Evolving Web

Rules of the 2.oad

Over the last few years there have been several rule sets written for Web 2.0, rules for social media, and rules for social networking.  Rules, rules, rules.  Yet, new web sites repeatedly make mistakes that are entirely borne of not paying attention to these rule sets.

It took me only about an hour this morning to overpopulate my del.icio.us archives with rules.  Dozens of them.

I started thinking about this today, after Ben Newman left a comment on my Evil Spock post.  Ben was responding to Andrey Golub's comment before his.  Andrey was making the case that Spock was pure web 2.0 and a search engine and therefore was exempt from the moral implications of data misuse.  (Which frankly shocked me so much, I never commented back.)

Ben said it better than I would have:

The problem isn't that 2.0 is evil, the problem is that the Spock platform seems to ignore one of the most critical aspects of any online community — the ability to know where information comes from.

When we look back over the various rules of [web2socialmedianetworking], we find several rules in agreement with Ben's interpretation.

The problem is there are about 100 rules now, splashed across the Internet.  If only to get a handle on them myself, I thought I'd make a distilled list of rules.

Here's the big huge map of ones by Jimmy Wales, Dion Hinchcliffe, David Chartier, Visionary Marketing and the 5-turned-17 started by Influential Marketing.  You'll have to click on this puppy to read it.

All together, these seem more like the Tax Code of Social Media than they do a set of design tenets.

Let's try to get them down to some good ol' Moses-style pithy.  You'd need an airlift to get these tablets of them mountain.

So here they are.  It's the web, feel free to turn these into 8 million rules again. :-)

I folded all of the previous ones into these families and gave them some categories.  But, just like there's apparently a lot of gray area around commandments like "Thou Shalt Not Kill", there are elements of these commandments as well.

So, the elements are:

Be Useful

Web 2 and social media applications need to build extensible, self-organizing tools.  Developers need to give the users the freedom to use the basic application.  Also APIs and feeds are standard practice for all sites, all pages and all searches.  In the end, listening to user needs and quickly responding to them in text or in action is vital.

Be Open

Users need to feel a connection with Web 2 and social media sites.  A lot of this is through "Being Real" - your site needs a personality of its own and personalities behind it.  I know that my personal use of sites like Platial and Yelp were greatly enhanced by their community advocates.  The cohort of friendliness is honesty.  Every list talked about transparency in one form or another.  Users need to feel that you are dealing straight with them.

Be Nice

Nice people are by nature respectful and ethical.  The Nice elements fall into ranges between the two.  You want to reward people for everything you can think of, you want to treat them well (talk nicely, don't forget them) and you want to give them gifts in the form of good services.  You want to share anything you have with them and always be respectful of their content and their identity.

Be Community

You are the creator of this microworld.  You need to participate, you need to facilitate.  You have to show up for your own party.  Communities grow, so you need to nourish them.  Don't let them grow too quickly, seed conversations and participate to keep them flowing, encourage real collaboration, reward good deeds, and allow users to edit nearly everything.  Help your content travel throughout the Internet, let ideas go and let them flow.

Here's the whole re-orged mind map.

To see the full run downs of all these line items, here's the source:

1. Rohit's original post that launched several more: he started with 5 rules that spread to 17.  This post has links to the other additions.

2. Visionary Marketing's 15 Golden Rules for Web 2.0.

3.Jimmy Wales' list on CNN

4. Dion Hinchcliffe's technically-oriented very detailed list.

5. David Chartier's rules - from Dec 2006!  Look, longevity on the internet!

Technorati Tags: Dion Hinchliffe, David chartier, Jimmy wales, visionary marketing, social media, social networking, Rohit Bhargava, Ben Newman, rules, edicts, mandates, commandments, golden rules, online communities, community indicators

Photo by Karuvelil Thomas.

Personal Brand v. Community Participant

Three years ago, I moved my blog from my own web site to Typepad because I liked their features and wanted the stability.  I was lazy at the time and didn't bother to brand the URL.  I could have left it with my personal soundbag.com branding - but did not.

Now, ourfounder.typepad.com is a known entity.  This is an issue for continuity.  Technorati, Alexa, Compete and other elements of the web track you by your branded URL.  The strength of your google juice is also impacted by the longevity, activity and links to your url.

So changing a long-standing URL is no trivial matter.

Add to this the fact that most web sites are gated communities and won't allow you to own your own information - and you end up diluting your personal brand across the Internet.  Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites take more than your attention.

