Hewlett-Packard appeared to have won the bidding battle for data storage technology company 3Par on Thursday, after Dell said it would not raise its offer and was ending talks.

I spoke with John Furrier briefly before he went on the air this morning at VMworld on #theCube, and he took great joy in pointing out that he was on record predicting the outcome of the auction.

“HP wins big here, mainly because 3PAR’s technology looks is set to become an essential piece of HP’s thin provisioning segment,” said John. “The value for HP, despite the purchase price, is clear.”

HP Found the Buy-It-Now Button on 3PAR Auction [HP FTW!] is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

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Not just a salient observation about movie-watching, but a good thing to remember as an IT professional! [source]

Join us at VMWorld with #theCube.

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Google has announced that its calendar desktop syncing conduit for Outlook — Calendar Sync — is now compatible with Microsoft Outlook 2010. The blog writes that Outlook 2010 support has been one of the team’s top feature requests. Currently, only the 32-bit version of Outlook 2010 is supported, but keep your eyes on the Gmail Blog for updates.

From Google’s announcement:

Google Calendar Sync now supports Outlook 2010 — our top feature request. Outlook 2010 comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and currently only 32-bit is supported. To start syncing your calendar with Outlook 2010, download Google Calendar Sync version 0.9.3.6. If you’re already using Google Calendar Sync, you’ll still need to download and install this new version in order to be able to sync with Outlook 2010. If you need help, take a look at our getting started guide.

This is something I’ve looked for a good solution to for quite some time. As an active member of the 7-10% of the smartphone using public on Windows Mobile 6, I’ve had a great deal of difficulty synchronizing my calendar and inboxes with the Google half of my online persona, literally having to hack together solutions. In terms of keeping my calendars in sync with one another, there’s not much of a better solution than using Google Calendar as my cloud calendar, but making that talk to my Windows Mobile 6 phone is highly problematic.

I’m happy Google has solved this problem.

GMail Adds Support for Office 2010 and Windows Mobile 6 is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

1 Comments

Machida says: August 22, 2010 1:52 pm I have been a GMAIL and MSOffice user most of my life but honestly I don't see the benefit of these two application integrating for the good of the users.  I think that they are better off without each other. Reply

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The number of citations a paper receives is generally thought to be a good and relatively objective measure of its significance and impact.

Nature news reports on research by Gregory Webster that analyzed the 53,894 articles and review articles published in Science between 1901 and 2000.

“There is a ridiculously strong relationship between the number of citations a paper receives and its number of references,” Gregory Webster, the psychologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville who conducted the research, told Nature. “If you want to get more cited, the answer could be to cite more people.”

The advice the study supports is “cite and you shall be cited”.

It’s generally good advice, albeit somewhat commonsense in my experience. Part of the power of the hypertext format in general and the platform of blogging and the web in specificity, is that one is able to pack a great deal more authority into one’s words with proper (if not liberal) usage of hyperlinked citations.

There’s power in that, and for those who have an audience that reads them because of their authority (either real or perceived), the more sources you base your conclusion off of, the more likely it is that people are to believe your words and share your writings.  This is because people perceive either a keen sense of analysis on your part (because you’re finding commonalities and consensus amongst a broad set of sometimes disparate data sets), or that they’re perceiving a consensus with your viewpoint due to a mountain of data that agrees with you.

How to Use This Technique to Game People’s Opinions

I’ve always been a slightly argumentative sort online.  At times, I feel a bit like the internet’s ombudsman, since the type of stories that often move me to write passionately are when I spot influential folks taking absurd stances on the issues. If you read my posts often, you’re probably well aware of this.

This tendency of mine goes back to when I first started writing for the public – the first instance my opinionated words appeared before more than just my teachers was when I wrote an editorial that rebutted something written in my high school newspaper. The original piece cited a number of studies and personal anecdotes that pegged the Internet as nothing more than a place for stalkers and creeps. My rebuttal relied on debunking the underlying studies used to support her position and the sensationalistic spin she put on them.

Similarly, and on a more grander scope, back in 2005 I wrote a sequence of posts on my personal blog thoroughly debunking a major news story at the time carried by CNN and most of the major newswires that allegedly “conclusively proved that global warming was irrefutable, and causing the drastic uptick in hurricanes.”

