by gtdonovan on December 28, 2011 at 5:04 pm · Filed under banks, commerce, credit score, edges, identity, link, nodes, privacy, PrivacyPod, semantic web, sns, social graph, surveillance
From the article: “A new wave of startups is working on algorithms gathering data for banks from the web of associations on the internet known as “the social graph,” in which people are “nodes” connected to each other by “edges.” Banks are already using social media to befriend their customers, and increasingly, their customers’ friends. The specifics are still shaking out, but the gist is that eventually, social media will account for at least the tippy-top of the mountain of data banks keep on their customers.”
by gtdonovan on October 3, 2009 at 7:13 pm · Filed under censorship, DMCA, Google, governance, informationalism, methodology, Pirate Bay, semantic web
A reminder that Google doesn’t really search “the web,” just a relatively narrow slice of it. From Threat Level:
The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google’s search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site.
The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, the site’s spare landing page contains no content to speak of — just links, a logo and a search box. By law, DMCA notices are targeted to specific infringing content.
I increasingly hear the students I work with (and a good deal of the faculty) use Google as a synonym for the web, much as how Kleenex is has become another word for tissue. It’s similar with Googling and surfing (e.g. one might say “I was Googling David Bowie last night” when they were actually surfing Bowie fansites with little or no use of Google). Of course, no such equivalence exists — Google is a gated community. There is a boundary drawn between the regions of the web that Google (and other major search engines) will index, and the regions they won’t. What they don’t index, we likely don’t see.
That there is proprietary decision-making behind what information is — and is not — indexed, and that we — as a society — are increasingly loosing our ability to even recognize this indexing is a cause for great concern. Expecting Google to make their gate keeping an open and transparent process is ludicrous. Google is for profit, and dreaming up a contorted “free-market” rational for how it could be in Google’s best business interest to be transparent is a dead end. Google makes billions by controlling access to information, and they aren’t going to give that up. Why should they?
But what if there were non-profit, or even for profit, search engines that focused on identifying and indexing all the information Google (et al) isn’t? At a minimum, having such options might at least make people conscious of the fact that the web is bigger than Google suggests.
by gtdonovan on June 25, 2009 at 7:43 pm · Filed under Berners-Lee, informationalism, medium/message, quote, semantic web
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, on the “insidious” quality of vertical integration:
The Web’s infrastructure can be thought of as composed of four horizontal layers; from bottom to top, they are the transmission medium, the computer hardware, the software, and the content. … I am more concerned about companies trying to take a vertical slice through the layers than creating a monopoly in any one layer. A monopoly is more straight forward; people can see it and feel it, and consumers and regulators can “just say no.” But vertical integration — for example, between the medium and content — affects the quality of information and can be more insidious.
– Weaving the Web, p130
