My Digital FootPrint

Pat Walshe aka @privacymatters and fellow professional all of all things on privacy and Identity, is currently cycling the 1000 miles from John O'Groats at the top of Scotland to Land's End at the bottom of England.  He is cycling to raise awareness and funds for two charities that help grieving children and people battling facial cancer and is doing it in memory of his sister who died some time ago aged 42 after battling facial cancer and who left behind two children.  His  blog at   http://cyclingformargaret.wordpress.com / for more information and on twitter @end2end_2011 http://twitter.com/#!/end2end_2011   Pat started cycling on Sunday 24th July and am now on day 4 having covered 330 miles, climbed over 12500 feet, burned 16,500 calories and spent 26 hours in the saddle in total. 8 more days to go. Can you support, by:- spreading the word via social media etc – this will really help drive interest donating at  http://www.justgiving.com/letsfaceitformargaret  or for

Where does the balance lie between an individual's right to privacy and the public's right to know? http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/pm/2011/06/the_privacy_commission.shtml   The BBC has interviews with : Hugh Tomlinson QC , Zac Goldsmith MP , Max Mosley , Stephen Abell , Hugh Grant , Sir Charles Gray , Alan Rusbridger , Helen Wood , Max Clifford , Marcus Partington , John Kampfner , Christopher Graham , Louise Mensch , Andy Trotter , John Mullin , Avril Sanders Royle , Jimmy Wales You can  read more about the Commissioners here. The  draft terms of reference  are now available on the PM blog, and listeners have a week to  offer suggestions and alterations  for the Commission to consider, as well as proposals for witnesses. Evidence sessions will begin in mid-June. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/pm/2011/06/the_privacy_commission.shtml

Overconnected: The Promise and Threat of the Internet by William H. Davidow, January 2011. This books needs to be set in context of other books like The Shallows by  Nicholas Carr ,  Clay Shirky 's Cognitive Surplus, Kevin Kelly's  What Technology Wants and Delete by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger   as they tend to bias towards the way technology affects the way we think or have actually recreated how we think. Overconnected, is not about email, iPhones and the other distractions that seem to direct our modern lives. William Davidow is focussed on how strong connections, instead of idyllically solving problems, and what they mean. Being connected has certainly made us more efficient. But there's now the risk of reacting so quickly that we don't give the thought we might have given to our actions and reactions even twenty years ago. Strong connections, it is presented, have only magnified the problems, turning local problems into national ones and national crises i

The McKinsey report on Big Data is here in various formats along with podcast http://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/publications/big_data/index.asp

From Search Engine land

At the very bottom, after a Google search, you can View Customisations and this allows you to search without the improvements (of your web history)

“It’s been amazing to see all the ways that companies are leveraging the API. From hotels instantly upgrading rooms at check-in to call centers routing calls appropriately and thousands of companies using integration partners like Radian 6, Seesmic, Hootsuite, CoTweet, about.me and others to provide heightened levels of customer service to key influencers. Klout has become a must have for any company dealing with support, customer loyalty, and directed offers. It makes us proud to know that with every API call an influencer is being rewarded. We can’t wait to see what innovation the next 2 billion API calls bring!” http://corp.klout.com/blog/2011/07/two-billion-is-cool/

Video of Christopher Osborne @osbornec at the Next Conference  in Berlin   Some great visualisation of ‘Bright Data, Big City: How Data Transforms Metropolitan Life’, People don’t talk about data, they talk about stories and you not only communicate analysis, but enrich it by creating conversation and enabling people to collaborate.

Thursday, November 03, 2011 from 10:00 AM - 3:30 PM (GMT) @ IW in London To register go here www.summit.mydigitalfootprint.com Irrespective of what we call them the Screenagers, Generation Y, millennials, digital natives or the Facebook generation; we all agree that they are driving new digital services.   Often, in a discussion of next generation services and privacy their voice is ignored. Therefore, we ask:  Should we teach the Screenagers or should we learn from them? The Digital Footprint Summit is all about social, personal and identifiable data and will focus on first hand perspectives from those in this generation. During the event we aim to explore what Screenagers really think about trading their personal information and how their attitudes will create a change for the ecosystem. Traditional media suggests that this generation is “careless with privacy”. We will look beyond that view. Instead of patronising and protecting, we will seek to understand

Sorry don’t have a source.

