retrobabel

by Isaac Pattis

 

 

Name of Company: BlueKai

Location: Bellevue, WA

Name of Employee: Robert Bale

Title: Taxonomist

Position description:

At BlueKai, the classification team constructs and maintains proprietary taxonomies that are focused on identifying consumer intent in advertising. Our team also works to construct custom taxonomies with clients that are implementing our data management platform. I am involved with managing the taxonomy governance processes for our team, and I also help determine best practices for our partners.

Can you describe a typical day for you at BlueKai?

A typical day usually begins with the idea that I’ve got everything lined up to roll straight through my tasks. That is, until I get to work. There is a steady stream of tasks that might be considered rote (such as reviewing the data being sent by a provider for classification), but there is an equally rapid flow of tasks that are unexpected or are more of a troubleshooting nature (How can we better address this provider’s needs? Does taxonomy actually achieve their goals?). Sometimes the number of unexpected tasks feels daunting, but our team takes things in stride. I’d like to think that the normal day is the one where I start off working on one project, but I find myself delving into several new ones.

What three words would you use to describe the culture at BlueKai?

Smart, empowering & sharing

What is the most memorable experience or accomplishment you have had as an employee at BlueKai?

I think some of the more memorable experiences are those where I’ve demoed a mock taxonomy to a high profile client and they’ve responded by saying, “Ah, that’s what we could do there….” Sometimes they can be critical. Other times they’re enthusiastic. But, in all cases, they’re interacting with the taxonomy that I’ve had a hand in putting together for them.

What would you describe as the best part about working for BlueKai?

I think one cool aspect is that the company, while it continues to grow, is made up of people who are intelligent, savvy and very personable. I like the fact that everyone tries to connect and share information—the culture is very much based on increasing information flow through the company. This is found top-to-bottom here at BlueKai.

Any advice for current students looking to enter your field?

Take time to realize that we each have skills that can be honed whether or not you’re a “taxonomist.” We can all learn to do technical things. Still, the soft skills are equally important to hone. Don’t forget to listen to people or look for ways to improve something. This is the stuff that helps make it simpler to get into this field.

In many ways, management of information tends to boil down to being attentive to context or helping provide context. My career path to date doesn’t look like it was authored in a straight line. However, within the different industries and job titles I’ve touched, it’s all been about being attentive to detail and remembering that, in the end, it’s about exploring something that will make a practical difference for someone (or something).

While a student at UW, was there a particular class or experience that led you to explore opportunities at X Company or the overall field that X Company is in?

I really enjoyed the processes I learned while in my “Organization of Information Resources” (IMT 530) and “Metadata Design Studio” (INFX 538) courses. These were the lead-in courses that helped give me insight into taxonomy.

What is your favorite memory of the UW iSchool?

Of the many memories that I have of the iSchool, there is a series of mental snapshots I have from the Capstone experience. It’s probably cliché to call out that memory, but it’s still pretty visceral for me. I can still see us designing the poster and picking it up from the print shop. I had flashes of nervousness as we presented our talk during the event, yet felt a sense of relief when I could explain our poster to bystanders. Finally, I remember being happy when it dawned on me that our team really had accomplished what we’d set out to do.

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Ha. Everyone now and then, you've got to toot your own horn, eh?

What is a “taxonomy”? And why is exceptional data classification essential to a smart marketing strategy?

 

By Robert Bale | Classifier, BlueKai

What is a taxonomy?

If you’re like me, every now and then you come across a term that sounds more elaborate than it really is. I think the word “taxonomy” is one such term.

Of course, it doesn’t really help that there are two related meanings for taxonomy: In one sense, taxonomy is the art and science of organizing and classifying things. In the second sense, the word refers to the outcome of such classification actions. In this post, I’ll mostly touch on the latter definition. But let’s move ahead…

So, what does that actually mean?

A taxonomy is really a basic concept. A simple definition is to say a taxonomy is one method of organizing and relating things, usually in a hierarchical manner (think trees and branches). And these things can be anything really. Maybe they’re different wines (a fairly common example in taxonomy texts), clothing items in a store or electronics products in a warehouse. Or, maybe they’re something a little more abstract, like names of book authors or a database full of movie titles.