A while back, I started to re-create soundbag as my personal brand.  Using a variety of widgets to bring content back to my main site.

The problem with this is that the content - the searchable elements of my content - do not end up at the soundbag.com site.  So the only reason one would ever go there is because of a morbid curiosity about me as a person and not about the content I had generate.

The Jim Benson Information Portal (or J-Bip) just wouldn't be a massive draw.  So the actual content needs to be folded into the site.

Some things allow this gracefully:

Typepad will allow me to incorporate the blog into my domain fairly easily.  While it's hosted at Typepad, it would be seamless for the user.  It would all loo like soundbag.com/blog.

Platial has a very nice widget to allow me to incorporate maps into my web site.  I've toyed with the idea of combining Platial and Wordpress to do a nice spatial blog with the content actually resident on my site.

Slightly less gracefully:

RSS feeds will allow me to incorporate content from Yelp, Twitter, and other sites.  Allowing, over time, the creation of a fairly massive reservoir of personally generated or relevant content.

But ...

At the moment this involves a massive effort on my part to rebrand, redirect and reorient my social media strategy.  I have to consider how this changes how I relate to new web sites.

Laurel Papworth beat Seth Godin's Squidoo with a broken bottle today (well, she did it tomorrow for me because of the international date line) because of not dissimilar issues.  Laurel wanted more detail on how her personal information was going to be used.  Direct statements were not forthcoming.  Then she opted out of further mailings - and got a mailing.

Her social media strategy had some key points:

1. If you expect my participation, let me know where my personal info is going.

2. Don't overload me with additional information, I'm filtering as fast as I can already!

Jay Fienberg and I have had many many long detailed conversations about this.   Everyone is looking right now to feel some ownership over their own information.  No web sites are stepping right up to provide this.  Yes, we have RSS feeds - but the goal of the site is to get you to visit.

From a business context, this is a no brainer.  Of course they want you to visit the site.  From a user perspective, having your online identity largely trapped by a company like Facebook is not a winning scenario.

When Michael Robertson sold MP3.com to C|Net - he gave everyone plenty of notice.  It was like "ABANDON SHIP!  C|NET GAVE ME MONEY BUT THEY WILL DESTROY ALL WE HAVE WORKED FOR!"  Which, of course, is exactly what happened.  But, at least, MP3.com gave everyone time to gather up their music and head for other pastures.

That has always left an impression on me.  I don't expect that any Web 2.0 company is out there for my benefit.  The objects on MP3.com were recordings of music I personally made - there could be no doubt that I was the rightsholder of those objects.  Entries made in Facebook or Yelp are entirely different.  They specifically are the property of the service provider.

But they feel personal to me.  So, when Laurel comes after Seth for her personal information (birthdate, address, etc), the question becomes ... where does "personal information" stop?  It's not just web publication because the web is an open channel where anything can be dumped.  Including personal IDs.

There is no international standard for personally identifiable information.

All this has been discussed before, of course.  And it will be discussed again.

But where it gets personal is ... what is your social media strategy?  How far are you willing to go, for what return, and where?  What are your limits?

Technorati Tags: social media, laurel papworth, seth godin, squidoo, facebook, linkedin, social networking, platial

The Measurement Meme & Twitter as Backchannel

I was sitting here actively measuring social media tools.  I'd been working for about two solid days on performance measures for a few of my Social Media clients.

Then in Twitter, someone mentioned the "measurement meme", but it was in passing and I didn't get the gist.

So, I used TerraMinds to get the gist.  Right after that, I checked my feed that follows social media tagged blog posts started spitting out measurement meme posts.  Of course, all this happened during my blogging hiatus.

So, I want to write about measuring social media, but I'm actually more interested right now in the measurement meme itself as a meme and how it came into my consciousness.

For me, I left the social media world for about 2 months - which sounds like a short time.  But it was at least long enough to miss this meme.

Today, someone mentions it in passing in a non-blog venue.  I take a look at the history of the conversation, seeing it stretch back a month or so.  I find out the players, check my del.icio.us tags, and very quickly have the entire meme unfold for me. 

Chronologically.

It appears that Twitter is quickly becoming a blogging backchannel.  This is different, I think, than "microblogging".  Microblogging has always had an air of its own matter stream.  i.e. things that happpen in a microblogging realm are in some way self-contained.

But now it seems that Twitter is a parallel tract to blogging.  As things are blogged, they are rapidly discussed in Twitter and responses are then blogged.  Almost like Twitter is saying, "Here's something to thing about, go think, then blog and let us all know when you're done."