Original post on GigaOM

Full document here  http://www.w3.org/2011/tracking-protection/charter-draft Scope The Working Group will produce Recommendation-track specifications for a simple machine-readable preference expression mechanism ("Do Not Track") and technologies for selectively allowing or blocking tracking elements. Proposed candidate technologies for this preference that the Working Group will consider include, but are not limited to, the use of an HTTP header to signal the preference and a site's response, and the use of a ECMAScript API or DOM property for the same purpose. Additionally, the Working Group will define the scope of that user preference and practices for compliance with it in a way that will inform and be informed by the technical specification. The group will actively engage governmental, industry, academic and advocacy organizations to seek global consensus definitions and codes of conduct. The Working Group may investigate monitoring of implementation and confor

Dachis Group has launched a Social Business Index (real-time ranking, analysis, and benchmarking of Social Business adoption and performance) and measures the social performance of the world's most engaged companies, their subsidiaries, and their brands by analyzing hundreds of millions of signals globally from customers, employees, partners, influencers, and the marketplace in real time across the Social Business graph.

Looking at visibility reports http://www.vrank.com/ and in their judgement for something that is not specified I am doing quite well – and when I do everything someone else will come along with a new algorithm and will rate everything differently. Probably tired and cynical

The EU requirement is that any cookie (or other equivalent mechanism) other than a "session-cookie" essential for the working of a website (and tracking, ad-serving and stats are NOT essential) will at some point in the next 12 months require opt-in consent from a web-site visitor. You do NOT need to get consent right now - Nellie Kroes of the European Commission AND Christopher Graham, the UK Information Commissioner have both made it clear there is a 12 month "grace" period Both have also made it clear that they expect the web-browser suppliers to come up with a solution (this is a global problem as legislation is being threatened worldwide) You should NOT make any immediate changes to your website You SHOULD review the list of actions you DO need to take in our free guide and consider circulating it to everyone who has anything to do with the web in your business. So, don’t worry, take the dire warning of the doom mongers with a large pinch of salt, re

Global Web Index  has mapped how the world uses social networks in the infographic The research, run by London-based consultancy  Trendstream , has conducted six waves of surveys about global consumer adoption of the Internet and social media in 36 markets. It used data from its February 2011 surveys of between 750 and 2,000 online users in each market to define three behaviour types: massagers, groupers and content sharers.

From GIGAOM: Cloud computing requires new thinking on privacy

Original post: on iHealthBeat The  U.S. Supreme Court overturned  a Vermont law that sought to limit the practice of selling information about physicians’ prescribing habits for marketing purposes, the  AP/Burlington Free Press  reports. The Vermont law also was aimed at increasing the use of generic drugs (Sherman, AP/Burlington Free Press, 6/23). In a 6-3 ruling, the court said that the law placed an unconstitutional restraint on the free-speech rights of drugmakers (Kendall,  Wall Street Journal , 6/23). The Supreme Court ruled the Vermont law violated constitutional free-speech rights, even though the statute was drafted to prevent drug companies from using direct marketing to persuade physicians to prescribe brand-name drugs,  Modern Healthcare  reports.

This McKinsey  report ( sorry you have to trade your identity to get it ) calls big data “the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity.” We can answer questions with big data that were beyond reach in the past. We can extract insight and knowledge, identify trends and use the data to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage and create substantial value for the world economy. The challenges with big data are limited compared to the potential benefits, which are limited only by our creativity and ability to make connections among the trillions of bytes of data we have access to. Big data provides an opportunity to find insight in new and emerging types of data.  How will you take advantage of this opportunity? Personal comment: In Light of the other blogs today about more data not producing better decisions, I might disagree.  But we do need to find a way to weave data (content and rights) so it becomes available. It is not about storing data………

