Table of Contents

• 1 Dry Tunisian Tinder
• 2 Cute Cats and Malaysian Opposition
• 3 Polish lunch rooms
• 4 Tunisia's Second Act
• 5 Media Ecology or Network Ecology?

Cory Doctorow (*) and Jillian York (*) were both full of praise for Ethan Zuckerman's Vancouver Human Rights Lecture on Cute Cats and the Arab Spring (*), so I listened to the podcast from CBC's Ideas (*). You can also watch the lecture on YouTube (*).

Ethan Zuckerman (EZ) has a long and admirable history of involvement in digital activism and a wide knowledge of both technology and social change; the lecture is worth an hour of your time. But (you knew there was a but) in the end I have to disagree with his main thesis.

1 Dry Tunisian Tinder

EZ tells us how, after years of sporadic and failed protests in Tunisia, one particular spark in the city of Sidi Bouzid blossomed into the forest fire of revolution. When Mohamed Bouazizi … Continue reading

Table of Contents

• Avoiding Cynicism (As If)
• Facebook: Privacy Hits the Mainstream
• Amazon: Abusing Community
• Apple: Stepping in Front of Google

Avoiding Cynicism (As If)

Peering into the New Year, my better half Lynne reflected yesterday that it is a duty of each of us, as we grow older, to be vigilant against encroaching cynicism. She's right (of course!), and I do feel that strong and steady current tugging me sluggishly downstream towards the lazy, easy waters of geezerhood, to a place where everything new shows itself only by its flaws and in which every new glass is basically empty.

Luckily, 2012 looks like being a banner year for those of us who take a critical view of the hype and commercialization around digital technology, so I'm actually feeling quite cheery. The number of digital hecklers is growing1, and will continue to do so as the relations between the mainstream Internet and its audience/members sours. A growing wave of disenchantment is gathering enough steam [sic] to become a creative force in its own right, and I think that's going to be fascinating to watch, as well as … Continue reading

I've had a couple of people tell me they were unable to post comments. After taking this up with Typepad, I have shifted from their "Typepad connect" system back to the vanilla commenting system. If you have problems posting a comment, then I would appreciate an email at last name dot firstname (gmail). And you can rest assured it isn't personal unless you are a spambot, in which case it is, or would be if you were a person.

Also, in a recent post I suggested that there was a conflict of interest in a paper I read. The authors have now published an explanation at the end of the paper and I retract the suggestion (I still don't understand why lead author Gilad Lotan lists his affiliation as he does, but that's his personal decision). I've put a note in the post to clarify.

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Jeff Jarvis's 2009 book What Would Google Do? is a breathless paean to the benefits of sharing, linking, and being open, but it has not a single reference or footnote, and no bibliography. Jarvis extols the virtues of listening and speaks of mutuality but in the end, of course, the benefits flow one way. Jeff Jarvis has become wealthy from this new ethic of sharing — he is fond of "starting conversations" which he can then take ownership of — but when it comes to giving credit to those who come before, for example by referencing previous writers on the topics he addresses, well it just seems like it's too much work for him. The book is one long argument by assertion, unsupported by facts and liberally sprinkled with utterances like "small is the new big" or "We have shifted from an economy based on scarcity to one based on abundance" or "Google has built its empire on trusting us".

It looks like his new book, Public Parts, is more of the same. The New Republic just published a long review of the book by Evgeny Morozov here or here. It's forthright, opinionated, angry, entertaining and also makes some … Continue reading

This speech by Steve Jobs has been posted in many places over the last 24 hours:

It is a strange speech: quite moving, personal, modest, and thoughtful. But in the end it’s a “follow your dreams” speech, and as such is quite a contrast to another Internet event of the moment, the very moving stories being posted at We are the 99 percent.

“Follow your dreams” invokes a cosmic bargain (fortune favours the brave) and it also invokes a social bargain: that if you work hard, and have a little luck, society will ensure that your efforts are rewarded. Meanwhile, the "we are the 99%" posters “sense that the fundamental bargain of our economy – work hard, play by the rules, get ahead – has been broken, and they want to see it restored” (Felix Salmon, quoted here).

So nothing against the guy, but over the next few days I’ll think more about what the 99%-ers say than what Steve Jobs said at Stanford. One of the stories he tells is of dropping out of college and, instead, monitoring courses independently. It's an inspiring story, but the contrast to this post, made today, is glaring.

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… is this one.

Every now and then I look back at previous posts on this blog. Some I still like, some not so much.  Some got a lot of views at one time or another, but my favourite post of all got little attention. 

I think that this time right now, with Amazon's and Facebook's recent announcements and Apple's to come next month, mark a turning point in attitudes to the web and the companies that dominate it.

So please, I don't often trumpet my own writing and it's not that easy to read, but this post is exactly what this blog is all about.

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Why Personally Identifiable Information is irrelevant. An introduction to information entropy, open data, and the possible end of crowdsourcing. 

Tim O'Reilly and ZIP Codes

From his Strata Conference on Data Science, Tim O'Reilly tweeted with dismay the recent California court decision that the zipcode is now to be classified as "personally identifiable information". "No more demographics" he lamented. A little later he retweeted a response that "apparently 87% of US residents can be uniquely identified by zip+DOB+gender: bit.ly/qysMqs" and later followed up with "Here's a reference for the claim that zip code, gender and DOB uniquely identify 87% of individuals: http://www.citeulike.org/user/burd/article/5822736 via @crdant".

These tweets are odd and disturbing. The zip/DOB/gender finding is a basic one in studies of privacy, published years ago by Latanya Sweeney of Carnegie Mellon University. I gave a talk at work on privacy a year ago, and this was one of the first references I came across. Tim O'Reilly has been pushing an agenda of Open Data, particularly Open Government Data, for the last couple of years, and yet it looks as if he isn't aware of the basic privacy issues around such data. Can that really be the case?

… Continue reading