Twitter mining makes this workable.  Before, you couldn't look back very far in Twitter land for meaningful information.  Now it's all there.  Who said what, when, and in response to whom?

Interesting.

Technorati Tags: twitter, terraminds, measurement meme, backchannel

Twitter as a Buzz Mine

Robert Scoble tweeted TerraMinds today, it's another Twitter searcher.

To test it, I took a look at how it dealt with "Spock".  Since I've recently had Spock on the brain.  What came out was a fairly interesting stream-of-buzz. 

This shows all the public tweets with the word "Spock" in them.  I chose not to show you all 1,251 of them.  What I really like here is you see praise, confusion, criticism, discovery, viral marketing, all in one quick easy tool.

You can also judge your level of buzz relative to other buzz-worthy objects:

So we can see that Spock is somewhere between Hello Kitty and LinkedIn in popularity amongst the general population of Twitter users.

You can also see that you can subscribe to the RSS, which means you can easily automate the mining and analysis of Tweets that relate to things you care about.  In this case, the Spock team could subscribe to all Spock posts and then do keyword sorts for positive, negative, or confused tweets.

Of course, this is only people who have made their Twitters public. But there is significant value in the information stream here.

Technorati Tags: twitter, terraminds, spock, blog analytics, analytics, data mining

A Bad Day at the Office or Never Attribute to Malice

Last week, the team at Spock had a very bad day at the office and it was largely my fault.

In my earlier post, It May be the Evil Spock, I invoked a powerful word.  Evil.  I passed this post amongst my tribe and they all blessed the word evil.  I wanted to make sure I hadn't gone too far.  When the tribunal had spoken, Spock was evil.

After thousands of page views and a bunch of comments and several posts by others, Spock is reeling in the court of public opinion.  And most of these opinions jump on the condemnation bandwagon.

One of the comments was from Jay Bhatti at Spock.  Surprisingly, Jay did not think of himself or Spock as evil.  Well, that's just crazy!  Of course he's evil. 

So, this made me wonder .. what exactly is evil?  And what, exactly would make Spock evil?  Is evil correctable?

What is evil?

In the search to learn about all things evil, of course, I went to the 21st century CliffsNotes - Wikipedia.  (Which makes Jimmy Wales the 21st Century Clifton Hillegass).

Wikipedia is a great memory jogger.  Soon synapses that had long ago been shoved to the back burner - memories of Spinoza and Nietzsche.  Memories of trudging across frozen Michigan snow on my way to early morning classes.

So ... here's the deal. 

Evil is a fluid concept and a loaded term.  In it's nitpicky form, an Evil act is a harmful act caused from ignorance.  Let's call this "Oops! Evil".

In it's more loaded form, an Evil act is caused by an Evil person with malicious intent.  Let's call this "Haha! Evil".

Practitioners of Oops! Evil learn from the evil act and do NOT do it again.  Practitioners of Haha! Evil learn from the evil act and DO do it again (hopefully in an even eviler way.)

Is the Evil Spock Oops! or Haha!?

Jay's long comment on my Evil Spock post shows a few things that should be appreciated:

1. Jay and Spock understand the need to respond to flame with cool water. 

2. Jay and Spock are thoughtful and understand that Spock needs to be refined

3. Jay and Spock have spent considerable time thinking about the issues behind the collection and redistribution of personal information.

Currently, Spock is Oops! Evil.  They are not malicious.  But they do have a bit of work to do to make up for this.

Can they do it?  Certainly.  If Plaxo can dig their way out of their PR hole, anyone can.

Spock has potential

In my post that preceded the Evil Spock post, I said that Spock did some really needed things.  Most notably, it lets you really coordinate your network.  Recently (like late this week), Facebook started to allow the same thing - but Spock's implementation is better.  This would be a post in itself, so I'll just say that Spock is a better platform for this because Facebook's business model is so chaotic.  Spock is much cleaner.

Direct Response to Jay Bhatti

Please do go read Jay's long comment on the Evil Spock post.  Then come back and read my replies.  I don't want my quotes to remove any of his context.

Before I respond I also want to say that a blog post is like a text chat, so my aim here is to be perfectly clear to Jay and Spock what my issues are and how they can be mitigated.  If I seem a bit forceful, it is due to the medium.

So, here we go:

Jay's first comment: We don't trick people.

... we NEVER send unsolicited email ... I hope this can clarify the issue some people raised above that we trick people to send invites. I have been trying to improve the process  as much as possible to make it more clear.