According to  IBM , we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Ninety percent of the data we have has been created in the past two years and the amount of data is expected to increase exponentially. The data we create is expanding rapidly as enterprises capture more data in greater detail, as multimedia becomes more common, as social media conversations explode and as we use the Internet to get things done. This is “big data,” and it’s getting even bigger. Big data spans three dimensions: Variety  – Big data extends beyond structured data, including unstructured data of all varieties: text, audio, video, click streams, log files and more. Velocity  – Often time-sensitive, big data must be used as it is streaming in to the enterprise in order to maximize its value to the business. Volume  – Big data comes in one size: large. Enterprises are awash with data, easily 

This is a NYT article by BRIAN STELTER and starts out “ Not too long ago, theorists fretted that the Internet was a place where anonymity thrived…Now, it seems, it is the place where anonymity dies.” After the usual discourse about how bad it is, the reporter appears to loose a number of facts… Discovery is because people are involved and for some reason we love a story. News is about new and headlines sell and sales means pay check It is quicker, easier and therefore relevant now as the context of who the “offender” is still present Is there a value gained that outweighs the loss of something you did not have?

Congratulations to Andre Durand and his team as Ping fuels growth with $21 million in financing from Triangle Peak Partners and Silicon Valley Bank and follow on from General Catalyst Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Volition Capital, Appian Ventures and SAP Ventures. A reward for a focus on identity federation, standards and the business of identity . Their vision is to enable one secure identity, integrated across millions of systems.

This is from <a href="http://www.alchemyofchange.net" title="http://www.alchemyofchange.net/ ( http://www.alchemyofchange.net )">Alchemy of Change by Gideon Rosenblatt who has written several thoughtful articles on the same topic…. Part 1:    Change Happens Through People – Even at Walmart Part 2:   5 Steps to Influence Mapping Part 3:   Influence: the Flip Side of Permeability Part 4:    How to Strengthen Your Organization’s Influence Mapping Each of us depends on our ability to create change, and quite often that change is happening within an institutional context.  We all recognise that there’s usually a handful of relationships that play a disproportionately large role in bringing those changes about. That’s part of the reason it’s hard to truly separate institutional change from personal change. The process by either “influence mapping” or “power mapping” is hard and here’s a quick look at how this incredibly important tool for influencing

Source: Vision Mobile

Interview between Ali Riaz and Sid Probstein (Attivo), by Michael S. Hopkins Companies have been trained to think about data all wrong, say Attivio’s Ali Riaz and Sid Probstein. “Analytics don't have to be based on super-precise data,” they say. “The report doesn't have to be perfect. It needs to capture the   behaviour , not the   totality   of it." This is not off topic for Digital Footprints as the same ideals are present.  What is the least data you need to get the result? The interview is worth reading in full, couple of key points: Proposition 1: Your company collects data. You want to act on it. First, though, you really, really want to make sure that data are accurate. So you focus on getting it right. Better to wait on a decision until you have the absolutely correct information than act based on partial information. The stifling downside of the quest for perfect data. The problem with focusing on getting the numbers too right is that most companies sacrif

Two insightful articles from Michael Wu  Michael was voted a  2010 Influential Leader by CRM Magazine  for his work on predictive social analytics and its application to Social CRM. He's a regular blogger on the Lithosphere's Building Community blog and previously wrote in the Analytic Science blog. You can follow him on Twitter at  mich8elwu . Quantifying Facebook Engagement: More than Just Counting Fans and Likes Deeper Facebook Engagement: Dissecting Interactivity Conclusion….. It is possible to understand how fans engage within a fan page by looking at thread depth, the unique number of other fans they interact with, and the dynamics of these interactions. By doing so, we covered three more levels of engagement metrics. So our spectrum of engagement is five levels deep now.  Level 0: Total fan counts Level 1: Active fans Level 2: Interactivity through comments Level 3: Thread Depth – amount of interaction Level 4: Unique fans per conversation – with how many oth

Topsy delivers realtime search powered by the social web that finds the most relevant conversations happening online has now indexed over 5 billion tweets and 2.5 billion links. Topsy provides the “influential” search results ranked by millions of people. By searching links, tweets and other user generated content, Topsy brings you the freshest, most valuable content on the social web. Topsy is backed by BlueRun Ventures, Ignition Partners, Founders Fund and Scott Banister.