Over a series of posts, I dissected the individual sources for that story, done at MIT, and it turned out that the person compiling the research paper had done no actual original research, and simply had compiled numbers from other existing studies, many of which had not done the original research themselves.  It took many layers of clicking on hyperlinks at the bottom of PDF files to find the original studies, which mostly turned out to be funded by lobbyist groups looking to increase funding from congress to their non-profit eco-protection rackets.

The MIT study, however, received mainstream coverage, and was used throughout the 2006 election cycle by folks from both sides of the political aisle as a reason to increase funding to ecology initiatives aimed at reducing man-made global warming.

Between 2004 and 2007, I did a number of articles that conclusively debunked a number of similar studies that were done that were generally intended to debunk the effectiveness of abstinence-based educational curriculum. At the time, there were no independent third party studies done that conclusively showed that abstinence-based education was generally ineffective (though some studies have come out since then that put these educational programs’ effectiveness in question).

The studies I reviewed all fit the same profile: they cited dozens and dozens of studies done by organizations with neutral sounding names, the data they cited all supported a conclusion the researcher seemed to have held before his study began, the organizations with neutral sounding names all had funding from decidedly biased organizations, and all the final studies were commonly cited by mainstream media at the time as “incontrovertible.”

At the time, my aim in profiling these studies was to show the fallibility of the mainstream media in propagating bad information. Here we are in the social media age, and still the same things keep happening. Wasn’t it just a week ago we were all taken in by a few hoaxters and a pretty face who pretended to quit her job with a whiteboard?

People Generally Don’t Click on Links

This is most easily evidenced by Twitter users’ bit.ly logs. Scarce are there the bit.ly logs that show as many click-throughs as there are retweets or Twitter followers. Most people don’t even read the article, but of those who do, fewer still will go over every link to its original source to divine the possible bias inherent in that author or researcher.

Hence it’s pretty easy to game people’s brains by “faking” authority in this manner.

Fortunately, I think this is a problem that a combination of social media evolution and technology can solve.

Everyone, Even the Mainstream, Gets More Sophisticated with Experience

As time progresses, everyone on the web gets more sophisticated.  What passed for explosively viral ten years ago (like the Star Wars kid) is passé these days. Certainly, oddly mundane things continue to go viral (“Double Rainbows” spring immediately to mind), but thanks to a more savvy and populous online denizenry, incorrect rumors often are rebutted and disproved in hours or minutes, rather than allowed to go uncorrected for days or even in perpetuity.

One of the reasons I think that many online reputation systems fail at the outset is that they don’t do as good of a job at weeding out disreputable or incorrect information than our own brains.  As neural scientists tell us, if equated to modern computing, the brain is best at pattern matching, which is why we learn from better from experience than rote memorization.

Thus the technologies we use and the algorithms we rely on to sort our news gradually improve over time.  If someone in our social network of friends has a habit of sharing out bad information, we naturally tend to either mentally discount data fed to us from that person, or remove them from our network completely. If a source of information habitually gives us information we find to be negatively biased or fundamentally flawed on a consistent basis, we have the ability in many of our tools to filter that source out of our views completely, and the human tendency is to do so.

I’m somewhat of an optimist when it comes to these things, admittedly, but one that’s focused on reality. As someone who lives in the torrential river of news online, I’ve noticed a definite shift in the currents when it comes to misinformation and disinformation over the last ten years. Un-refuted disinformation was quite commonplace in the mainstream media landscape, with only a precious few dissenting voices. These days, it’s hard to find anyone putting out slightly off-base information, let alone disinformation, that goes uncorrected.

How to Game the Human Brain: Copious Citations is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

1 Comments

Machida says: August 17, 2010 2:34 am I thought that we are going to game our ownselves and not someone's mind. I agree with putting a lot of links in your blog post since it will create an impression that you are really good of what you do and people might think that you are expert when it comes to that specific subject. Besides putting more links on your article looks better than no link at all to back up you article. Reply

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The topic he brings up is something he’s termed the “impending social crash,” and rather than paraphrase his words, I’ll directly quote him:

Old days: I’d see you at a family event. We’d talk. I’d send a letter or call you some time after that. We’d not see each other for months.
New days: I post something on Facebook or Twitter. You see it. I don’t say something directly TO you, but you remember that I’m still out there. You realize that it’s been a while since we talked directly.

Human Math

• If I talk to 100 people on twitter for 6 minutes each, that’s 10 hours.
• If I respond personally to 120 of the 600 or so emails and contacts I get a day, that’s 2 hours.
• If I call 10 people for six minutes each to “catch up,” that’s another hour.