I hear the earnestness behind these statements.  The issue here is that the system makes it seem that people are on Spock when they actually are not.  "Trick" like "Evil" is a loaded word ... I don't think that Spock or Jay specifically set out to mislead people, but the current architecture is misleading.

This is an Oops.  It's also the reason for the invite flood.  People are assuming they are linking to someone already in the system, not sending an invite.  I know the system may be presenting these as slightly different - but the user isn't getting the message.

Jay's second comment: Spock's other reasons for invite flooding.

(paraphrased) Spock assumed that people in your address book was known to you.  Unfortunately, many email clients save anyone you've ever emailed or received an email from - so lots of people in your mail client are total strangers.  ....

This is compounded by the fact that many early Spockers were recruiters, biz dev consultants and others who have a vested interest in a giant network.

I did paraphrase here, so please do read his original and judge my work.

I appreciate the fact that Jay is airing a bit of laundry here and acknowledging something very important about social networking tools.

Different people have different strategies for applying their social networks.

The type of people Jay mentions in the second paragraph have a vested interest in having gigantic weak networks.  Their business model is based on breadth and not depth. 

The email issue is also very important.  When I sign up for a system like Spock and it taps my email list to seed my network, I am always saying "Who the hell is that?"  It works against my personal social networking strategy to include weak or unknown contacts.  But for those other guys, they will add me no matter how tenuous the connection.

Oddly, Spock's tagging tool which lets you organize your contacts makes it the first tool to really let you self-filter your massive networks.  So, even though this is an invite problem - Spock's architecture allows you to deal with large networks after they form.  Organizationally, Spock has this covered - socially it was a bomb.

So, how do we deal with things like this?  How do we deal with friend-whores who go out to collect every name in humanity's phone book and, in the process, fill your inbox with invites from people you don't know?

That's a big one.

Jay's third comment:  We adhere to standard search engine rules.

We crawl the web the same way any other search engine does, we adhere to every robots.txt file from every site and we only crawl information in the public domain. ...

This is cool, but most people have no idea what a robots.txt file is.  And no one has any control over the robots.txt files on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. 

Here is a conversation that I am so confident in, I will type it as it happens right now:

Jim: On your Elocution Seattle site, how did you set your robots.txt file?

Jim's wife: I don't know.

So, I'm afraid I see this as a bit of a cop out.  Jon Udell has a great post today (much more succinct than me, I'm afraid) where he welcomes Spock's coming simply because it brings issue like this to light.

People's expectations of their data, while naive, is that it will not be used without their knowledge.  This will help people streamline their data.  But, as Jon points out, the crawlers are never accurate enough to filter out the difference between personal attributes and the topics of writing.

Also, as I noted before, names are not unique IDs, so building a massive database based on a non-unique ID is problematic.

Jay's fourth comment:  We present good information

In the process of crawling, we do gather a lot of information about people. We made a decision .. that we wanted to represent people in their best light, and not in a creepy way. We try to never display publicly identifiable information (email, address, phone number, im, etc), even if we gathered it from a public source. We just don't think it is cool to show PII.

This is a good start, but doesn't seem to have served Spock well.  I know that if I went in and looked around again, I'd find more pages declaring me to be an astronaut.  I am very grateful that no Jim Bensons have done anything particularly nasty.

Unlike presidents.  Neither George Bush nor Bill Clinton have taken the time to claim their Spock pages which are being systematically and ideologically defaced. 

When I did a search for pedophile, I found 156 results.  156 people directly labeled by Spock as a pedophile.  Somehow, I'm sure none of them stopped by and okay'ed that label. 

It doesn't do a person a whole lot of good to protect their IM account over their reputation.

 Jay's fifth comment:  You can change it

We also allow people to claim their search result and remove wrong information and add information that they want to be searched on. If people want data removed, we have a easy process for them to get that data removed.

I'm going out on a limb here ... "Allowing" me to join your site and edit my data that you have misinterpreted is not a luxury for me as a user.

My personal advice here ... seed your database with people's personal information - but do not broadcast it publicly until it has been claimed.  The seed data should be to help me, as a user, quickly set up my Spock account - it should not be a threat (even an unintentional one) that makes me come to the site and clean up the messy after affects of a crawler they never sanctioned.

This is the biggest issue, messy data on your side will quickly bring a response for an accepted and open-source reputation management system.  People will lose their faith in companies that play by the accepted corporate rules but appear not to respect the people impacted by those rules.