One powerful aspect of creating a taxonomy is that the structure shows the relationships between items. Visually represented, taxonomies tend to look like inverted or sideways trees, with branches showing connections between the things you’re relating. Basically, each item gets a place on a branch somewhere in the tree and the relationships between objects are implied through the branches linking them.

 Most commonly, you’ll find that the types of relationships in a taxonomy are often described as parent-child, general-to-specific, broad-to-narrow, or is-a-type-of. So, you can easily imagine taking a general category of things and adding something more specific.

Give me an example, please!

///read more at blogs.bluekai.com

Ha. I couldn't help but point to the blog post I wrote for BlueKai.
Check it out and let me know what you think!

We’re very happy to announce the beta release of ObscuraCam for Android. This is the first release from the SecureSmartCam project, a partnership with WITNESS, a leading human rights video advocacy and training organization. This is the result of an open-source development cycle, comprised of multiple sprints (and branches), that took place over the last five months. This “v1″ release is just the first step towards the complete vision of the project.

The goal of the SecureSmartCam project to to design and develop a new type of smartphone camera app that makes it simple for the user to respect the visual privacy, anonymity and consent of the subjects they photograph or record, while also enhancing their own ability to control the personally identifiable data stored inside that photo or video. Also, we think an app that allows you to pixelize your friends, disguise their faces and otherwise defend their privacy just a little bit, is a lot of fun and helps raise awareness about an important issue. In this first release we have focused on ‘obscura’ by optimizing the workflow of identity obfuscation in still images. Future releases will look at ‘informa,’ the process of properly gaining and recording informed consent from subjects, while also moving to video.

Quick Download Links

For those of you who just want to get to it, head over to the Android Market to grab the latest version of the app. You can also scan the QR code to the left, and it will take you in that direction.

For those without access to the Android Market, you can get the ObscuraCam.APK file from our public builds folder. The official signed release binary is also available here. For these options, be sure to check back for updates, because the app will not auto-update itself.

The “Cameras Everywhere” Initiative

In January, WITNESS launched their Cameras Everywhere initiative, in which they ask:

As more and more people film people speaking out and taking a stand against human rights crises, how can we protect victims and witnesses and ensure informed consent as much as possible? As more and more footage circulates from human rights crises around the world, how does powerful footage reach audiences in comprehensible ways that move people to action? And how do we know how to trust that footage?

…

Critical issues to address in this realm include safety and security in the use of video; ethical questions raised by the widespread capacity to shoot and circulate human rights video; challenges around the authenticity of video and the preservation of evidence; and the need for effective documentation around the use of video in advocacy.

Through our collaboration, WITNESS has decided to move beyond just awareness, training and advocacy, and instead help design a next generation of Camera app software that is not just intended to share and capture more, but is meant to allow its operator to stop, think and be empowered to control the media they are capturing.

A Primer on Visual Privacy and Anonymity

Visual Privacy is the relationship between collection and dissemination of visual information, the public expectation of privacy, and the legal issues surrounding them. It relates particularly to the increasing presence of large-scale still- and video-camera networks in everyday life. This not only includes those surveillance-oriented networks under the control of corporations and governments, but also applies to the vast new network of citizen-controlled media capture devices such as smartphones and handheld cameras that has created a peer-to-peer, social-networking based surveillance. At the same time that these networks have exploded in size, face detection and recognition technologies have also improved considerably while policy regarding the privacy and fair use of such systems and content, as well as the rights of those imaged by such networks, are topics that are not resolved. What results is a situation in which massive amounts of media are being captured every day with little to no protection of individual rights to privacy or anonymity – something that is especially detrimental to human rights efforts.

