Sure, this is just a fun bit of remixing, and no one is profiting from it, but isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that Creative Commons was invented to support? Why not make use of it? First I looked around on flickr and discovered that they allow you to find random images, interesting images, or CC-licensed images, but they don’t offer a way to use all three of these criteria at once. 

But I’m sure that it’s possible with the flickr API. A quick search led me to this blog post by Eszter Hargittai about this very same issue. She points to this handy tool by Mike Lietz, who used the flickr API to do this very thing – show a random photo from the Explore page that has a CC license. 

With more and more people using flickr as a source for reusable, remixable images, maybe they will start to provide more robust options for exploring and searching CC-licensed content.

Both of these reactions are misguided. Having worked in mainstream media for many years, I can tell you that there’s no concerted effort to cover certain things, or hold off on covering things. The “media” is made up of individual people who have a lot of space to fill, whether in print, on TV or online.

Sure, some of their stories are pitched by publicists, and some news is so important it demands to be covered. But the rest of the space is going to be filled with content about things that individual writers or editors are interested in. And these things will be covered at the time when the person happens to find out about them. That might be 6 months after you’ve already gotten sick of it, but to that journalist it’s new. 

Plus, once a subculture has been covered by some mainstream news outlets, it becomes legitimate fodder for everyone else. Here’s a meta-article on NBC LA about coverage of the “25 things” meme: 25 Things Articles Arriving as Fast as 25 Things Lists.

All I’m saying is that people should neither be insulted nor impressed when their pet activity is covered in the mainstream media. It just means that the right person discovered your niche at the right moment, and there was space to fill on the page. Enjoy the moment, but keep it in perspective.

There are a few other reasons that I’ve been resisting Twitter.

1. What’s going to happen to quiet contemplation? I live in New York CIty, a place where there is nearly constant sensory input. Having a peaceful moment to oneself is a rare enough occurrence. If we have no internal thoughts that stay private, will we lose the skills to develop careful thought?
2. I don’t like what this kind of thing has done to my inner monologue. I hate to admit it, but I already find myself narrating my activities in a format compliant with Facebook status updates. It annoys me, but I can’t help it.
3. I already suffer from information overload in many aspects of my life. This is not going to help.
4. I adore my friends, and I feel disappointed when I don’t have time to communicate with them as much as I’d like. But I don’t want Twitter to take the place of personal communication, and I definitely don’t want to be held responsible for failing to diligently follow their exposed inner monologues.
5. At the same time, I wonder if it’s wise to subject my twitter subscribers to my every thought. Look at me, I’m sharing! So what? There’s probably a reason why most of these thoughts are internal. The ones that are valuable usually come up again, at which point I share them, discuss them, and write about them.

Well, we’ll see. At this point I have been on Twitter less than 24 hours. Maybe I’ll love it and be converted. Maybe I’ll find it an indispensable communication tool. And maybe it will even encourage me to engage in more spontaneous, unedited thinking. If I find that to be true, I’m sure you’ll be able to read about my experiences here.

(In the meantime, here’s a link to my twitter feed, if you’re curious to see how it’s progressing. No promises about the quality of the content!)

I haven’t used Twhirl, but apparently it prompted Erick Schonfeld to speculate about Web 3.0′s noise cancelling powers over on TechCrunch. I’ve heard it said many times that one of the goals of the semantic web is to deal with complexity. There’s definitely a need for it, and that need is only going to get more urgent as the information-providing services multiply. Bring on the intelligent information-filtering services!

Now, I’m not going to name any names, but I think the people that forwarded this should be kind of ashamed. Because if you think about this for a moment, there are basically three options of what could happen when you forward this:

1. Nothing at all happens. You’ve just forward a semi-pornographic image to all your friends and colleagues.
2. Something mildly unexpected happens, and it is also pornographic. I hope it was exciting enough that it was worth having shared it, indiscriminately, will all your friends and colleagues!
3. Haven’t you seen Japanese horror movies? Or even a remake? Or even just a trailer for a remake of a Japanese horror movie? Do you really hate your friends and colleagues so much that you want them all to be killed by a demonic pornographic funwall message???

To be fair, I’ve also seen some indications that FunWall was somehow tricking people into inadvertently forwarded messages, so perhaps I should cut my contacts some slack. Who knows, maybe I even sent it out myself, without realizing it! That doesn’t really explain the people that sent it multiple times, though.

