My Second Life: Under Construction

Click. Choose a name.

Click. Choose an identity for your avatar. Female or male? Girl/boy next door, City Chic, Harajuka, Cybergroth, Furry or night club?
Click. Here’s my Second Life identity.    

I have chosen a name similar to my own name so I am sure I will recognize myself. I did not consider being a male in Second Life (SL), I was considering being a Harajuaka or Cybergroth but I was not really sure about these identities so now I am a city chic girl just like in my real life. (I am even looking forward to go shopping for city chic clothing to my avatar). I could also change the identiy completely. I am surprised that most residents in SL have chosen avatars that are similar to their real life personalities. I am happy that my avatar seems to have longer legs and a smaller nose than the real me, but it is interesting that participants do not take the chance to become another character  – maybe a bit younger and fancier – than they are in real life.   I looked around on OI (Orientation Island) for a while, and I have to admit that I am looking forward to get an introduction in class later this week. I am a bit nervous that I will get addicted to SL because like BeckBlogic Weblog I do not know where I should get time to have a second life – without giving up my nice night sleep. But anyway, I want to explore SL with all its creativity in art, music, diplomacy, and other businesses and activities  because I am curious. What is this about? Why are people playing this? The old me (me before this class) was surprised to learn about this huge user generated society with entrepreneurs like artists, bankers (not allowed anymore), and real estate agents. I am also surprised to learn about the SL economy where residents can exchange Linden dollars for US dollars. One thing is that Linden Lab generates a profit but SL residents can convert Linden dollars into real dollars and make some sort of a living. SL residents are earning Linden dollars out of real estate, games, or funky avatar gadgets. I have not heard about any who created a fortune but still….. I am not a big player online, but games can be a great training tool especially if you are trying to communicate with the net-generation. For years, America’s Army has been on my “to do list” so I could learn more about the army, war strategies etc. It is a great recruiting tool. Now I have downloaded it and created an account. I am not patient or tech savvy so I ran out of patience. There were so many things going on. Same thing in SL – but I guess it is easier for me to identify myself with a city chic than a soldier. I also tried out FatWorld, Airport Security and Points of Entry all made by Persuasive Games. The games are effective media for communicating a message to an audience playing online games. I think the messages are clear about nutrition, immigration and airport security: Think about what you eat, think about the unfair standardized immigration system, and think about the ridicules airport (in)security. It is combining Shakespeare tragedy and comic with expressive visual and sounds effects. In that way it can be manipulatining. It is not hard to figure out the political agenda of Persuasive Games, but I guess in other games it could be more difficult to see the context.

You Tube and me

This is a test. Knock knock. I have been trying 100s of time to publish You Tube clips on my blog. It seems like I do not have the Personal Options bottom that I have to uncheck. And when I try to upload video the screen freezes.   

It worked on another computer, but not on my own. I cannot send the clip to Editor. Strange. What´s going on?

There´s no rules

Inspired by Kurtz’ longer blogging style in Washington Post and MacKinnon’s short style I will present my news surf from this week about what I think is interesting and surprising in this wild world of the web. Remember – there’s no rules. Though, you should be cautious of blogging about your job. But maybe not always! 

Surfing the news
Any news about Wikinomics, The Long Tail, The Database of Intentions, Twitter (twittering?),Digg, del.icio.us, and Flickr? I have become addicted to surfing news about these new vocabs in my life. Thanks to GoogleReader and RSS surfing is really an easy way to sort out the information I don’t need.   

Twitter
I don’t get it. But I know I have to dig deeper just like Jeff Jarvis has done. He convinced me that it can be an effective tool for professional use. Who’s interested in my private life of blogging at 1am, baking bread, or shopping at Barnes and Nobles or Barneys – besides advertisers on Facebook and Google?  

Privacy concerns
Just as fascinating the concept of The Database of Intentions is just as scaring it is for privacy matters. Have you tried to change your profile and noticed the shift in ads? Try! Or try like we did in class to target various voters or consumers in Washington DC from www.facebook.com/ads. Are you worried? Or do you think it is a blessing with relevant ads?    