100 small Twitter conversations.
120 emails.
10 phone calls.

13 hours.

That’s not work. That’s not necessarily business (though touch and networking aids business). That’s just contact.

13 hours a day on just that.

And that’s just 100 or so people. That’s not the 146,000 Twitter followers, the 58,000 RSS subscribers, the 11,000 LinkedIn connections, the 4550 Facebook friends, that I have right now.

That’s 100 or so people.

Is a Social Crash Coming?

We’re going to have to start contenting ourselves with more “ambient connectivity.” I think that lots of us already do understand and accept this. I believe that the frequency of touch requirements of the hyperconnected are much lower than the average human out there.

Is there a much more painful crash before us? A social crash?

It’s important to note exactly what perspective Chris Brogan writes this commentary from.  Most of you reading my words now are probably quite aware of who the man is, but for the two or three of you who aren’t, Chris is one of the guys who’s literally written the book on how to apply social media to the workplace, and consults regularly for Fortune 100-style companies. Chris, along with folks like Dave Winer, Adam Curry, John Furrier and myself, made his bones early on in the podcasting movement.

The take-a-way here is that not only is Chris an early adopter, like many of us who’ve been on the cusp of technology innovation, he’s inundated with communications requests from fans, readers, listeners, friends, business contacts, and co-workers. At that level of success, one really has to put serious thought into what their priorities are, how much of their own dogfood they can realistically eat, and how to best manage their time to achieve both short and long-term goals.

As an early adopter preaching practical application of the tools he evangelizes, he’s caught in-between use cases as well. On the one hand he’s used tools like Twitter since there were only a handful of users, and he can probably remember a day when the volume of flow that went through his timeline was manageable via SMS or a GTalk chat window. On the other hand, though, he now has far too many people in his social graph to ever reclaim that “personal touch” aspect to any service he’s using that made him fall in love with them in the first place.

It’s Clear that Social Media Scales, but Not Infinitely So

If you look at the time required for various forms of conversation, it’s clear that as you move up the scale of social media and Web 2.0 style tools, you’re improving your ability to connect with more people in less time. 

- A Twitter conversation is succinct, quick, and in many cases doesn’t take a full six minutes.  Sometimes an occasional retweet is enough to signal to someone that they’re still on your radar. Sometimes a quick several minute back and forth is required to accomplish the thrust of the communication.

- An email conversation generally takes more time to hold up, but it definitely beats oral communication in terms of it’s ability to communicate the same thing to a medium sized group of people, or coordinate specific details that shouldn’t be full-on publicly available.

- Productivity tools such as collaborative calendaring (or even automation tools like Tungle or Aardvark) aid in the communication process.

- While it almost seems pedestrian in its antiquity, telepresence tools like video (or even strictly audio) conferencing tools (be they one to one or many to many) provide a times savings over the old methods of oral communication (which is to say, walking to someone’s physical location and talking to them).

- To that end, video conferencing, in many cases, provides a distinct advantage in communication since much of what we can communicate to others may require many strictly audio-only words, but can be reduced to many less words when supplemented by facial and hand gestures.

When looked at in the broader context of the evolution of communication, it’s clear that we’re on a curve that probably has some definable law that’s a cousin to Moore’s Law of transistor growth in computing devices.

To that end, there’s been a lot of charting of the raw and underlying technologies along logarithmic charts showing how communications technology allow an ever increasing amount of throughput, but I’ve yet to find anyone research and chart how these technologies allow us as humans to manage more connections to more people. I’d tentatively posit, though, that as our communications technologies have been innovated and iterated upon, our ability to maintain communicative relationships with more and more people has increased if not logarithmically, then by increasingly large multiples. In other words, we may not be far enough along the knee of the curve to determine how much further we can go.

What Needs to be Innovated Before We Leap Forward, Again?

Anything said here is purely speculative, of course, but it’s something I’ve spent a lot of time pondering and writing about here at SiliconANGLE.

What we as early adopters have grown accustomed to is interacting with the “real time feed,” such that it is. For quite some time, I’ve taken the attitude that the feeds and real time data we create by interacting with blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the rest certainly has a limited amount of value when used directly, but has a great deal more value when looked at streams and pools of data to be applied else wise.

For example, take the technology application at work with the Siri application that was recently sold to Apple. Strictly speaking, it isn’t traditionally defined communication. Instead of speaking to other people, you’re speaking to a machine. When you’re speaking to that machine, it’s pulling together data from public data streams, private services and social media feeds to accomplish the tasks you speak to it.

