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Privacy, Frictionless Sharing, and Hasah Elahi

December 5, 2011 By Dan Thornton

I originally wrote about Hasan Elahi four years ago following an article in Wired, which described how he was incorrectly questioned by the FBI, and the Tracking Transcience project he began as a result to share everything about his life – where he was, what he was eating, his purchases etc. (My original post is here). Way before frictionless sharing became available to us all!

I thought it was worth sharing his recent TED talk which was queued up in my always growing list of videos to watch;

It’s something which is going to be a growing issues for more of us as ‘frictionless sharing’ and online lives are the easiest for people to track and interact with. Rather than trying to hide everything, perhaps overwhelming the systems with information is the more effective route, particularly, as Elahi points out, the various Government agencies in every country whose stock and trade is information. After all, ‘Everyone’s a curator now‘

Frictionless sharing and frictionless ambivalence

I’ve been looking at the rise of ‘frictionless sharing’ – exemplified by Spotify autoposting every song you play on Facebook. The insightful Chris Thorpe summed it up well with his blog post comparing it with frictionfull sharing.

What I really want and act upon is that one personal recommendation from someone I trust/respect/like for the one thing that really matters – a new song, a book, an article. Something that someone saw and though they absolutely had to share with me.

After all, I thought at this time of year it’s meant to be ‘the thought that counts’, and ‘it’s better to give than receive’. No thought goes into autoposting, and you’re giving me nothing – except a bunch of unfiltered noise alongside everyone else doing the same thing in my friends list.

Unless you’re doing it to devalue government information agencies, in which case you’re far more interesting than your choice in mainstream pop suggests…

Great videos to watch from the Dachis Social Business Summit

June 24, 2011 By Dan Thornton

Just spotted that the Dachis Group have just released all the videos and presentation slides from their Social Business Summit, which took place in March.

All of them are worth watching, but I figured I’d pull out the talk by JP Rangaswami in particular, considering it was only a couple of hours ago I included his site as one of the blogs I always make time to read.

Others include Ton Hsieh Shiv Singh, Phillip Kaplan, Lee Bryant etc. Definitely worth making some time on a Friday afternoon to browse through and watch when you can.

 

Libraries could really be up the creek…

October 22, 2010 By Dan Thornton

I actually toned down the headline (the original one rhymed with ‘ducked’). The reason for this bleak prognosis?

Well, first I wrote about the potential of the ebook to remove the relevance of libraries and how they could adapt.

Two days later, Amazon allowed websites and bloggers to start embedding the opening chapter of books – not a major nail in the coffin, but an indication.

But now it’s done.

Later this year, Amazon owners will be able to lend out their books to other Kindle owners for 14 days. That’s the same functionality which is also available on the Barnes & Noble Nook.

Now, there are restrictions and rules, not every book will be available, and the Kindle-owning population is by far the minority. But there’s also a two-week limit on physical library books, not every book is available, and there are restrictions and fines.

And as detailed in the external link below, there appears to be a successful trial in the U.S using e-readers as I suggested a while ago.

Related articles
  • Kindles, Sony & Nook e-Readers Allowing Libraries To Thrive In Information Age?

Still room for improvement in Google Reader

August 21, 2009 By Dan Thornton

A lot of people have commented on the new social features which have been released for Google’s RSS Reader – and most of them have been pretty positive.

Recent changes have included showing more information on who likes and shares posts, and being able to connect with more people who have interested with content you like. And the option to ‘Send To’ various listed or custom social networks from Google Reader has also been a step towards improving the influence it has.

Both the basic ideas behind the improvements are good ones, so it’s just a shame that there are a couple of major niggles which mean they’re not as good as they could have been.

Firstly, I use Google Reader for around 2 hours every day when I’m travelling to and from work by train. The access to free wifi means it’s completely replaced ever bothering with a newspaper or magazine, and I can get all the information that I’ve requested delivered to me.

But it also means that the fact the Send To option doesn’t occur within the reader itself means that I’m still stuck waiting for other pages to load before I can Stumble them, for example, and that’s no at option on shared wifi. It still means attempting (and failing) to remember which articles I loved and going back to promote them when I’m on a better connection.

Secondly, and this is the biggest problem – the more people sharing with me, the more times I’m seeing duplicate content. In some cases, the same feed item can appear 4 or 5 times – once from my own subscription and then numerous times from my friends and contacts.

That means I’m loathe to add anyone, particularly in my areas of interest, because I’ll end up with 200 items every day that I’ve already seen, added to the 150+ that I get anyway.

It’s frustrating, because I’d love to see what a ton of people are sharing, and it’s a nice alternative to short urls with no explanation on Twitter.

Still, it’s good to see Google investing some time and effort in Reader, even if the supply side of Feedburner is as flakey as ever.

And there’s also an interesting Greasemonkey script for Firefox (called gReactions) which has just been released to show blog comments, Friendfeed, Twitter, Digg, Hacker News and Reddit underneath each post.

Google RSS Reader finally allows social bookmarking

August 13, 2009 By Dan Thornton

One of my guilty confessions is that I’ve been doing less linking and sharing of other sites on places like Stumbleupon recently than in the past.

A major reason for that is that I’m generally going through my reading on the train in Google RSS reader, and not actually visiting sites. Combine the slow speed of the onboard wifi with the hassle of coming out of my RSS feed to recommend things on a regular basis, and you might be sympathetic as to why it’s a bit of a hassle.

But no longer – in addition to the places which allow me to import my RSS shared items (Friendfeed, Publish 2 etc), Google’s Matt Cutts revealed today that Google Reader now has a ‘send to’ option for Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg etc from within the feedreader, and that you can also set it up for sites which aren’t currently listed.

Like him, it’s a feature I’ve wanted since I started using Google for RSS reading, and combined with the improved social tools for sharing and following with other Google RSS readers (And with an 84% share in one example, there’s quite a few!), and RSS is back in the game alongside sharing links on Twitter etc.

(Incidentally, to enable it, just go to settings, and it’s under the ‘Send To’ tab.)

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