As Sam Gregory of WITNESS points out, most contemporary discussions around anonymous communication on the Internet focus on the data protection side – for instance options for data encryption or censorship circumvention. In the case of media content, a largely unaddressed question arises: what about the rights to anonymity and privacy for those people who appear, intentionally or not, in visual recordings? Visual privacy and anonymity may sound like a contradiction in terms, but people often wish to speak out and to ‘be seen’ while at the same time concealing their face and identifying surroundings. As human rights documentation and organizing increasingly involves media capture, how are people enabled to make purposeful choices about when they speak out and what degrees of anonymity they hold onto for themselves? Conversely, people caught in the background of a video or still may be unaware that they are even being filmed in that moment and have no option to protect themselves – particularly true in mass protest settings where the wave of group solidarity may overwhelm any sense of personal privacy. For those speaking out from marginalized positions, personal safety is a very real risk.

Some examples where visual privacy and anonymity is being diluted in the name of features or security:

• The persecution later faced by bystanders and people who stepped in to film or assist Neda Agha-Soltan as she lay dying during the 2009 Iranian election protests.
• Facebook’s opt-out feature for auto-detection and tagging of faces
• British Columbia’s privacy watchdog OKs the use of facial recognition technology to identify rioters from video and still images of Vancouver’s 2011 hockey riots.
• Viewdle’s Social Camera automatically tags your friends in photos based on the social networking profile pictures they have published

While some of these examples might seem harmless, or even a useful feature for law enforcement, the main issue is that the subjects of these photos and videos are never asked if they wish to participate in them, not to mention whether they want their photo published online in the first place. The permanence of media on the Web means that any uploaded content can be poured over again and again to identify individuals – either by old-fashioned investigative techniques, but crowd-sourcing, or by face detection /recognition software.

How ObscuraCam Helps

Part of the problem currently surrounding visual privacy and anonymity is the fact that many of the tools and applications that people use on an everyday basis do not have features built in to protect privacy. As a result, everyone with a smartphone, tablet or laptop – not to mention an actual video camera! – captures raw, unedited content that exposes the identities of participants and bystanders present at sensitive events or activities.

ObscuraCam is a mobile application for Android that makes it easy for anyone to protect the identity of individuals or groups represented in their photos by building obfuscation and redaction directly into the app. It can be used on photos taken directly from the app itself, or on any photo that your mobile device has access to, including local memory card images or linked Picasa albums. By moving a usually cumbersome post-production process into the daily workflow of those capturing sensitive images, it’s our hope that visual privacy will be respected when it really matters.

Using ObscuraCam

ObscuraCam features a simple, touch-based user interface for easy manipulation and redaction of images, as well as an automated removal of identifying metadata stored in the photo itself. The following steps walk through the process of capturing and sharing an obscured photo using ObscuraCam.

1. From the application home page, choose to either capture a new image or choose an existing image from your existing collections. These options just launch your standard Camera and Gallery application. When the photo is imported, identifying EXIF metadata stored in the file itself, such as GPS location, camera make and model or timestamp, will be removed.
2. After you capture or open an image with ObscuraCam, it is automatically scanned to detect faces. Any faces detected are marked as tagged regions in an image, and the user is able to create as many additional tagged regions as they wish – either via the menu or by long-pressing the desired region. By default, tagged regions are set to be obscured via pixelation.
3. Once a tagged region has been created, the user can interact with that region by simply touching it to bring up a contextual menu.

4. Options available from the contextual tagging menu include:
   • Edit – select to scale and move tagged regions
   • Redact – select to fully redact tagged region and replace with black space
   • Pixelate – select to selectively obfuscate identities of persons or situations
   • bgPixelate – select to easily obfuscate everything BUT the tagged region
   • Mask – select to pin a set of ‘groucho marks’ glasses on the tagged region – not only a bit of fun, but useful for quickly defeating facial recognition schemes.
   • Delete – delete the current tagged region
5. Once you’re done selecting and obfuscating tagged regions, you can use the options from the main application menu to see a preview of the finished image, save it to your local memory, or share the picture with any application on your handset that is configured to accept images. This includes applications like Facebook, Twitter, or the default Messaging app. 

Share With Us and “Save Your Face”!