I’ve now removed that FunWall application and blocked it. There’s no real benefit to it, and there’s too great a risk of accidentally sending people something I didn’t even want to see in the first place.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t leave well enough alone. There are these user generated quizzes you can take, and when you’re done, before you’ve seen your results, it invites you to select up to 20 friends and challenge them to take the quiz too. I never understood this – why would I want to challenge my friends to beat my score before I’ve even seen what my score is? Well, now they’ve quietly added an adorable little “opt out” right above the submit button, like so: 

Of course, one of the first times I saw it, I neglected to deselect it.  So, the app sent a notification to 40 random friends, challenging them to beat my abysmal score of 60% on some ridiculous quiz about car logos!* Many of these could be people who don’t even use this particular Facebook app. Most of them are not people I would normally choose to “challenge” to a quiz. And none of them are people who I want to boast to about my ignorance of car logos!

So, while I originally thought the app was making changes to demonstrate more integrity, I now think it was just a way to get us to let our guards down while they came up with new methods of tricking us into partaking in their viral campaign for total Facebook domination. Judging from a quick survey of the people I inadvertanly spammed with my announcement of logo ignorance, it was already working. Damn.

*By the way, though I failed to recognize the logo for Subaru, I did recognize the logo for Skoda – so, I guess I’m kind of proud of that, anyway.

1. How do I create a persistent identity, across all the different web services I use? This is a question of convenience. Registering for a website that I’m going to use once is kind of ridiculous. Even if I wanted to use it again, chances are I will have forgotten my password, or even that I ever registered there in the first place. I could always register again, but that isn’t useful for me, or the service provider.
2. How do I take ownership of my personal information? This is a privacy and security question. I’m online a lot. There’s a lot of digital information about me that could be gathered up to paint an interesting picture of who I am. Ideally, I should be the person who owns that picture and controls who has access to it.

Now, I’m not saying that OpenID has solved these problems – far from it – but it has created the opportunity for people to test things out and discuss what works and what doesn’t. As far as I can tell, the first issue is being addressed more directly than the second. Still, I don’t think we’re going to have a meaningful approach to the privacy question until we get some more experience with persistent identities.

Tim Berners-Lee’s recent post on the Giant Global Graph is bound to spark more interest in and discussion of OpenID and other identity solutions. As social networking explodes, the portability of personal data becomes an issue that could define the success or failure of new players. The marriage of social networking and the semantic web seems like a natural one – if I can capture all that data about me and my relationships, independent of any given social networking site, then I can go to the sites that provide me the functionality I want, without having to recreate everything or worry whether my connections will follow me there. Having a unique, neutral ID for myself becomes a pretty important factor – my own personal URI, if we want to be technical about it.

This brings me to what I don’t like about OpenID: you sign up to get your OpenID through a service provider, someone like LiveJournal, WordPress, AOL or Vox. I say “sign up” but really, if you use one of these services (or a host of others), you already have an OpenID, you just have to start using it. The problem is that my relationship to these services could be transitory, so why would I want one of them to own my ID? I had a Vox blog once. Strictly speaking, it still exists. But I don’t want my persistent, ubiquitous online identity to be tied to it. Seems to me that it sort of defeats the purpose if you use one OpenID for a while, then switch to another for other uses, or when you tire of your old one.

As I followed this thread through the blogosphere today, I came across an interesting offering – Own-ID.com. It’s like domain forwarding for your OpenID. You create a URI, at a domain that you control, and point it to the OpenID of your choice. Authentication still takes place at the level of the OpenID provider, but I can change that provider later if I want to. I decided to give it a try with my AOL OpenID.

I should point out that I had used my AOL OpenID before and I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I used to work for a company that merged with AOL, and I wasn’t thrilled about their strong arm tactics and determination to take over the world. On the other hand, I’m familiar with their authentication system, and I feel pretty comfortable with it. Still, I did not really want to announce to the world, “My online identity is inextricably tied to AOL!” Well, except to the people reading this blog, I guess.

Anyway, seemed like a good reason to give Own-ID a try. I added an alias to my domain, pointed it to Own-ID, authenticated it using my AOL Open ID and that was it. I tried using my new OpenID to sign in to some sites. Most of them worked, a couple of them didn’t. But the ones that didn’t work with my Own-ID also didn’t work when I tried to sign in directly with my AOL OpenID, so I’m guessing there was a deeper issue going on with those sites.

It’s a pretty interesting sandbox to playing in, and I’ll be watching the developments closely.

