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.

The future of search is the recent I/v with Eric Schmidt, CEO of google, which outlines a bit more than the need to change your name to avoid bad teenage pix. Schmidt talks about Google being AI, the place where search has become syntax and google can tell you what you want to do next, not what you're looking for now.

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.

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

"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.

106 rigorous questions to tell me what sort of politics I believe in. This is kind of a literal interpretation of internet governance but a fun way to finish the semester! i'm about to dive in the deep end and find out what I am!

When it works the world of instant connectivity and social convergence is a wonderful place. Although I personally find the comments illustrative in a more depressing fashion. Derogatory comments, hotness debate and sudden normalising of "Welcome to the internet" where women are sex things and men are whatever they want to be.

This is like PJFenwick in 3D. Eric Gradman has great art work "The Cloud Mirror" which demonstrates many interesting social features about privacy, identity and people. Like we queue up to make idiots of ourselves and hand over our password on public computers without question. All done using Facebook Connect and Python.

I wasn't previously a plan of Craigslist per se, however, as I'm so excited about the possibilities of peer to peer open source social networking (JoinDiaspora.com) it seems the time to reflect on the addition of a social layer of governance to the internet (Lessig in Code2.0 re identity layer), or the reverse, adding internet architectures to governance, which is Alice Goldmann is describing here.

don't forget the tooltip

Kind of a scary headline after today's class. Not quite what it sounds though. .. Or is it? Google owns or controls content. Now Google owns more content. If you look at Benkler's definition of layers (via Lessig), both the physical layer and the content layer have been subject to ownership and freedom exists/ed mainly on the layer of logic or code. Google is just a giant content aggregator.

Very timely for our forthcoming privacy class. Google has been wardriving. Which makes perfect sense. Useful for business and so easy to do when they're driving by. Who owns info that we put out on the street?

I found this recent pamphlet about "MicroPublicPlaces" from situatedtechnologies.net while hunting down Latour's Dingpolitik. Arendt's theory of acting (as opposed to Heidegger's thinking) in "The Human Condition" foreshadows Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, in my opinion, and is seen here as operating in parallel with Latour's object-oriented democracry. Beginning with a critique of the current state of the public realm, they follow two trajectories: one through Hannah Arendt's "vita activa" and Bruno Latour's "dingpolitiks", and another through the history of information and computation technologies. Through the former they establish an understanding of the "public" as a space of difference that is held in common, while through the latter they formulate an infrastructure that could support such a contestable space. This leads them argue for a new public realm built on specific architectural programs (water purification plants, zoos, kindergartens, repair shops, chapels) and adaptive learning environments that initiate collaborative relations between people and machines. Their goal is to foster a manifold public through the participatory structures of MicroPublicPlaces.

2005 exhibition and edited collection curated by Bruno Latour "From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik - or How to Make Things Public" seems to be simultaneously critiquing and creating Habermas's 'bourgeois public sphere'. Amongst many, many other 'things', Dingpolitik references the work of Walter Lippmann "The Phantom Public" and John Dewey's "The Public and Its Problems". "What Is the Res of Res publica? By the German neologism Dingpolitik, we wish to designate a risky and tentative set of experiments in probing just what it could mean for political thought to turn "things" around and to become slightly more realistic than has been attempted up to now. A few years ago, computer scientists invented the marvelous expression of "object-oriented" software to describe a new way to program their computers. We wish to use this metaphor to ask the question: "What would an object-oriented democracy look like?"

Wow. Read it and weep. Tim O'Reilly is promoting this article. I haven't read anything quite so scarily propagandist since Caberet. What do I mean? (and who is this 'state'?) Courtesy of One Economy Corporation "If e-mail lives in the cloud, who owns that information?" says State Department's Alec Ross. Cloud computing is a double-edged sword in the fight for Internet freedom, a top State Department official said on Wednesday." "During a major policy speech in January, Clinton announced that Internet freedom would become a strategic priority for the United States in 2010. In March, State revived the Global Internet Freedom Task Force, a Bush administration initiative that worked to harmonize policies departmentwide on protecting free speech. The renamed NetFreedom Task Force met on March 4, when 19 telecommunications and information technology companies discussed the corporate sector's role in facilitating Internet freedom."

Open Standards vs Cross Platform - it's starting to sound like politics. Confusing. Misleading. Impractical. Constrained.

LOL. A parody downfall video of the downfall of downfall. Electronic Frontier Foundation are the authors of this piece, suggesting that maybe Apple's approach to DRM is... ironically more modern.

PJ Fenwick gives the lowdown on facebook's personalisation and what you are sharing with whom. If anyone ever wondered where the money was in the 'free' internet, then follow the moves that facebook and google are making to market all of the personal info that you so lovingly and willingly provide to your 'friends'.