Siri is truly a leap forward in that respect. Another leap forward on the software side is the the iPad application that recently came out called Flipboard. The first thing that strikes anyone who has any experience with Flipboard is the aesthetic quality with which it presents web-based content. Perhaps even more interesting than that is that it employs algorithms on your social graph to come up with a way of presenting the news that’s relevant to you as judged by the people you know.

These two are just examples of how advancements in software improve communication in a way that saves time. To get the same benefit you’d get from Flipboard, you’d be stuck for most of your day scanning your various social feeds for relevant content, using time and mental energy constructing raw filters to determine what you do and don’t find interesting. Having your social graph and algorithm do this for you lets you use your time more efficiently, engaging with the content (and it’s producers), rather than simply hunting for it.

On the hardware side, we’ve seen amazing advances in the last three or four years in the field of mobile computing. We’re now able to consume (and interact) content and producers on the go in a myriad of ways that were previously impossible. We have e-Readers, mobile phones, tablets, netbooks and laptops, whereas a scant decade ago, most of us were limited to one fairly large desktop machine per household.

Those of us who live on the bleeding edge know that as amazing as these new technologies are, they aren’t particularly conducive to efficient two way communication. That’s why trends in information display and input devices are particularly interesting.

Enabling ubiquitous augmented reality and digital input further lowers the barrier to communication while simultaneously allowing us more “ambient awareness” and low-impact communications channels.

Will Communications Convergence Stay Ahead of Technology Adoption?

The question of “social media crash” that Chris Brogan originally brought up suddenly takes on a new meaning in this context. He’s asking as to whether we’re all headed for inevitable “social media crash.”

There are several factors to consider when answering that question. I think it’s clear that highly-connected early adopters live in a constant state of social media implosion. For folks like Chris and I, there is far too much going on in our social spheres for us to pay attention to all of it. We’ve all developed coping mechanism on how to deal with it, whether it’s a heavy reliance on automation and complex tools (my preferred method), or a minimalist approach like Jason Kownacki recently suggested with his #ReadItAll Challenge.

Most users of social media don’t need these coping mechanisms, at least yet. I think the path that early adopters have paved is the eventual future for most of the web’s users.  Not only do we as users increasingly create scads of data in our wake, but our devices are increasingly doing the same. At some point in the future, it’ll be impossible not to use the real time web, if not directly than by abstraction.

Don’t believe me? Look to the past – remember when RSS was just a good idea, but we were told it would “never going to see mainstream adoption?”

Look around you – it’s impossible to go a day on the web to use a service that either serves up RSS directly or relies on RSS as a crucial component to its operation. Streams of standardized real time data will similarly form another central backbone to the way we all communicate. And just like most people don’t understand or care how streams of RSS data make it into their Facebook feed, we’ll similarly not care in the future how it is our Skin Display Unit finds out how to tell us that our friends are nearby and what they are doing, just that it doesn’t crash on a regular basis and that it stays connected with five nines of uptime.

Will these tools arrive ahead of the “impending social crash?” Will adoption of current tools spread quicker than innovations on top of them are made? I’d prefer to think not, but then I’m an optimist when it comes to these things.

[Editor’s Note: Some photo credits to Dan Patterson. –mrh]

Ambient Connectivity and the “Impending Social Crash” is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

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Sean and I have been particularly attuned to significant pricing changes in the digital reader markets because we’ve long held that the first organization to get a device priced close to the $100 mark will win. I’ve been spending the last hour or so searching my video archives for proof that we’ve said this publicly, but since so much of what Sean and I were saying publicly at the time was on Mashable (and their search functionality leaves something to be desired), I’ve only just now found the video I was looking for (turned out, it was on my personal blog).

None-the-less, something I’ve always contended is that the current business model for eBook readers is flawed, and certainly the price-point for the Kindle and other eBook readers is far outside the realm of what will make it what the mainstream would consider as a “best-selling product.”

From my post:

… a couple of days ago I was searching for a cheap used Kindle 1.0.  I did a Google product search for a Kindle priced between $100 and $200, and all I found were Kindle books priced in that same range.

Where are my savings?  What’s my incentive for this? The equipment is expensive, the books are expensive – why do I want this?