Further reading and resources:

• OpenID Site Directory
• The problem(s) with OpenID (from a blog called The Identity Corner)
• We Are Opening the Social Graph (from Six Apart)
• Give yourself a URI (from the Decentralized Information Group blog)

Types of Facebook Status

(Note: All examples are completely made up. Any similarity to any of my Facebook buddies is purely coincidental.)

1. Cryptic – no one knows what your status means, but it shows off your creative and/or mysterious side. Ex: Rachel is indefatigable.
2. TMI – sometimes people don’t need to know what you’re up to. Ex: Rachel is getting drunk and going home with strangers.
3. Inside Joke – only a few people know what your status means, everyone else is saying “huh?” Ex: Rachel is missing blue boy, already.
4. Meta – you’re breaking down the fourth wall. Ex: Rachel is checking Facebook on the train.
5. Mood-based – describes how you’re feeling. Ex: Rachel is bored.
6. Activity-based – describes what you’re doing. Ex: Rachel is shopping.
7. Location-based – describes where you are. Ex: Rachel is in Washington.
8. Health-based – describes your physical or mental state. Ex: Rachel is coughing, again.

These types are not mutually exclusive. Someone’s status can be TMI and Activity-based. But everyone’s status fits into at least one of these categories. Want to know the breakdown of the 65 status updates of my Facebook contacts?

1. Cryptic – 12
2. TMI – 7
3. Inside Joke – 9
4. Mood – 14
5. Meta – 0 (but trust me, I’ve seen them)
6. Activity – 12
7. Location – 6
8. Health – 5

For the purpose of this tally, I only counted each status once. So, if something was an Inside Joke and Location-based, I only counted it as an Inside Joke. I also think I should point out that two (!!) of my contacts attributed their mood (deliriously happy and excited) to Project Runway. I didn’t put it in my status, but I have to agree.

Having a strong interest in Content Strategy, the semantic web, and knowledge management, I’ve thought a lot about how these elements could be put to use within an organization, to help support the goals and needs of an enterprise. But I hadn’t had a chance to discuss it with a lot of people that I work with. The summit was attended by people from all different disciplines – technology, strategy, client relations – and I got to see a wide range of perspectives on the issues.

The second day included clients, and we had a range of speakers and use case presentations. Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) gave a keynote, though in some ways it was more interesting talking to him at the cocktail party the night before. Kind of a mysterious character. He must have people talking to him all the time about their favorite topic, and they’re stunned when he doesn’t have the entire body of knowledge represented by Wikipedia at his immediate disposal.

I say this because I saw him, a couple times, respond to people with what can only be described as pride about his ignorance of some topic or other. I can only imagine that he’s developed this technique as a defensive measure against people who would otherwise say, “But how can you not know about [insert nerdy topic of interest here]??”

I’m as guilty as the next nerd, in this respect. One of my colleagues enthusiastically mentioned that I’m interested in the Semantic Web and Wales responded that he doesn’t get it, and he doses off every time he tries to read the article. I prodded him a little bit, and asked what he thinks of people using Wikipedia to extract concepts and generate ontologies. He said he thinks it’s pretty cool, since, after all, it’s the biggest collection of human knowledge ever.

I had a feeling that was about as far as it was going to go, so I told him that if the movie The Fifth Element were made today, Leeloo would have learned about human life by speed-reading Wikipedia (instead of absorbing encyclopedic video feeds). He seemed to like that idea.

You can read a more thorough account of the highlights of the Enterprise Solution Summit over on Shiv Singh’s Workplace Blog. He also gives a good account of Jimmy Wales’ keynote and the very lively panel that closed out the day.

If you haven’t seen or heard of Twine, it’s a new Semantic Web Application from Radar Networks. The project was kept secret for quite a while, but Nova Spivack unveiled it last week at Web 2.0.

From what I’ve seen, it’s a social, semantically enabled, co-brandable information collecting & sharing service. Well, that makes it sound a lot more clinical than it really should. Picture something like Facebook+Digg+del.icio.us+flickr+blog+email+??. Only it’s smarter because, while allowing you to tag the content you want to share, it also extracts concepts and makes tagging suggestions. By “co-brandable” I mean that one can create different communities, and they’ll sort of stay distinct, but your profile can cross communities and mingle. Or something like that.

Honestly, there’s probably more to it that I’m not able to express. I requested an invite to the beta on Monday, but haven’t heard back yet. I’ll post more when I do and I’m able to try it out first hand.