenty else in common. They built a platform where readers could trade messages with other readers and see what other sites they visit.

Power of Images

They hit the jackpot with the reader rolls that provided a picture to connect readers and writer of blogs. By just providing a static visual cue in the form of a picture, MyBlogLog provided an important visual context for online community conversations. The result, their usage took off and is not at over 50K users…In the meantime, they also got acquired by Yahoo! for a $10M.

Where there are visitors there is spam

With all the success came a number of people looking use MyBlogLog for financial gains. From R-Rated avatars to people pretending to be somebody else to other commercial avatars like Mr. Online Pharmacy, there has been a glut of stories related to how people are trying to game MyBlogLog and given their history, MyBlogLog has understandably been having a hard time coping.

Competition

In addition to all the spammers, there is new competition on the horizon for MyBlogLog. OthersOnline and Explode are two emerging players. These players have interesting new twists to the functionality provided by MyBlogLog. Let’s take a quick look at each:

Explode

Explode provides the same analytics capability as MyBlogLog but in addition to Analytics, it also allows users to build a network for friends who can be readers or writers of blogs. Bloggers can then display a friends widget on their blogs. This widget provides valuable context on the readers of the blog and the bloggers circle of friends. Another capability Explode provides is a comment wall for each user, where friends and other users can post comments. This also provides valuable context on each of the user.

OthersOnline

OthersOnline has an interesting twist on the idea of providing context. They allow people to register their profile along with their website. As part of the registration process, OthersOnline asks users to categorize their website and themselves via keywords. Now using these keywords, OthersOnline shows profile information, along with presence and email, of users via a browser plug-in (a widget is in the works as well). The idea is to make it easy for people to locate other like minded individuals or websites in the course of browsing.

Conclusion

While these companies are breaking new ground in making online conversations more useful, there is still a long way to do before we have achieved a good enough quality of online interactions. Good things, a lot of companies are working on it.

Patent reform: Use social networking

First USAToday and now the US Patent office…It looks everybody is trying to leverage social networking to improve the services they deliver. In the case of US Patent office, following are the details:

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.

Below are the mechanics of how the system will work:

The new patent system will try to help separate experts from posers by offering extensive details about the people sending information to the site. To help others evaluate the quality of this information, called prior art, each posting will include several measures gauging the quality of his other contributions to the site. Patent examiners, for instance, will award “gold stars” to people who previously submitted the most useful information for judging earlier applications, Noveck said.

Ultimately, those registered to participate in this online forum will vote on all the nominated information, and the top 10 items will be passed on to the examiner, who will serve as the final arbiter on whether to award a patent.

Major kudos to the US Patent office for leveraging the community of interested parties to express their opinions via the Internet. This will certainly make the process better…but because of the amounts of money at stake, there will be extremely perverse incentives for participants to game the system. I would not be surprised, if big companies create a department, just to game the review process…I think a better system with checks and balances that rewards good behavior and punishes bad behavior might be better to negate some of the incentive issues here…What do you think?

Public Connections

Great piece from Danah Boyd on her blog about the way Internet and social media makes it easy for people to document and publish their thoughts and feelings…and the effect it has on people’s behavior and relationships.

“The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.” — Hannah Arendt

Have you ever found yourself not saying something that is on your mind because you’re afraid that if you say it, it will become real? This is a really interesting conundrum in the context of blogging because it has to do with the ways in which public performances make ideas real. Arendt argues that one of the primary roles of the public is to make things real. People seek out witnesses to validate their emotions, ideas, actions, or mere existence. Our stories become real when we have other people to share them with, when other people saw and experienced what we experienced. Having no access to public life can be maddening (literally) because everything might as well be a fable with no witnesses to validate what took place.
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The Internet has allowed us to take the most “intimate” thoughts and ideas and perform them in a public before witnesses. This makes real every neurosis and stupid act – stuff that might simply have slipped away before. It makes it possible to be heard.

Of course once you make public a bunch of private things like your relationship, you need to undo them publicly as well if things don’t work out…Check out this youtube video of a UNC Pit student who decided to have a public breakup on valentine’s day:


I suspect, the ease with which the Internet enables people to go public, even changes dynamics of relationships…Anybody remember the speed dial episode on Sienfeld…now imagine kids, who are dealing with growing up and building up a more mature public persona, having a rich and public equivalent of the speed dial list. It isn’t hard to imagine, how kids will use the web to communicate various transitory feelings and crushes and regret some of those public communications later. No wonder their are companies like ReputationDefender that just focus on cleaning up online histories of kids.

Now the effect of public nature of connections might not just be limited to kids either. LinkedIn provides a good example of public connections that more and more adults are using. Using LinkedIn people can browse people’s professional networks. Now there are people on LinkedIn who have a huge number of connections. Some of these people build up these connections without really even meeting the person (I am sure you get such connection requests as well). I suspect its the public nature of the linked in connections that compels people to establish these useless connections…What do you guys think?