Summing up:

It is hard to provide detail about problems without seeming negative.  Problems are negative.  It's not my goal here to take Jay to the cleaners, but to help Spock get even better - and thereby increase the effectiveness of social networking and social media in general.

I'm sorry to have caused a few bad days at the Spock offices, but I hope that in the end it'll make the product better.

Technorati Tags: spock, jay bhatti, jon udell, social networking, social media, evil, wikipedia

How to: My Book on Windows 2003 Server

As your equipment ages, things break, hard drives crash, all sorts of fun.  You also end up with new equipment trying to interface with older OSs and programs.

Soon I will have a post about dealing with a boinked Bugzilla on an old Linux distro with a very old MySQL needing full updates before they can be of any use.

But for now, my colleague Allan Cady, recently had to try to figure out why the heck our Western Digital My Book USB drive wouldn't be recognized by Windows 2003 on an older server.  After he was done, I asked him to write up a how-to for me to toss on the blog to help future travelers.

Allan says:

How to use a Western Digital "My Book" drive (Home Edition, but I don't think that matters) in Windows 2003 Server:

1. Follow instructions for normal connection using USB, then:
2. Start -> My Computer -> (right-click) Manage Open Storage -> Disk Management  External drive will appear in list of partitions, but it will be inactive and will not have a drive letter assigned.
3. Right-click on the partition, select Mark Partition as Active
4. Right-click on the partition again,
5. select Change Drive Letter and Paths,
6. click Add.  Assign a drive letter.
7. The drive should now be accessible. 

This procedure should only be necessary the first time the drive is plugged in.

As with most OS wrangling ... fairly simple to explain, but fairly inexplicable when you first try to plug the thing in.

Technorati Tags: western digital, western digital my book, my book, windows 2003, how to

A Visible Case of Focused Social Media

In your web site logs you can see where people come from.  E-mail or chat based link distribution shows up with no referring site.  The other day I wrote a critique of the new web site Spock (which I'm surprised isn't a trademark).

Many other blogs picked up that post and some nice conversation happened.  I was watching the activity from this and noticed a hole I'm fairly sure is the Spock company all looking at the article at the same time and discussing it.

This is an excellent use of web resources.  Not knowing the means of internal link sharing, I can't say for sure if this is really focused social media. What would have really got me excited would be to see these all coming from an internal Spock research tag.  Seeing an organized collection of research links for Spock would have been really cool.

At this time, the article have received 3 del.icio.us links.  As seen to the left.

I love seeing focused blog viewing when it happens.  Some companies, like 103bees, are really really good at this.  The Windows Live Writer group has also been very excellent at reading and responding to blog posts about their product.

Why should Spock or any other company care if I know the tool they use to do internal research?  Because it is a further element (and a fairly harmless one) of transparency.  It's an easy way to show the world that you are participating in the market and not merely a supplier.

Might you end up linking to pages like mine that say nasty things?  Yep.  But you also get the opportunity to balance those viewpoints _and_ conveniently distribute information internally.

Either way, it is always welcome to see companies take notice of posts (good or bad) and know that the information there is incorporated into their planning. 

Technorati Tags: spock, social media, focused social media, 103bees, windows live writer

Sometimes It Seems Like Google Punts

Sometimes it seems like Google AdSense just plain punts.

I went through the e-mail that seeded these ads and could not find anything to warrant any of these.

Crazy

Technorati Tags: google, adsense, nonsense

It May Be the Evil Spock

Nancy White and Catherine Juon both wrote me simultaneously today to ask me the same question I asked Laurel Papworth the other day:

(Paraphrased) "Why do I want to join a new web site that has been peppering me with invites?"

Social networking adepts understand that any web site that bugs you too much about one thing, will probably annoy you in other ways as well.

A few things need some light. 

Q: Why are you getting tons of opt-in requests from your friends who should know better than to bulk invite people not already on a system?

A: Spock has pages for nearly everyone who has ever existed.  When you first log in to Spock it, like most sites, mines your email accounts and asks who you'd like to add that "already has a page on Spock."  But I had three pages on Spock before I ever logged on - Spock had crawled my business site, my blog, and my page on LinkedIn and created pages for me.

Then why my friends logged in, Spock told them I was already there - and THEN invited me.  My friends thought they were connecting to me in a system I had already opted-in for - but I had not.

I made this same "mistake".  So, Spock misrepresents their membership when you first log in.

Q: Why is this a problem?

A: Evil Spock has crawled the pages of a very large number of real people and created profiles for them that are based on totally unvetted and unauthorized information.  It is all machine made.