Wikinomics in journalism
Thanks to Jeff Jarvis´Buzzmachine, I have got into this wikinomics of journalism as one more example of how wikinomics are being accepted as a best practice for developing ideas and solutions. The idea of using the wisdom of the crowds instead of a few experts appeals to me. I am looking forward to see the stories that the readers of The Dallas Morning News´ will come back with after studying the new material about the murder of JFK.

Kiva – loans that change life
Social networking is not just about friendship, the long Tail of music, books, or used stuff. Check out Kiva and lend money to entrepreneurs in the developing world. See Bill Clinton´s explanation on You Tube

Do you want to be my Facebook friend?
Does social networking change the concept of friendship? Are Facebookers telling the truth about themselves? Who do you want to make your life accessible to?  

Other questions……
How do we cultivate public opinion or educate citizens/consumers on important issues in the future? How do the government and government agencies handle the challenge of the uncontrolled social media?How do the next president integrate the wisdom of crowds and wikinomics into his or her politics?

Hot Trends from Google

These snapshots of Google Trends are examples of the Database of Intentions. The trends discover the intentions of the human beings and their desires, needs, or wants.

As I expected the McCain story and the shooting of the spy satellite are among the top searchs. I notice that Lake Erie is back on the list again. And I have to check out what´s going on in Mehlville. The hot trends this morning:

1.	larry davis
2.	vicki iseman
3.	anthony anderson
4.	uss lake erie
5.	devon townsend
6.	talinda bentley
7.	sm 3 missile
8.	hydrazine fuel
9.	mehlville school district
10.	natasha sizow

I wrote this last night – but for whatever reason I could not publish it;  

It is fascinating with all the different things the users of Google are searching for. I guess the searchers are just as curious as I am. (But I wonder why people search for love and happiness…..) Well, did McCain have an affair with Vicki Iseman? We will see where that story will go tomorrow online and offline!  

1.	vicki iseman
2.	lunar eclipse
3.	jesus rey david alfaro
4.	solar eclipse
5.	lunar eclipse february 20 2008
6.	gene simmons sex tape
7.	le tourment vert
8.	genesseret.com
9.	eclipse tonight
10.	mccain affair

Today´s Hot Trends from Google

I have been offline for some days so I have not checked the hot trends on Google as part of my little research study. Today, the Wisconsin primary ranks high and even twice on the list but love and happiness are still on the list.   

Today’s Hot Trends   (USA)

1. so happy together   2. greek word for city   3. one is the loneliest number   4. robbie carrico   5. wisconsin primary results

6. lunar eclipse   7. i love you more today than yesterday   8. wisconsin exit polls   9. transporter 2 10. moon river

Do we need a Bill of Rights for the social web?

Living in a time where markets are conversations and wikinomics is the driving force for innovation there seems to be a contradiction between a Bill of Rights and the social web.  
The new world is described by Tapscott and Williams in their book Wikinomics as “what happens when masses of people and firms collaborate openly to drive innovation and growth in their industries” (p. 11). Collaborating is not just about talking about things but about “peer production that will harness human skill, ingenuity, and intelligence” (p. 18). The principles are openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. The traditional business model is turned up side down – a thing that Google has also proven – by opening the innovation processes to external experts or users. Companies like Linux, IBM, Lego, Procter and Gamble and others have invited users to take part in their innovation doing that the companies have to share some of their business secrets (open source).  
I guess that is what I do on an individual level using LinkedIn, Facebook, or Google. I share a lot of private information but I trust these companies not to do evil things but to make life easier for me. As Rosie the Third has pointed out I believe individuals benefit from sharing personal information on the social web. Do I and the rest of the users of the social web need legal protection from these companies as I as a citizen get protection of the government in a bill of rights like a constitution?  I do not think so. Social media like Facebook and MySpace are regulated by the trust the users donate to them. If they break the trust of the users they will lose their business. On the other hand, the debate about privacy and Google and Joseph Smarr’s “Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web” show that users are concerned. The users are increasingly asking companies to focus on who own personal information, how the personal information is shared, and how persistent access to personal information to trusted external sites.  
The companies who are harnessing “procumers” communities have learned the hard way that there are new rules of engagement (Trapschott and Williams, 2006:147). These new rules are not written in a bill of rights, but they are experiences that companies entering the new business world can use as best practice.  