Nick Halstead CEO and founder of DataSift has raised $6 Million Dollar round from GRP Partners and IA Ventures. Mark Suster  and  Roger Ehrenberg  have joined the board. DataSift provides very granular and modular ‘sifting’ functions from a wide range of social and web input feeds, augmenting them with sentiment analysis, storage and analytics to offer an unrivalled service platform which leverages the cloud and scales infinitely. The world is moving to streams, and consumers will consume and curate their own news. DataSift follows this paradigm shift and seeks to become the platform of choice for stream curation, consumption, and ultimately monetization. The end visualizations are unlimited and bounded only by your imagination. Their ambition in life is to: build the best platforms for developers, publishers, brands, and agencies. unlock the power and data of social media. do so in a fun and exciting way.

Original Article from Huffington Post So the story goes… Eddie Rocha home was burgled in April and an expensive watch was taken and he launched an online search to find the watch. According to  ABC Local News Rocha spotted the a 17-year-old neighbour wearing his watch in two prom photos that he noticed while browsing the school website. Here is a gallery of  Facebook posts that got users arrested . Is it just that we need humans to do this…..or do we?

Source:  Go-Globe.com Every minute on the internet: More than 168 million emails are sent 695,000 status updates and 510,040 comments are published on Facebook Google serves more that 694,445 search queries 370,000+ minutes of voice calls done by Skype users 20,000 new posts are published on Tumblr 13,000+ hours of music streaming flows from Pandora More than 13,000 iPhone apps are downloaded 6,600 images are published on Flickr 600 videos (about 25 hours of content) are uploaded to YouTube

I met Venessa Miemis  earlier in the year and enjoy her views and research.  She is working with Erica Glasier’s  to illustrate her research  on the intersection of technology, society & innovation. She’s working on a video and book project called The Future of Facebook…. Erica’s social media illustrations are  here on Flickr  

Information designer Vincenzo Cosenza  has released  an updated map  of his social networking traffic around the world. Suffice it to say, there's no more compelling way to watch Facebook metastasize across the world.

This is a link to the 12 video presentations are from the Data Scientist Summit, a unique gathering of data pioneers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, technologists and scientists. This summit was a unique opportunity to share thinking on current and future tools, techniques and trends that are driving the big data opportunity for organizations across the globe. Twitter  #DataSci http://www.greenplum.com/community/data-scientist-summit-2011

In the light of News Corp” adventure” this is becomes an interesting read…. As the report does not recommend sweeping regulatory actions that might have seen Washington inserting itself into the affairs of the press or bailing out dying business models. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released on June 9 th “ The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age .”  The 475-page final report is know has been dubbed “The Future of Media Report” or for a speed read the 2-page summary   Historical context: Federal policymakers have been taking a greater interest in the health of media and journalism in recent years. In 2009, the Senate  held hearings  about “the future of journalism,” and Senator Benjamin L. Cardin (D-MD) introduced the “ Newspaper Revitalization Act ,” which would allow newspapers to become tax-exempt non-profits in an effort to help them stay afloat. In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission hosted two workshops asking “ How

The executive summary is below and the full report is   here Executive Summary  A great deal has changed in how we conduct business, where our economic activity takes place and where our markets are over the past few decades. We've seen information technology revolutionise our business and communications processes and today, the internet, social media, the cloud and an explosion of data are transforming our view of how we will do business in the next few years. Seismic shifts in our perception of continuity take place every now and again, such as the ash cloud from Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, the Tsunami off the Japanese coast and our human failings in the field of financial services, that led to the global credit crisis and Great Recession. These reassure us that we have only feint claim to being able to control our complex physical and economic environments. The recent eruption of Grimsvoetn volcano in Iceland has done nothing to settle well founded views that there really are t