I say this as someone who’s worked on creating budget hardware and eInk technology before.  This is something that can be done a whole lot cheaper.  Many things need to change before the Kindle will become the cultural revolution that most people seem to be expecting.

Now that the Kindle has dropped it’s prices and sold out as a product, everyone has suddenly remembered the rules of supply and demand and how all that works.

Given that I was right about the price-point, I thought I’d take another opportunity to flog my thoughts on eReader business models.

It’s been widely publicised by various pundits that the cost of printing and distributing dead-tree versions of publications is far more expensive than paying the actual talent that puts the paper together. Furthermore, when the eReader market was more of a notion than a reality, several of us did the math that it would be more economical for publications to simply buy their long time or in-some-sort-of-long-term-contract readers an eBook reader than continue to deliver to them a physical version.

While I’m thrilled that the prices of these devices are finally getting to where they need to be, I don’t think the move goes far enough.

If Amazon (or some other eBook Reader manufacturer) really wants to move the needle, they need to be approaching publications on a subsidized version of the product specifically designed (but not limited to) the consumption of magazine publications.

Imagine That: Price Something Affordably, and it Sells! is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

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Robert Scoble just put out a thought-provoking video on his personal blog detailing the frightening bi-polar personality of US immigration policy.

The three participants of note in the discussion Robert chronicles are Aye Moah, a brilliant Burmese UX designer who came to America based purely on her ability to do maths, Ronald Mannak, a European tech entrepreneur, and Chamillionaire, an American rapper-come-entrepreneur.

[Aye] grew up in one of the poorest countries on earth. She shouldn’t have many opportunities. Yet here she was, talking with me at a Silicon Valley party after the Always On conference. The route she took? She went to MIT. How did she get in? Was one of the top-scoring students in Burma. One of the top 10, in fact. Then she scored a perfect 800 on the SAT. That’s a cool story alone.

Ronald Mannak is an entrepreneur who lost everything he owned. In Holland if your company fails and you’ve taken venture capital you are personally liable for the losses. So, Ronald owes the Dutch government $200,000 and lost everything, even his fridge, he told us.

Robert uses the three individuals to compare and contrast the three cultures’ approach to entrepreneurship and immigration. Obviously, there are pockets of the United states that want to be much more liberal towards our federal immigration policy, and certain areas (like, quite famously at the moment, Arizona) that are doing all they can to make sure those who aren’t American feel as unwelcome as possible.

As Aye notes, it’s certainly working.

“I flew in from Boston, and stopped over in Phoenix today,” Aye explained. “Today is when the law the everyone has been talking about went into effect, and it was kind of freaky. Everyone was holding blue passports out. I lost my boarding pass, and I had to go get a new one. I wondered if I was going to run into trouble because I can’t carry an American passport. It’s not something that you freak out about, but it’s a tense undercurrent that you feel.”

The law she notes is Arizona Senate Bill 1070, which amongst many other things, increases the lattitude with which law enforcement officials can operate when it comes to enforcement of immigration status. The state’s new law allows law enforcement officials to literally detain random citizens for no other reason than to check the status of their citizenship, violating obvious consititutional rights in the process.

Unlike the instance of the PATRIOT ACT’s instances of civil liberty violations, it’s taken no time at all for documented isntances of flouting the law to surface, as was documented by the guys behind CheckpointUSA.

On November 26th, I was stopped & seized for about the 50th time since the beginning of 2008. The seizure took place at an internal suspicionless Homeland Security checkpoint along Southern Arizona's SR86 near mile post 146. SR86 is an East-West public highway located over 40 miles North of the border and never intersects the border at any point.

During the stop, Agent Gilmore admitted he knew who I was & all three agents told me I wasn't being detained. Nonetheless, these facts didn't stop the agents from refusing to allow me to go about my lawful business, choosing instead to escalate the encounter by requesting that I move to secondary inspection for more intensive scrutiny absent my consent or any articuable suspicion.

Arizona can hardly be blamed for it’s somewhat draconian actions. The state capital, Phoenix Arizona, has been famously dubbed the ‘kidnapping capitol of America,’ and has estimated to have the second highest number of kidnappings, per capita, than any other city on the planet. There is some dispute amongst immigration apologists as to whether that’s a valid claim to make (or if that fact is even knowable, given how much crime goes unreported in Phoenix and other contenders for that ‘prize’), but these quibbles miss the point: American sovereignty and the very fabric of society is eroding in some US border states. Justice, law and order are increasingly difficult to maintain in many border towns not limited to Arizona, but notably California and Texas as well.