As impediments of visual privacy continue to expand, help us get the word out that we can take back control over our online identities with ObscuraCam! We’ve set up a Facebook Page where you can share your creations with us, and with eachother!

Source Code & Issue Reporting

We’re big fans of open source and living in public. As consistent with all our projects, source code for the SecureSmartCam project, along with the ObscuraCam release, is available online at GitHub.

We also use GitHub to manage our development milestones and active bugs / issues. If you encounter any bugs or issues when testing out this beta build, please report them directly to us in the comments below or by filing directly on the Issues page.

 

But if all e-books were available to everyone at any time, why would anyone need to buy a book ever again? And why would anyone need to visit a library if it could be downloaded off-site?

"It's important to remember that libraries are not simply bookstores where the price-tag always reads zero," says Nora Daly, digital curator of the British Library.

"They exist to collect, sometimes create, but always preserve that knowledge, regardless of what format it is in and to help make it grow through advocating and assuring free and fruitful access to it.

The British Library offers a glimpse of what could be the library of the future

"If we understand the role of libraries in that context, then in 10 years' time they will still be providing open and trusted environments - virtually and physically - in which to share, create and grow knowledge."

An interesting read. This snippet highlights how the concept of a library is undergoing a transition. I particularly like the last quote pointing to the library as an "open and trusted environment" for knowledge creation and sharing.

With companies looking to follow your data trail online, why not take possession of that information and find innovative uses for it yourself? That’s the question Jeremie Miller — the developer known for building the open-source protocol that powers many Instant Messaging programs — is trying to answer. Miller is building The Locker Project, an open-source effort that allows users to capture and archive their own online “data exhaust,” the term used for the crumbs of data we leave behind as we move around the web.

Using APIs and feeds, the Locker Project will pull in tweets, updates, pictures, check-ins, transactions, contacts and webpages, and will allow a user to store it on his or her own server or as part of a hosted service similar to the blog platform WordPress. Miller’s company Sing.ly will provide the support for the open-source project. Readwriteweb has a good first look at the service. The idea is an interesting one, because it will give people a repository of their online behavior, where they can see at a glance what kind of trail they’ve left online, and look for patterns inside that data. The service is one of an emerging group of companies that are aimed at helping users capture their personal data, including Statz, Greplin and Personal.com.

Where things could get really interesting, however, is that The Locker Project is looking to have developers build apps on top of the service. Those apps — with permission from users — will be able to analyze a user’s data and extract trends and other interesting information. A user could get more personalized recommendations or a better assessment of behavior or spending habits, or someone with a medical condition might get a pre-diagnosis based on the symptoms he or she been searching for information on.

It’s a compelling idea that builds on the power of data — something we’ll be talking about at our Structure Big Data Conference in New York on March 23. People are creating huge amounts of information as they move around the web, but it’s not being leveraged very well, or if it is being leveraged, it’s big companies and marketing services like Rapleaf that are taking advantage of it.

Citibank spun out a project called Bundle that takes millions of anonymous user transactions and builds recommendations based off of that for customers. But the future lies in taking in personal data and crafting highly customized services: BankSimple, a New York-based start-up, is poised to launch a next-generation banking service that takes in a user’s data and preferences and builds a personalized finance system for them. BillGuard, another start-up that just won $3 million in funding, also leverages personal banking data and uses that to build a fraud alert system.

The challenge for many of these services — including The Locker Project — is that it will take a certain amount of trust for a user to give up their data. But if users do believe that their privacy is protected, and the results will be beneficial, it could open up a lot of opportunities: When you apply big data analysis to personal data, you can surface unseen trends, correlations and patterns, and it can also bring consumers closer to marketers on their own terms. Kaliya Hamlin, the executive director of the Personal Data Ecosystem Collaborative Consortium, said recently that, rather than tracking or stalking users online, marketing and advertising companies should learn to empower users to hold on to their data, then share it with them willingly:

Giving individuals choice about where they store their personal data and who has access to it, and under what terms and conditions, grows trust. This trust is hugely valuable, because over time  more and better services that combine and utilize valuable personal data can be offered. It supports new forms of advertising and marketing by enabling trusted relationships between customers and vendors that enable “relationship marketing” and opt-in, user controlled sharing of data, permissioned communications and offers, group buying, recommendations, social and viral marketing, more efficient commercial exchanges.