Good article by Alistair Fairweather titled Four Very Different Mobile Payment Services  - there is more on the article than here and worth a read This is his advantage and disadvantages and my added comments in colour Approach one: Phones as credit card machines (Square) Advantages Ubiquity and familiarity of credit cards (at least in developed economies); A clever and comfortingly familiar payment interface; and The focus on small businesses and vendors has given them cheap and effective market penetration. Disadvantages Requires physical proximity between buyer and seller; Requires a smart phone and special additional hardware (although it is free); and Requires the buy-in of (historically unfriendly) banks and credit card companies (which may slow or limit international adoption). All your lovely data is still not yours and make is easy for the status quo to remain, you can see some natural support from certain players who want to remain in power. Approach two: pho

Is Social Media Paving the Way for an Offline Sharing Economy? Study from Latitude Full study download

6th June 2011. By advertising to Facebook fans instead of non-fans, advertisers can reduce the acquisition cost of registrations by 44%, event signups by 33%, and purchases by 15%. These results of a 4.1 billion ad-impression, thirteen-client test have been exclusively shared with Inside Facebook by TBG Digital, developers of one of the most popular technology solutions for buying huge volumes of Facebook ads . It is worth a read if the entire article …. http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/06/06/target-facebook-fans-cheaper-registrations/

This is an Article from Banking Technology by a sound and hugely respected friend David Birch ------ As the mobile payments area looks set to take finally take off, the next big area for payments services will be identity and authentication, according to a leading commentator. Digital money specialist Dave Birch, a director of Consult Hyperion, this week told the annual Payment Strategies Conference - organised by Experian Identity and Fraud - that "the evolution of an identity market is the next big step" in developing mobile payments and related services. But he warned that "the technologies involved are very different to those in the connectivity space". "In the mass market, biometrics are about convenience, not security," he said. Birch lambasted traditional banks and payments providers for their failure to grasp the nature of the opportunities presented by mobile technologies, which has led them to miss the boat. "I'm almost embarrass

https://www.tokenpay.com/ Mission is to provide a full service, 100% anonymous online transaction solution.  Claims to take privacy and security to all new levels of protection through a closed-loop network allowing for complete anonymity and untraceable online transactions. You are able to maintain undisclosed your online spending habits as we pass absolutely no personal or account information on to the merchant. With Token Pay you keep your money, financial details, and identity safe, secure and private. They offer Indemnification of transactions and no chargebacks. And they are located…. DRS Holdings, Chancery Court Leeward Highway, Turks And Caicos Islands, BWI Assuming you keep your own “data” – this has the weakest of all levels of security !

Keep coming back to this; how much are you (your data) worth? Irrespective of the scenario below that you favour there is always a balance between the time, effort, management, commitment and any real cost/ benefit.  Whilst each scenario, depending on how you add it up, is worth a min of $2bn; one scenario is growing fast. scenario 1 – the insurance sale             Data loss             Data recovery time scenario 2 – the identity loss             Access to material you wanted to keep private             Loss of Privacy/ liberty             Recovery of direct loss             Reputation/ falsification             Setting up and securing services again scenario 3 – the social exchange             Barter your data on an exchange             Improvement in personalisation and recommendation             Filtering             Speed to discovery

  Source:  http://blog.mycube.com/ copy: https://s3.amazonaws.com/mycube.ae/User-Generated-Content.jpg

Back in May I wrote Moving Beyond Recommendation Engines, does personalisation work or are we doomed and I am back thinking again about Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"    TED talk as I read his  book. The premise is that life is filtered, but I will still contend that Internet provides less filtering and more choice than a TV or media editor and it is accessible but you need to know how to discover the content you are looking for. Tom Weiss (whom I know well) over at TV Genius blogged about keeping TV relevant for each individual and the need for a mix that needs to include not only recommendations, but also TV search, saved search terms , TV reminders, social media suggestions, editorial reviews, popular programming, and the top trending TV shows.  However you social media recommendation will be influenced by who you follow and presented 5 segments. 1. Socialites: Influenced by friends and family, channel surfing, and web and mobile 2. Progressives: In