The Bill of Rights for the Users of the Social Web is a blog and part of an ongoing conversation and I think that is the right place to address the challenges and the privacy of the users of the social web. The conversations are the bill of rights for the users of social web because they include rights or best practices that are important and essential to the users.

Don’t be evil

I cannot let Google go and have a few more thoughts.
Thank you, Rosie (The Third) for your comment. You are right – we have to trust Google not to do evil things. My impression is like yours that the Brin and Page are aware of the implications of their business and its impact on our society, culture, and life. Their answer to this seems to be the Google truth number one: “Don’t be evil’.  But how do we define what is evil? I remember reading the story about the shoemaker that Battelle mentions in his book “The Search” in Financial Times a few years ago on a plane to Rome. It made a huge impression. Was Google evil? Google changed some of the algorithms in the search engine and the shoemaker was not among the search results and he lost his business. The shoemaker obviously thinks Google is evil, but I guess Google just improved the search engine for the sake of millions others.  I am really fascinated by Google’s un-conventional business strategy that is also their brand. Don’t be evil and “you can be serious without a suit” are cool truths in the Google world. On the other hand it is odd for a dominating company not to be motivated by money. Is the Chinese market really only interesting because Google can disseminate information and thereby execute its mission and do good? (Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful). Is it a bottom-up approach to create democracy in Communist China? Or is it worth going there because China is the fastest growing e-market right now? No matter what Google is what Barack Obama is for politics these days: the new big thing.  To me Google is the new big thing. Of course I have used a few Google tools like Search engine and IGoogle. During the last month I have added GoogleReader to my daily life. I have just downloaded GoogleEarth (I have checked it out a few years ago but my work computer broke down…and I had to delete it again), and yeh I have seen my house north of Copenhagen. (Have not lived there for a year and a half and I am happy to see that it is still there and the woman who is renting it is taking good care of it. I know – the picture is old because the garden is green).  Now I will also add Google Trends and Zeitgeist.  The Hot Trend today is of course Valentine:

Today’s Hot Trends   (USA)

1. richard lewis   2. hallmark.com   3. free ecards   4. hoops and yoyo   5. jane fonda today show

6. hallmark e cards   7. someecards   8. some ecards   9. history of valentines day 10. dayspring        More Hot Trends »

  I will take a look at the trend once a day for the next week and see what I can get from that. But I have noticed that not one presidential candidate is listed!

Google – The Most Powerful Media Company Ever

  

Should we be afraid of Google?

For sure the competitors have been afraid for years. Microsoft’s bid on Yahoo a few weeks ago is one example. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer did not mention Google in the letter covering the hostile bid on Yahoo on February 1^st but of course it’s about beating Google. “Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition,” Ballmer wrote.  And think about the (early) search engines like Excite, Ask Jeeves, and AltaVista. I don’t even remember them! The Chinese search company Baidu.com Inc. might be the only company which is not really scared of Google – but that is of course another story of the non-democratic China and Google.  One thing is that Google is driving everyone else out of competition. Luckily the American and European authorities are looking into this very carefully for every step Google takes. Another thing is the inherent drive in Google to aggregate data about our digital lives and habits. Google’s business model is based on the trust of the users; the more information the user entrust Google with the better service Google is to deliver. Google aggregates data that includes for example the users’ search patterns, responses to ads, e-mails, calendars, contacts, and documents. Much of this used to be private and ephemeral, but today this digital identity of every user is lasting forever.  John Battele describes this phenomenon in detail in his book “The Search. How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture”. He calls it The Database of Intentions. I checked his website and found this quote about this Big Idea: “The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, supoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.” Should we then be afraid if Google is monopolizing the aggregate of our digital footprints? So far we have traded privacy for convenience, service, and power” (Battele, 2005:12). But giving too much information to one source creates a threat to the individual privacy – it is tempting for corporate and public organizations to request this useful information. This combined with the Patriot Act from the fall of 2001, private information can be handed to government authorities via a request to Internet service provider or community libraries without individuals knowing it.  Rumours say that Google works with law enforcement agencies from time to time, Google claims it doesn’t (Battele, 2005:203). Of course Google uses this information to test products. So far we can only see a few signs of what this means in the future. What happens when Google is a phone company? Plus a cable provider? Plus university? Plus eBay, Amazon, Netflix and Expedia in one big company? (Battele, 2005:250). I am a bit scared if this information ends up in the wrong hands.  But Google makes my everyday easier and actually I do not have anything to hide. So I will continue googling!!!! But I might not swift from hotmail to Gmail as I had planed to do just to make it a bit more complicated to get my aggregate data! 

