I’m at the BlogOn conference today and tomorrow. My takeaways so far:
- From a panel with Jeff Jarvis: centralized control over brand and community identity is no longer possible. This is an interesting, scary, and empowering idea. Think about it: until recently, companies (especially large ones) could generally define and control their own corporate identity through advertising and marketing. Today, with a thoughtful blog, a single individual can create a global media platform; with common search technologies, like-minded individuals can find each other and move markets. Scary time to be a company with a misleading message or bad product. Empowering time to be someone with ideas who wants to be heard. Case in point: Kryptonite, the company that claims to “make tough locks for a tough world.” If you Google “kryptonite locks”, you’ll see that the second result shows a year-old Engadget article that explains how to pick a Kryptonite lock with a common bic pen. Basically, an enterprising individual figured out how to pick the lock, Engadget posted an article complete with a how-to video, and, from there, the message was out.
- Another noteworthy development is the practice of spontaneous, collaborative tagging, popularized in part by sites such as Del.icio.us and Flickr. The idea is that if enough people (working individually) are given a platform that enables users to freely label items of interest (web sites, photos, etc), an organic model will eventually emerge that meaningfully organizes the information in question. This is important because it allows people with common interests to easily find each other. For example, I can quickly find photos of today’s BlogOn conference by checking the “blogon” tag on Flickr. Clearly, I could find such photos in other ways, but tags work well, especially considering that no one decided beforehand that conference photos should be stored in this manner. For another example, check out the “popular tags” on del.icio.us/popular. You can easily skim a list of sites that interest others (today’s most popular site is a list of the top 20 free fonts)–and quickly find related, relevant sites, as well (by clicking on the design tag, you can find similar sites, such as this one showing web design mistakes).
- Finally, consider internet privacy. The difference in behavior between certain (generally older) users and others (generally younger) is astonishing. For examples, take a look at any number of random MySpace profiles–you can find mostly trival information like a person’s favorite band or book, but also more sensitive identifiers such as income, sexual orientation, religion, drug history, etc. It’s hard to know whether those who have relatively revealing MySpace profiles will eventually come to regret what they’ve chosen to disclose, or if increasing openness is just a part of today’s digital life. Either way, the amount of personal information easily found on MySpace (among other sites) is somewhat terrifying, especially considering that certain services, like the Internet Archive, intend to make a permanent archive of publicly available web sites.
Left by tech.memeorandum on October 18th, 2005