We’re still a ways off from something like this being mainstream, of course. Users have to get used to storing their own data, and companies will have to learn to work with consumers rather than go the easier route to track them. And the fact that Do Not Track proponents are pushing for more regulations of that kind of activity, working with consumers on a more level playing field might be the best resolution for all.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns
• What IBM Does With Big Data
• Why the Hoopla About Hadoop?

This is big. Data is big. The ability to capture one's data is something I've wanted to do. Looking forward to trying this out.

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From: www.cio.com

Self-Service BI, SaaS, Analytics Will Dominate in 2011

– Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld

January 03, 2011 

Enterprises will increasingly look for opportunities to tap self-service business intelligence systems and SaaS-based BI offerings in 2011, analysts say.

Other items that are also likely to be high on the enterprise agenda include technologies that enable businesses to do more real-time analysis of large data volumes, social media analytics and mobile BI.

A lot of these trends are already under way, but they will gain strength throughout 2011, said James Kobielus, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Self-service BI

The move toward self-service BI, for instance, has been picking up steam and will gather further momentum in 2011, Kobielus said. Increasingly, enterprises will adopt new Web-based interactive querying and reporting tools that are designed to put more data analytics capabilities into the hands of end users, he said.

The tools will give end users the ability to quickly navigate through and visualize business data, and they will allow them to generate views and reports relevant to their job functions.

Numerous vendors, including IBM, SAP, Information Builders, Tibco Software (TIBX), QlikTech and Tableau Software, already offer such tools, and adoption will accelerate as more companies try to deliver BI capabilities to nontechnical users, business analysts and others, he said.

Self-service BI tools "take the burden off IT and speed up the development of reports to a considerable degree," Kobielus said. They also make it easier for users to create personalized reports that reflect their needs better than the standardized reports developed using traditional BI approaches, he added.

SaaS BI

The increasing availability of BI tools provided on a software-as-a-service basis will also drive more self-service BI and enable wider adoption of BI usage in general, Kobielus said.

One example of a company that is taking advantage of SaaS BI is New York-based women's apparel maker Bernard Chaus Inc. The company is using a BI application to track the performance of its products at each of the high-end department store chains that sell them.

Every week, company executives sift through sales data from each department store to see how each of its SKUs are performing and determine which stores might be doing a better job of selling them. The data also is used to study which styles and designs are popular and are selling well.

That sort of analysis is vital said David Stiffman, chief operating and financial officer at Bernard Chaus. "Reading consumer response to certain styles helps influence what we will be designing in future," he said. "By analyzing and learning what sells we are able to make better decisions about what we will offer customers and how to encourage them to buy from our line."

But rather than host a BI application itself, Bernard Chaus has signed up with IBM (IBM) business partner Sky IT Group, a firm that offers SaaS BI services. Sky IT brings in data from all of the different department stores that sell Bernard Chaus apparel and then cleanses the data and makes it available to Bernard Chaus for analysis.

The approach has helped Bernard Chaus take advantage of BI tools at a substantially lower cost than the price of doing it in-house, according to Stiffman.

A slew of big and small vendors have begun rolling out such hosted SaaS offerings, and more companies will start offloading at least some of their BI applications to such vendors, Kobielus said. In many cases, SaaS BI vendors are able to "provide BI at a lower cost so companies don't need to maintain the staff or manage the footprint," internally he said.

Hadoop

In another development in the BI market, expect enterprise interest in the open-source Hadoop framework to increase significantly next year, said David Menninger, an analyst at Ventana Research.

Vendors such as IBM, Pentaho, Cloudera and Karmasphere already offer enterprise-ready Hadoop implementations, and analysts expect more vendors and more products to join the list in 2011.