The Long Tail and the markets of infinite choice

No wonder that Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail from 2006 is compared to Gladwell’s The Tipping Point on the back flap of the book. No wonder that Gladwell himself writes in Time 100 2007:  “All writers are in search of the Big Idea. A Big Idea has to matter. But you can have only one of them. Your Big Idea can’t be that there are, say, 89 Rules of Power. E=mc(2) was, technically speaking, a Big Idea. But not really, because the best  Big Ideas are also transparent. Truly Big Ideas are the rarest of phenomena, and when I first came upon Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail last year, I knew this was one.“ 

Gladwell’s description of Anderson’s big idea of The Long Tail as transparent is right on the spot. You got the point from the very beginning (page 2): “Although we still obsess over hits, they are not quite the economic force they once were. Where are those fickle consumers going instead? No single place. They are scattered to the wind as markets fragment into countless niches. The one big growth area is the Web, but it is an uncategorizable sea of million destinations, each defying in its own way the conventional logic of media and marketing.”  The Big Idea is about the success of Netflix, Google, ITunes, Rhapsody, and Amazon. Anderson has been digging through the hard data and economics of these companies (and others) and found The Long Tail.

  

The aggregate market for niche products is huge as the online music industry has experienced. The radical idea of Anderson is that you do not have to follow the hits and mass products to do business. “If the non-hits – from healthy niche products to outright misses – all together added up to a market as big as, if not bigger than, the hits market” (page 8). In other words this means that “the mass market is turning into a mass of niches” (5). Rhapsody, Netflix etc. are still getting a profit from the music or films that only have a few hits every quarter because the costs of having them in store are low.  The fun part of reading The Long Tail is that I can see parts of myself in the Long Tail. I podcast, I netflix, I shop online for niche products because it is easy and because I am a mini-connoisseurs (as Anderson describes it) just like everyone else. On the other hand, I will probably never be so tech-savy as the 16-year-old Ben that Anderson describes. Ben has grown up with broadband, MP3s, cell phones etc. He is used to the choices that I am so overwhelmed of.  

The idea of The Long Tail is fascinating. The writing is fantastic. The book is fun. That is my impression. If you have seen my Facebook today I have been reading and reading. I am not done yet. And I will get back to this topic because it is fascinating, fantastic, and fun.  

Reflections on podcasting

Thanks to Dave Winer and Adam Curry who made podcasting available so I can listen to my favourite programs on my IPod where ever I am and whenever I have time! Regularly I podcast the Sunday Morning Shows and Diane Rehm. I have to get more fun podcast in my RSS feed for my lunch break like Ask a Ninja.  I enjoyed listening and watching the podcasts for this class (4). Twit was fun and kind of informative about gadgets – even though there was no point! Or???? I also liked the discussion in Twit 130 with Schoble. I´m his new fan! I think it´s cool that he interviewed the power elite at the World Economic Forum in Davos and taped it on his cell phone. Rocketboom and Webalert are great, weird news outlets.  Podcasting is also a fantastic source to keep track of things back home. I have to admit I rarely podcast Danish news but I listen to my favourite radio talkshow Mads og Monopolet every week. Ordinary people call the Monopoly of celebrities (politicians, writers, artists etc) who solve all kinds of dilemmas. E.g. is it OK to have worms for fishing in the fridge? or your daughter tells you that she has seen pictures of her friends parents having intercourse on the family computer. What do you do? Call the parents and tell them to be aware that these pictures could easily end up in cyber space?