Group items tagged

"I used to track my work hours, and it was a miserable process. With my spreadsheet, I inadvertently transformed myself into the mean-spirited, small-minded boss I imagined I was escaping through self-employment. " This NY Times article (recapped poorly in today's SMH) epitomises Foucault's concept of biopower. It's a great run down of multitude of ways constant self tracking is already part of our lives and the psychological pros and cons. Unfortunately it doesn't give a sociopolitical analysis. This is Weber's iron cage of rationalisation in the age of the self. Self employed, self actualised, self interested man. And typically, the irrationality of rationalism means we spend much of our life recording and measuring ourselves rather than living.

Whilst not strictly about reputation, this post discusses tracking what your (your being a person or entity) fans are also fans of. This tells us alot about identity and reputation within different communities, and helps to track coalitions of interest and identity.

US court rules that tracking once in public is public information but tracking over time in public is accumulating information usually unavailable to 'the public' therefore requiring a search warrant.

From the spreadsheet and timesheet at work to the tyranny of the scales... to the constant tracking of your iphone and social media apps. Foucault's biopower.

On the subject of the private and public divide of our social media lives comes this news article of a debt collection bank employee found to have set up a fake facebook site for the purpose of tracking the bank's bad credit customers that had gone AWOL. This story is at the heart of the issue of ethics on the internet - do organisations have a right under any circumstances to parade as something they are not?

SEDO (Search Engine for Domain Offers) has partnered with VeriSign (the operator of the valuable .com and .net gTLDs, amongst other network inrastructure) to conduct a .TV auction between 1 April - 8 April 2010. Having a semiotic association with rich media content and a memorable quality, it seems likely the auction will attract bids from brand names already harnessing rich media content and looking to capitalise on new revenue streams that the expansion of gTLDs offers. Reserves will be around $5000 for each auctioned name ( a list of all names can be found at http://sedo.com/search/searchresult.php4?auctionevent=tvPremium&tracked=&partnerid=&language=us ) causing some annoyance amongst those who have already made costly .TV purchases in excess of the reserved price.

Possible opt-out for web visitors. As the article suggests if this is possible, certainly presents a challenge for marketers, as well as the value of Google Analytics!

Possible opt-out for web visitors. As the article suggests if this is possible, certainly presents a challenge for marketers, as well as the value of Google Analytics!

Possible opt-out for web visitors. As the article suggests if this is possible, certainly presents a challenge for marketers, as well as the value of Google Analytics!

Blog which keeps track of, amongst other issues,ICANN and domain name related topics. A good blog roll as well. 

A survey which was released as part of the Pacific-wide Privacy Week (last week) shows that people in New Zealand are very concerned about their Internet privacy.It is of main concern how social networks use personal information and how search engines and websites are tracking online behaviour for targeted advertising.

On Thursday April 1st, the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) - the Canadian equivalent to the SEC, put forth allegations against Agoracom.com an online investor relations forum for seeding fake conversations throughout their investor message board community. The allegations describe a scenario of more than 24,000 fraudulent posts made by 670 different accounts In the amount of time it took to create all these fake posts and different accounts, maybe they could have done something constructive? People don't seem to realise how much their actions are tracked on the internet. Beyond embarrassing, it's also becoming a grounds for legal action

SMH article that put me on to the NY Times and Kevin Kelly's Quantified Self. lightweight but local

EMI can't sell Pink Floyd singles online. Could be a precedent for other copyright/authorship cases. 

Apple announced that it will be now possible to run different apps on the iPhone at the same time and keep them constantly running in the background. This means for application providers that they coud now constantly get information on the whereabouts of their users instead of the sporadic data they got so far. Exciting new opportunities for Apple's new "iAd" that offers targeted advertising. At the same time there are privacy concerns on several fronts.

Privacy may not be completely dead with Google promising a broader future roll out of an SSL encrypted Google search meaning companies will not be able to track where traffic to a site comes from...