Why People Are Such Jerks Online

Great Piece by Mike on TechDirt

The concept of the flame war online is certainly nothing new. It’s been around since before most people were even aware the internet existed. However, more people are starting to look into the issue of why people tend to be such incredible jerks online when they might be perfectly nice in person. It seems that there are few different things contributing to the effect. First is that people somehow feel “disinhibited” when sitting behind a keyboard and monitor — whether it’s because of the supposed anonymity, the fact that you’re effectively “invisible” or even the fact that there’s a time lag between being a jerk and any response to it. The fact that you’re somewhat separate from the response just makes it that much easier to be a jerk. Some feel that it has even more to do with the lack of direct human contact in terms of either seeing hurt feelings or hearing someone’s voice. There’s just less empathy involved in seeing black and white text then seeing a physical reaction to being mean. Some of the latest research on this actually looked at how brains process messages during a conversation, and noted that in a normal conversation the person is tracking a variety of different cues in terms of how the other person is responding, and those cues help moderate what we say. Without any such cues when sitting behind a keyboard, you don’t get any of the warning lights to moderate what you’re saying, and the natural tendency is just to go right to the extreme edge without ever cooling off.

Another take from International Herald Tribune:

Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle school send one another a steady stream of instant messages through the day. But there’s a problem.

“Kids will say things to each other in their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person,” Jett tells me. “Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up what they said in the message. It makes things tense.”

Jett’s complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.

The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.

Flaming has a technical name, the “online disinhibition effect,” which psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint in cyberspace.

In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, suggested that several psychological factors lead to online disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to others; the time lag between sending an e- mail message and getting feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or toxic, as in flaming.

Also there is this pithy cartoon from Penny Arcade (via a comment on TechDirt).

Out of the explanations, I tend to like the last one the best (The one in the cartoon). I think lack of accountability or even reliable identity and reputation online is the root cause of people being jerks. Without such mechanisms, I suspect even the real world, emotions/facial expressions or not, will disintegrate into a lawless flamefest. Another potential cause could be the lack of broad community participation on the Internet. This leads to people, who feel the strongest about a topic, to participate thereby causing the perception that people are jerks on the Internet.

Wikipedia Case Study

Fascinating case study on the history and sub-culture of Wikipedia by Karim Lakhani and Andrew McAfee of HBS.

The study delves into the evolution of Wikipedia and makes for an interesting read. You can see the controllers of Wikipedia struggling to strike a balance between the need to empower people and the need to ensure that the system is reliable. The result – Wikipedia has more than 10 times the number of articles available in Encyclopedia Britannica, an extremely high page-rank, and a community that, although rickety and slow at times, produces an astonishing quantity of quality content. Nick Carr, has an interesting take on the bureaucracy at Wikipedia (reminded me of a number of big corporations):

For some of us, the popular online encyclopedia has become more interesting as an experiment in emergent bureaucracy than in emergent content. Slashdot today points to Dirk Riehle’s fascinating interview with three high-ranking Wikipedians, Angela Beesley, Elisabeth “Elian” Bauer, and Kizu Naoko.23 (See Dirk Riehle’s article (PDF). Note that the article is copyrighted and does not fall under GFDL.) They describe Wikipedia’s increasingly complex governance structure, from its proliferation of hierarchical roles to its “career paths” to its regulatory committees and processes to its arcane content templates. We learn that working the bureaucracy tends to become its own reward for the most dedicated Wikipedians: “Creating fewer articles as time goes on seems fairly common as people get caught up in the politics and discussion rather than the editing.” And we learn that the rules governing the deletion of an entry now take up “37 pages plus 20 subcategories.” For anyone who still thinks of Wikipedia as a decentralized populist collective, the interview will be particularly enlightening. Wikipedia is beginning to look something like a post-revolutionary Bolshevik Soviet, with an inscrutable central power structure wielding control over a legion of workers.24

Another interesting piece of the study deals with the tussle between different visions of what Wikipedia should be:

As the encyclopedia grew, a tension appeared between Wikipedians who had broad and narrow definitions of notability, or what made a topic worthy of a Wikipedia article. Inclusionists adopted the slogan “Wikipedia is not paper,” reflecting their belief that since new articles consumed no scarce resources, they should be encouraged and welcomed because they would help make Wikipedia more comprehensive. Their Wikipedia page stated:

Inclusionism is a philosophy held by Wikipedians who favour keeping and amending problematic articles over deleting them. Inclusionists are also generally less concerned with the question of notability, and instead focus on whether or not an article is factual.

If, for example, an article has some good content and some substandard content, the inclusionist will see the good content as reason to keep the article and, like eventualists, will have faith that the wiki process will improve the substandard content in time.

Deletionists, in contrast, maintained that “Wikipedia is not a junkyard.” Their page stated:

“Deletionism is a philosophy held by some Wikipedians that favors clear and relatively rigorous standards for accepting articles, templates or other pages to the encyclopedia. Wikipedians who broadly subscribe to this philosophy are more likely to request that an article that they believe does not meet such standards be removed, or deleted.

Deletionists’ two central goals were to “1) Outpace rampant inclusionism and 2) Further our goal of a quality encyclopedia containing as little junk as possible.”

Overall, the authors have done a great job putting together a case that reads well along with exhibits that provide a lot of interesting information for those who are not very familiar with how Wikipedia works.