For those who wonder about the latest craziness coming from California, here is a summary. It’s truly shocking that California policy makers are going after Silicon Valley, since it is one of the reasons the economy hasn’t completely tanked.
Facebook is having a tough month. First, it was revealed that the company hired a PR firm to portray competitor Google in a negative light, and now it is facing an even worse scenario: government regulation.
The Social Networking Privacy Act (SB 242) introduced into the California Senate by Sen. Ellen Corbett, D-San Leandro, would force any social networking site to make new users choose their privacy settings when they register and make the default settings private except for the user’s name and city of residence.
This is a huge challenge to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg who has argued that making personal data public is the new “social norm.”
Clearly, the battle over what constitutes the appropriate social norm is up for grabs. According to Corbett, “you shouldn’t have to sign in and give up your personal information before you get to the part where you say ‘please don’t share my personal information.’”
This might sound like common sense at first, but someone should remind the senator that signing up for Facebook is voluntary. No one is required to log in or give up their data.
In addition to its stipulations about privacy settings, the bill would force social networking sites to remove any personally identifying information that a user wants to delete and would allow parents to edit their children’s Facebook profiles.
Suddenly the horror that “Mom’s on Facebook” could mean a lot more than potential embarrassment for kids. For those under 18, it might mean deletion of one’s online identity.
airfoobar writes “A four-year extension to the highly controversial Patriot Act is set to be rushed through in the coming week.” Techdirt has its usual trenchant critique. I hope it’s not unpatriotic to raise doubts about “one of the critical tools the intelligence community has to keep America safe.”
While Google won a similar lawsuit in France, down in Argentina, a court has ordered Google to censor the “suggested search” feature on searches that lead to certain sites that have been deemed offensive. It has also ordered Google to remove those sites from its index. Honestly, if it was going to order Google to remove the sites from the index anyway, I wonder why the suggested search was even an issue. Once they’re out of the index, the suggested search issue becomes meaningless.
Either way, this definitely seems to be a growing global trend of placing the liability and blame for content that people don’t like on the intermediaries. Even if we can all agree that the content is offensive and ignorant (and, hopefully, we can), is this really the most sensible response? Personally, I’ve always found that attempts to censor such content only empower those who already believe in it, because they feel like they’re revealing such an important “secret,” since others feel the need to shut it down. I tend to think that the best way to respond to bad or offensive speech is with more speech, in order to educate the ignorant.
Either way, putting the responsibility on Google seems silly. Google is just indexing the content. It’s not responsible for it. When we seek to put censorship ability on the intermediaries, it feels like we’re not dealing with the actual issues. Rather than responding to ignorant speech with more speech, it’s trying (and almost certainly failing) to sweep the ignorant and offensive speech under the rug. I greatly prefer a world in which we deal with realities (such as the fact that there are ignorant people out there), rather than hiding them and pretending such people don’t exist.
As if newspapers and magazine publishers didn’t have enough problems already, what with declining advertising revenue and the difficulty of getting readers to pay via iPad apps and paywalls, the number of competitors they face is expanding almost daily — and it’s not just aggregators like The Huffington Post. High-end group shopping service Gilt Groupe has just launched its own cooking magazine, and the New York Public Library has launched an interesting iPad app that also has a very magazine-like feel. As the tools to publish become cheaper and cheaper, brands are effectively becoming publishers in their own right.
The Gilt Groupe offering, which is called Gilt Taste, is interesting in part because it is targeted at a very specific market: namely, the high-end food afficionado. It looks and reads like a high-quality food or recipe-based magazine that might come from a regular publisher, but it is obviously designed to help promote offers from the Gilt Groupe (which recently closed a $138-million financing that values the company at $1 billion). It’s more than just a catalog, however — Gilt hired the former editor of Gourmet magazine to run it, and it clearly wants to be the equal of any traditional food magazine.
It’s not unusual to have specialty retailers or marketing groups put together a magazine to target a mailing list — American Express and other similar entities publish their own controlled-circulation publications, for example. But while Gilt Groupe has a massive mailing list of its own, filled with people who have expressed interest in buying its high-end discount items, it theoretically has even broader reach via the web, and through apps if it chooses to do that — and it doesn’t charge for them, the way some traditional publications do, because the whole thing is an ad. And it can produce as many similar publications devoted to specific niches (travel, etc.) as it wants with little increase in cost.
Even the New York Public Library has created its own digital magazine, although this happens to be a magazine filled with content about the World Fair in 1939 (other issues will be released in the future, the library said). The iPad app — which is called Biblion — was produced as a way of promoting interest in the library in an age when digital formats are taking over from print (Amazon said it is now selling more Kindle books than hardcover or paperback books combined). And as Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic notes, it is a stunning looking magazine, one that traditional publishes might want to imitate.
Evidence of the ease with which magazine-like experiences can be created by just about anyone are all around us: Flipboard is effectively a new kind of iPad magazine created from Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds, and it is starting to include traditional media content as well, such as content from Oprah Winfrey’s network and other publishers. Paper.li, which generates a kind of personalized newspaper website from your Twitter feeds, just announced some new features — including the ability to blend multiple accounts or feeds from Twitter — and the addition of Huffington Post publisher Eric Hippeau to its board.
What’s the next step in the blurring of the lines between brands and marketing and media and publishing? Mitch Joel, a social-media consultant and author, says that it could be brands hiring their own journalists and putting out their own publications — filled not with canned marketing messages but actual content. Already, Forbes magazine and other media outlets are running brand-produced content alongside their traditional editorial, and companies like SAY Media are effectively devoted to producing that kind of content or helping brands do it themselves.
So when everyone is a publisher, how do we know what to believe and what not to believe? How do we know when something is a marketing message and when it isn’t? The short answer is that we don’t. For better or worse, everything is media now.
Andrea Kuszewski, a behavior therapist, has come up with five rules of life, that if followed, will “maximize your cognitive potential”. Basically, make give your brain more wrinkles. Luckily, you guys are probably living like this already.More »