Essentially, border towns are all being expected to fill the void in the lack of federal intervention in the United States’ endemic illegal immigration crisis. The insane state of affairs at the federal level are creating insane (and more often than not, unconstitutional) solutions at the state level, all of which serve to create more and more hostile environments for young and brilliant entrepreneurs in and out of the tech sector.

On the one hand, we’re inviting the world (by virtue of our student visa programs) to come on by and learn (often for free) in our institutions of higher education, but in general don’t invite them to stick around after they get their diplomas to contribute to our economy (by virtue of our negligent policies on immigration and work visas).

US Government Personified, That’s Almost Textbook Bi-Polar

How does one go about solving the problem of immigration?

That’s the billion peso question. Our representatives from bottom to the top seem content to continue to kick the issue around as nothing more than a political football, which has been the problem for the last couple decades.  While our leaders play semantics with issues like amnesty, ten foot fences (and eleven foot ladders), The Minute Men and whatnot.

Meanwhile, the most legitimate solutions I’ve heard proposed come from what in recent years have been the most marginalized segments of the US political spectrum: the libertarians.

Rather than start quoting something from Rand or Ron Paul here, I’ll turn to a discussion started by one of the more respected voices in libertarian ideology – the CATO Institute.

They’ve had a fairly constant message as long as I can remember on the issue of immigration, and when pondered logically, their solutions tend to make the most amount of sense, particularly on an issue that tends to be dominated by raw emotion and business interests on both sides of the table.

In their book entitled Cato Handbook for Policymakers, 7th Edition, they go into great detail in the chapter on immigration as to what the solution would be (specifically with regard to guest worker programs and the H1B Visa), but boil their solution down to four bullet points.

- Expand current legal immigration quotas, especially for employment-based visas;

- Repeal the arbitrary and restrictive cap on H1-B visas for highly skilled workers;

- Create a temporary worker program for lower-skilled workers to meet long-term labor demand and reduce incentives for illegal immigration; and

- Refocus border-control resources to keep criminals and terrorists out of the country.

These four points address nearly every issue relevant to the economic and security concerns about illegal immigration. The whole problem the the United States immigration problem stems from the fact that demand for a certain thing, that is citizenship status in the United States, far exceeds supply as mandated by the federal government.

The vast majority of those who would emigrate to the States are law abiding and potentially productive members of society. Because we don’t allow them in on a permanent or legal basis, our government creates a black market for residency as well as second and even third class citizens. Consequently, those that break the law and emigrate illegally are forced to equal footing with those with truly malevolent intent.

Unalienable Versus Inalienable: Smackdown at the Continental Congress

Within the annals of US history, there are two terms which are quite similar, but distinctly different – the concepts of unalienable rights and inalienable rights.

Unalienable: incapable of being alienated, that is, sold and transferred." Black's Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, page 1523

Inalienable rights: Rights which are not capable of being surrendered or transferred without the consent of the one possessing such rights. Morrison v. State, Mo. App., 252 S.W.2d 97, 101

I mention this because in the most prominent of the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, the second paragraph opens with the following sentence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

To that end, we can assume that the founding fathers (as well as most of America who cares to interpret constitutional intent) believe that while the United States has no jurisdiction to enforce the Bill of Rights to citizens of foreign powers, at our core we believe that all of humanity is entitled to basic human rights. That means it doesn’t matter what side of an arbitrarily drawn political line in the sand you were born – the theory is that if we have you in our jurisdiction, we believe you have rights that cannot be taken away or surrendered.

The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness isn’t something you can give up, like the right to remain silent.  It isn’t something that can be taken away  or curtailed for bad behavior or mental disorder, like the right to bear arms.

It’s something you’re born with, and ostensibly something we as a country are eager to protect so long as you get within our jurisdiction at your earliest convenience.

Our societal dysfunction on the issue and political unwillingness to solve the root of the problem creates classes of citizens in this country that don’t have these rights in a practical sense. We’re all aware, thanks to stand-up comedy’s ready tropes about migrant workers, that these second class citizens sell us our fruit and mow our lawns. Increasingly, though, these sub-citizens are also responsible for our information infrastructure – our databases, our networks, our algorithms.

It’s not wise to continue to send the message to these people that they’re unwelcome here – because eventually they might all take the hint and start creating that infrastructure and intellectual property elsewhere while the United States gets left in the dust.