The reason for the interest is Hadoop's ability to let enterprises analyze much larger volumes of data than most traditional database systems and warehouses can comfortably manage. Much of Hadoop's growing popularity also stems from its usefulness in social media analytics and text-mining applications, Menninger said.

"Hadoop is the new black. It is gaining in popularity because it supports a wide variety of analytics and [data types] that we couldn't previously analyze either because the data was too big or the analysis was too complex," Menninger said.

"Not everybody understands it yet, but Hadoop is going to have a big impact on big data infrastructures [and social media analytics,]" he said.

Open-source BI

Kobielus also expects that other vendors of open-source tools, such as Pentaho, Infobright, Jaspersoft, Talend and LucidDB, will start rising in visibility and will soon start to offer more complete BI stacks.

Pentaho, for instance, already has one of the stronger commercial Hadoop capabilities, and many of the others offer innovative technologies that are resonating with users, he said.

For instance, Bango, a Cambridge, England-based provider of mobile analytics and billing services for large content providers, started using Infobright's columnar database technology when its older SQL Server-based database began struggling to keep up with exploding data volumes.

What makes the technology appealing is its ability to support ad hoc complex queries on large data sets, without any need for any indexing, manual tuning or IT support said Tim Moss, chief data officer at Bango. "This is huge," he said.

Infobright stores metadata about data even as the data is entering the database. "This means you don't need to index the tables; it's kind of doing that automatically," he said. "With other databases, you put the data into tables and then, depending on queries, you need to add indexes to help speed up and support these queries."

Real-time analytics

Expect enterprises to pay more attention to products such as SAP's High-Performance Analytic Appliance, or HANA, that are designed to speed up data analytics, Kobielus said.

HANA uses an in-memory computing technology that allows data to be processed in a system's RAM as opposed to reading it off I/O disks. The in-memory approach enables much faster data processing and is designed to allow companies to run far more sophisticated data analytics applications than they could with conventional relational databases.

For the moment at least, such in-memory technologies are considerably more expensive than traditional disk-based products, but expect that to change as the technology matures and more people start using it, Kobielus said, adding, "BI is becoming more real-time."

In 2011, expect to see enterprises continuing to push for "all things cache, all things memory," Kobielus said. In-memory and flash-based technologies are slightly ahead of the curve, at the moment, he said, but added: "I think that will start changing in 2011 and 2012."

Emerging new search and discovery technologies from companies like Attivio and Endeca will also start making a bigger impression in enterprise environments next year.

Such tools are designed to enable companies to implement user-configurable, search-based business intelligence applications involving large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

"Search tools are getting embedded into the BI stack" and are enabling a convergence of unstructured and structured analysis, Menninger said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at Twitter @jaivijayan, or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed Vijayan RSS. His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.

© 2010 Computerworld Inc.

Any thoughts or feedback on this? I think it's pretty interesting how people (including "end users") are now moving toward doing their own analytics. It'll be interesting to see what the next phase of intelligence tools brings...

Kennish released Facebook Disconnect in October and the extension quickly gained popularity, hitting the top 10 list of Google Chrome extensions. He told us that he quit his job at Google three weeks later so that he could "develop tools that make it trivial for the average user to understand and control the data they share whenever they browse or search the Web." He said that he thinks Google is "collecting more personal data than any other company" and "to fight for user privacy while working there would've been impossible."

Disconnect, similar to his earlier project, blocks a number of third-party widgets from sites like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo, as well as de-personalizes search at the cookie level, allowing you to remain logged-in to services like iGoogle or Gmail without having your search queries attached to your Google profile.

Kennish said that, while the tool is in a primitive state, he hopes it will have a larger effect on the debate over privacy on the Web.

"Realistically, Disconnect won't have a significant direct impact on the average user's privacy -- Adblock (and I mean the whole suite) is the most successful browser extension and used by less than 1% of the Web population," said Kennish. "So government policy and what browser vendors ship natively is more important to me. I'm hoping to show a better way through software and have a butterfly effect on policy and browser implementation."

Kennish calls the "Do Not Track" method of opting-out "a bad model for defending online privacy because phones ring and get your attention, where Web bugs are invisible and go unnoticed."

