Group items tagged

Here's a link to the debate about the Three Strikes Your Off policy that Doctorow discusses in his interview.

An interesting case of the big three search engines striking an agreement on structured markup data on web pages. If you really pay attention, you can watch the Internet evolve before your very eyes. (Internet Evolution sounds like a nice topic, huh?)

Here's a couple or articles/op-eds on the announcement of Schema.org. One posits it may be a movement toward monopolization of markup data by Google: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_schemaorg_really_a_google_land_grab.php ; the other that it's a boost for structured data: http://www.mkbergman.com/962/structured-web-gets-massive-boost/.

Thanks, Rebecca. The first document you listed made my head spin a little bit. I wasn't totally familiar with the importance of a competitor to W3C markup data (I just assumed that Google et al.'s innovation would mean progress), but the polemical suggestions of "land grabs" made me think... wow, this is something to really pay attention to. Now that I'm reading Amanda's latest posts on Google vs. Facebook in a business context, I'm wondering if the big three move to Schema.org represents something like a defensive strategy (maybe even a land grab!) against Facebook jumping into the market. Maybe social media can do a better job of searching the web for relevant documents - an operation, as I'm beginning to understand, depends so much on markup standards (it's news to me that so many different options exist). I'm not sure I really understand what's going on here... but thanks for pointing out the complexities!

This book review seems a good companion to Justin's post below on artificial intelligence/human-computer interaction. The reviewer ties three different books together under the theme of how humanity seems to be integrating itself with its digital machines - including discussion of brain-computer interaction (whoa.) and Google's search algorithms or "contouring."

The section on the ideological dissemination of information as it relates to Google is eye-opening (and really worrisome). I think when we talk about Singularity, "fear" will continue to be at the center of our discussions. For some, the biological integration with machines is just too radical to fathom, though the daily use of the Internet is now commonplace. I think we can rightly call certain technologies "external minds" (@ Mary, above) - so it's really not so much the shifting sense of what are bodies are as it is the effect - or danger - of increasingly personalized information certain technologies host that should be cause for concern.

Later in the article she talks about the same concepts as Jesse Schell, in terms of racking up points for online activity, though she draws the conclusion that your information will be sold to advertisers. Really a fascinating article!

This happened a few days ago now, but I forgot to post it until I went to talk about it in my journal this week! From the article: "Over the course of three days in June, artist Kyle McDonald captured the faces of Apple patrons in two of the company's Manhattan stores. He did this by installing a program on computers in the stores, which automatically took an image every minute." His idea was that the photos constituted an art project about what people look like when they engage with technology. The Secret Service confiscated his computers after an Apple Store employee traced where the photos were being transferred to. I thought this was interesting because it's an example of visual surveillance of people's physical presence/actions in public spaces like Greenfield talks about, rather than surveillance of their digital actions, which so much of the literature focuses on. I definitely think the artist's project constitutes a violation of the privacy of the people whose photographs he took, but I can't help thinking it's also a really fascinating project that wouldn't work if people knew their photo was being taken in that moment.