Unalienable Rights and the Psychological Dysfunction of US Immigration Policy is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

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That doesn’t sound particularly impressive until you actually see it in action. Take a gander.

The functionality is soon to be available in a few other clients as well, according to various comments I’ve read about it today. Tweetdeck, so far, has the only demonstration up on the web of what it looks like.

If you want in on this, you’ll need to sign into the site with your Tweetdeck username and password and get on the “private beta whitelist.”

Tweetdeck to Go True Realtime is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

1 Comments

Joel Richman says: July 29, 2010 1:53 pm That's a migraine waiting to happen. I bailed off of TD for Hootsuite. Actually has more functionality and I can get it anywhere without lugging around my black box. Reply

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There’s nothing like bringing back a classic, something that Democrat senators Jay Rockefeller and John Kerry are trying this week at online privacy hearings this week in the Senate.

I almost missed the news, but caught the recap this morning from Frank Reed over at Marketing Pilgrim:

Don’t think that just because Facebook has managed to not completely trample people’s privacy as of late that there is not more activity around the subject. In fact, forces in Washington, this time the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), are speaking at ‘hearings’ that are looking into this issue right now with talk of a “do not track” list. This is not the first time the subject has been raised (2007 it got some attention) but in light of recent online privacy ‘dust-ups’, this idea may have a real chance to develop.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) both expressed concern that privacy policies weren’t giving Web users enough useful information about online ad practices.

Rockefeller proposed that some companies were burying too much information in lengthy documents that consumers don’t read. “Some would say the fine print is there and it’s not our fault you didn’t read it,” he said, adding, “I say, that’s a 19th-century mentality.”

Kerry added that he didn’t know that consumers understood how companies use data. “I’m not sure that there’s knowledge in the caveat emptor component of this,” he said.

Sen. Rockefeller just tossed the advertising business so far into the past regarding their practices that the 20th century was ignored. I guess he made his point.

I haven’t covered this topic in depth since my early days at Mashable.

My analysis now is more or less the same as it was then:

There are very real privacy concerns with regards to user data, especially with recent developments in advertising relationships with Facebook and Microsoft, not to mention the ever advancing juggernaut of the Google data acquisition machine.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Action, and the Consumer Federation of America as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are among the privacy advocates proposing for the do-not-track list. The groups are suggesting that there be a requirement that advertisers, as a part of their online ads, give those that they advertise to the details of what they intend to track about them.

It’s as if no one thought about the feasibility of enforcing restrictions on advertising companies, or how, for instance, you’d initiate an agreement to share demographic information with a user downloading an advertising supported podcast. In a world where these privacy advocates have their way, am I going to be inundated with privacy policy pop-ups every time I navigate to a new domain?

It’s simply not feasible for something like this to be executed, and even if it were, would we want the government in charge of enforcing compliance?

Aside from my Geico Caveman reference in my Mashable post, most of what I said stands the test of time. So little has changed. EPIC and CDD are still pushing for ridiculous restrictions on digital business, the FTC still doesn’t seem to understand how the web works, and big government is pushing for more digital regulation to protect us all from ourselves.

The bottom line is that behavioral ad networks sound more scary than they are in practice, and regulating the fundamentals of that business would knee-cap a large swath of the web. It should go without saying that this is a bad thing.

The FTC Ponders the Do-Not-Track Registry … Three Years Later is a post from: SiliconANGLE Subcribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter.

3 Comments

The Time for Foursquare Marketing Is… Later? [STUDY] | inetdirectories.info says: July 29, 2010 1:37 pm [...] Read more on SiliconANGLE [...] Reply

Kristen Nicole says: July 29, 2010 2:51 pm Lol. Good to know someone's still working on it. Reply

The FTC Ponders the Do-Not-Track Registry … Three Years Later | Latest News, News Today, News Online, Live News, Daily News, World News, Latest World News, Live World News, Online World News, Headlines Today, World News Sites says: August 4, 2010 12:18 am [...] The FTC Ponders the Do-Not-Track Registry … Three Years Later There’s nothing like bringing back a classic, something that Democrat senators Jay Rockefeller and John Kerry are trying this week at online privacy hearings this week in the Senate. I almost missed the news, but caught the recap this morning from Frank Reed over at Marketing Pilgrim: Don’t think that just because Facebook has managed to [...] The FTC Ponders the Do-Not-Track Registry … Three … Read more on SiliconANGLE [...] Reply

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