Evil Spock's Robot has gone out and raped crawled my LinkedIn page, gathering up my information without my consent and then misrepresented this to people coming to the site. 

When you go to an unowned page, it does tell you that the page is unclaimed.  Going to an actual page comes long after the "link to friends" process.

This information harvesting has caused me work in cleaning up the Evil Spock database.  It has caused me some embarrassment by inviting people to a service I don't think they need or will use. 

But now, I feel compelled to tell everyone I know to JOIN SPOCK - simply so they can clean up their bios.

That is Evil.

UPDATE:  No, no wait!  They are even EVILER!

Technorati Tags: spock, nancy white, catherine juon, evil spock, information harvesting

An Initial Response to Spock

"Spock ... help me ... Spock."

This week I received a buncha invites to try Spock, which I'd sort of been avoiding simply because I was so buried by other life events.  But Sunday morning I felt the Jones to fill out forms and go through another web 2.0 process.

Here is my initial response to Spock. 

1. Weirdly Controlling

Spock gives you lots of tools to have robust data and then doesn't allow you to use them.   The biggest part of this for me is the box to the right.

My name is Jim Benson.  There are 80 Trillion Jim Benson's out there, or so it seems.  If people search for Jim or James Benson, they have a hell of a time finding me.

But everyone who knows me knows that I'm "ourfounder" on just about every social site out there.  But I cannot enter "ourfounder" in this box because it is not a full name.  But, you know what, it is a primary identifier of me.

Laurel Papworth, a woman who will never suffer from 80 Trillion people with her name, also goes by Silkcharm.  What did she do....

Yes, Ms Silkcharm.  Allowing her to be findable.  I tried "Ourfounder Ourfounder" and it said "That does not appear to be a real name".  Which makes me wonder if the large number of repetitive African names can be used in Spock.

Laurel had a larger fight with Spock over her imagery.  Part of her personal brand is her avatar / logo which they would not allow as a real picture of her.  (For some reason the Second Life shot you see here stayed).

2. What the heck is my trusted network?

This is really confusing.  The point of Spock is for you to build trusted networks and organize people you know into groups.

But, you cannot view your trusted network.  This is so bizarre that I spent about an hour just searching over and over for it.  There is a Network button, but it shows you everyone in your extended network!

While I was working on this, other people joined my trusted network.  But I didn't know - because I have no way to actually track my trusted relationships.

They give you an "advanced" search, I thought maybe it would be here, but no. 

Again, here, "Network" means your trusted relationships and everyone they know.  So I have dozens of pages of people in my Network that I do not know. 

If I am bothering to trust these people, it would be nice to be able to see them.

3. At last!  I can manage my network!  Sort of.

On your front page is a tool to list people you respect and to tag them.  Wonderful!  But ... where do these people come from?  Off the top of your head.

Can you stand it?

There is no pick list.  No ability to view your trusted network and select people for this treatment.  You just start typing names.

4. "Claim this page" and Scraped Information

 

This sort of freaked me out. I linked my page to Ed Vielmetti's ... but he hadn't even been on the site.  As you can see at the bottom here, it asks me to Invite Ed ... so that Ed can claim his own information.

I'm sure others will write long bits about this.  For Ed, this was fine.  Ed is an old pro at all things social software.  But for my other friend Bob, he represented on Spock because Spock went out and scraped his myspace page - a page not updated in quite a while.

So, because of this I thought .. wow, they must have a bunch of pages for me.  And I went searching.  Two more Jim Bensons and one James Benson pages that had my information in them - amongst hundreds of other Jim Benson and James Benson pages.

But for my own personal identity management, I had to chase these pages down and claim them.  I had to actually sit there and sift through their database in a very coarse way to gain my own personal information.

That wasn't fun.  At least if you are going to make me work, give me better tools.  But having to search their scraper-results to clean up my on-line identity is worrisome.

There was also a lot of effluvia from other Jim Bensons in my real profile that I had to disavow.   This information also came from their scrapers.

Conclusions

What we see here is that search engines and scrapers are too coarse to build identity profiles for third parties.  That's the easy part.

The ethics of scraping and claiming that's a profile for a person ... that's harder.

Requiring a rigid level of data input from users (photos, names) while having a frivolous data collection method is just plain bizarre.

Spock looks like it could evolve into a very useful tool.  But they'd better watch out that they don't alienate everyone before they get there.

Technorati Tags: laurel papworth, spock, ed vielmetti, twitteriffic, social media, social networking