Alasdair Watson

This will make sense to no-one but me – I can’t seem to find the time to expand this collection of other people thoughts into a coherent post, for which I apologise. But here are a few insights by other people I’ve picked up in the last couple of weeks. Some of them aren’t anything you won’t have seen a variation before on here, but they’re something in their phrasing sparked a few new ideas in me.

I worked on TapLynx for about two years, and this meant working closely with a variety of publishers. And most had these things in common:

1. No money.

2. No idea where the money’s going to come from.

3. An unswerving faith in the supreme value of analytics.

4. A willingness to try anything as long as it’s cheap or free and has analytics. Unless they’re paranoid and afraid for their jobs, which they almost always are, given #1 and #2.

– Brent Simmons “The Pummeling Pages“

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage – we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action.

– Maciej Cegłowski “The Social Graph is Neither“

(Context for the above, and despite the quote, and my usual habits, I’m not just singling out Google and Facebook here: We consider corporations immortal persons, and, having granted them immortality, we then allow them to indulge in behaviours that would get a human locked up. Not exactly a shattering insight, but I wonder if there’s something in a model of corporate behaviour that is simply to require them to be sane.)

We’ve moved from a world that is “private-by-default, public-through-effort” to one that is “public-by-default, private-with-effort.”

– danah boyd “Debating Privacy in a Networked World for the WSJ“

Fingers crossed I’ll have time at some future point to come back and tie this lot together and add a few thoughts of my own, but I just want to make sure I didn’t loose the quoted bits in the interim.