Indeed, last summer one online advocacy group released a browser extension that alerts you "whenever your personal information is being sent to Google servers." The result was a near constant barrage of alarm bells - if your phone rang this often, you would go insane. Disconnect takes a less obnoxious method, showing a running tally of how many calls have been blocked in the extension's toolbar icon. Clicking on the icon also allows you to quickly allow for unblocking because, no matter our privacy talk, these tools are also useful in our online lives and not always unwanted. Kennish's point is more that the user should be allowed to opt-in, rather than needing to opt-out - an oft-heard refrain in online privacy discussions.

Kennish said that he started with blocking standard third-party social widgets "because I consider them the most dangerous third-party resources and there didn't seem to be another tool that blocks them out of the box. The prevalence of these widgets means they can report on almost all your browsing activity, which can then be linked to databases full of the social data you intentionally share."

While Disconnect may be in early stages and not have a "significant direct impact" for the average user, the tool could be useful for those concerned about how different social tools are keeping track of your browsing habits. The extension is available for both Google Chrome and RockMelt.

See Also

• Shame on "Democratic" South Korea for Censoring Facebook and Twitter
• Google Now Warning Surfers of Hacked Websites
• Wave Technology Lives On In Google's New Shared Spaces
• Here's What Happened to Delicious

Gonna look into this.

The URI is the key to universality. (I originally called the naming scheme URI, for universal resource identifier; it has come to be known as URL, for uniform resource locator.) The URI allows you to follow any link, regardless of the content it leads to or who publishes that content. Links turn the Web’s content into something of greater value: an interconnected information space.

Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently. Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI. Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform—a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.

So, Tim Berners-Lee's got an article coming out in Scientific American discussing the state of the web. I couldn't help but read it wondering what he'd mention regarding data access and portability. While this snippet is a small representation of the overall tone of the piece, I think he does well to concisely summarize the nature of today's (and tomorrow's?) siloed information spaces. As much as I'm still trying to conceptualize what it would take to link data across silos, thus propagating serendipitous info discovery, I'd have to admit that it is a little frightening to think about how close we are to having Facebook (and others, such as Comcast) provide us with their version of "the web." AOL anyone?

Check this book out. While it helps to have a bit of pre-existing knowledge regarding the world of information, this book certainly takes a good stab at defining the concept and role of taxonomy. (If I'd had this a couple years back, it would have helped me disambiguate the different meanings of the term.)

Check it out.

In a democratic society, it is thankfully easier for governments to fix limits than to enforce models of behaviour. Laws will more often say "you can't" rather than "you may." Furthermore, when the first privacy laws passed in Europe, in the 1970s and 1980s, only the rich and powerful had access to computer technology. The fissure between bare naked individuals and heavily armed organizations seemed distinct and profound.

These imbalances have endured, and preventing or correcting the abuse of personal data by organizations remains as necessary as ever. Yet something essential has changed - individuals now have powerful means at their disposal to handle and exchange information. They use these means to affirm their identity, express themselves, share, collaborate, engage, and learn.

Let us now imagine that individuals could use, to their own ends, the masses of data that organizations hold about them, whether to turn surveillance on its head or just to get to know themselves better; that at school, kids are taught not only the dangers of the Internet, but how to use it in order to construct an autonomous and socially vibrant identity, one that is recognized and appreciated by their peers; that we, and our employers, learn to recognize and share the value of the myriad of informal skills that cannot be listed on our CVs; that it will become possible to give life to several heteronymous beings, i.e. alternative, perennial, credible personas that reflect the different facets of our personalities.

What could I accomplish if I had at my disposal all the data - in some truly useful form - pertaining to the journeys and communications I have made and had in recent years? As well as my past bank card transactions, search engine queries, or detailed lists of all my local supermarket purchases? Not just to control what others do with this information, but to actually use it myself, to my own ends?

I find this fascinating. I've wondered about using one's own data as well. Why not? It is one thing to let other entities cross-link my data, but it's immensely interesting for me to be able to do the same thing.