Picture by Andrew Turner's presentation "Drupal and the Geospatial Web"

Internet of Things

A rather old concept is becoming increasingly real thanks to RFID technology. I have previously blogged about its potential and consequences for development. RFID chips can be attached as stickers to objects, which then can disclose or collect information.
Over at the ReadWritewWeb blog there is a rather funny example of a social tennis racket, which could tell its story – where, with who and how it was played – with the help of such technology.
The logistic sector is using these technologies on a wide scale to track their packages, and soon millions of more objects will be connected to the Internet in the same way.

Location based information

Location based services have been around for a while, but it is lately when they are actually being tacked up. With services such as Foursquare or Gwozilla we not only send our location, but lots of additional information that is around the location. This is an amazing business concept, where users collect “for free” huge piles of information with all sorts of information:

• Location of bars, restaurants, shops, clubs
• An evaluation when a user sends statuses and comments
• Massive social profiles of movements and behaviors.

No surprise Twitter and Facebook have started to send their users updates from specific locations. I wrote a while ago about how you can see, on the example of Google Buzz, that such services are used around the world even in countries you would not imagine.

GPS is included in more and more devices, such as cars, mobile phones, bicycles and even washing powder (!).

World of sensors

Another approach to get huge amounts of data is through sensors, which measure all sorts of factors from our environment. The idea is that soon low-cost sensors will be available, for example, to measure noise, air quality or one’s physical condition. Such sensors can also be RFID chips, but can go even further. These sensors could be included in a watch or mobile phone; this way millions of people can deliver real time information. Sounds like science fiction, but there are already some crowdsourcing projects “using humans as sensors“. Citypulse wants to measure the air quality though the contributions from pedestrians.  And with a smart phone it is easy to join a project to measure the noise level worldwide.

The senseable city lab from MIT using such methods. For example, the “Trash Track” project, where 3000 sensors were added to trash bags to analyze the different ways pieces of trash are taken through the disposal chain.

Implications

The list can be easily extended; please add some further methods in the comment section. But why have I written this list? Because I want to describe how pervasive the process has gone and that it has had far reaching consequences, which not everybody is aware of.

First, positively, these means extend the richness of data on the Internet available. Second, it can offer more and better information faster. Third, thanks to open source and fairly cheap web services these tools become available for many more people. And fourth, if it is offered as open data to everyone, it can help create useful web services. I will elaborate further on user scenarios in upcoming posts.

However, I also have a lot of concerns and questions. What about ownership, often the lines blur. Who owns the data and to which I as an individual control the information about me anymore? Where does this data collection lead to in a few years time, when companies like Foursquare with millions of social profile data are in complete different hands? Do we really need to digitize everything that is possibly modifiable?

Michael Gurstein has a great post, in which he expresses concerns that open data might only help the people, who already have an information advantage (e.g. access, research skills).

What is the sense of collecting all this huge amounts of data? Or is a lot of that data collection nonsense, because it limits or has even little or no meaningfulness? I will elaborate further on these questions in my next posts.

First part of the post.

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There are more than one billion people, who are members of some sort of social network website. But, will these websites be the future platforms, where we can engage to create social networks? I doubt it. The future will go back to your address book, where it has always been.

Photo by Zheem from Flickr (CC)

Address book

An address book can combine contact details and much more information people add to it. Now, imagine these contacts are updated constantly adding new information available depending on each person and the social network they belong to. The HTC android driven mobile phone has already got that function. It connects you to certain social network websites and matches them to your address book. So, it really does not matter what website is behind it, you simply get an overview or stream of information of your friends’s and colleagues’s activities at various websites under each (online active) contact in your address book:

Own control vs. Facebook control

Photo by laihiu from Flickr (CC)

Now, the best way to decide what is public or private and who shall see what, would be if you have complete control over your information. In the case of Facebook, they want to do that job for you and that is the problem. If one looks at the continuous privacy issues of Facebook, it is about time that information gets protected from companies, which change their terms of services every second day (e.g. Apple).

Steve Boyd writes: “One simple observation is that users will not be able to get the privacy they want (or think they already have, or at least had in the past) in today’s Facebook.” and he concludes that Facebook, therefore, is not the future.

However, the answer of many social network websites is to collect as much personal information to become your personal address book. The Facebook friend finder stores all the information forever and therefore comes up with intriguing friend suggestions.

Reality check

The problem is that there is not really a serious initiative to work on an alternative open system, where users could control their data and give social networks access to the information they want to share. Still, in a call for a Facebook alternative, people donated in short time a hundred thousand dollars.

Another, albeit failed and disappointing, attempt was Open Social, initiated by Google about two years ago. The good news, however, is that even Facebook will have difficulties to be the decisive player. That might (hopefully) be history soon.

No related posts.

The example of digital face recognition

Google has a face recognition feature already built in their Goggles software for mobile phones, but luckily it is so far blocked. But for how long? Imagine you sit in a cafe and make a photo of a person and get all available information from that person – forum entries, work life, etc. To be fair, they will also launch soon a translation function, where you can take a photo of a menu in a restaurant with your mobile phone and it will be translated within minutes.  A typical example of this dilemma: Practical technology achievements, but also huge consequences for privacy.

No related posts.

The German vs. the British websphere

Well, a week after attending both, the Social Innovation Camp (sicamp08) and re-publica, I finally post my reflections on these events. It was great to visit these two events, listen to numerous interesting presentations at re-publica, and grasp the contagious spirit of social innovation in London. There were interesting differences and similarities on discussions in these two events, but I will just extend on some thoughts I had:

• There are great projects regarding Edemocracy in both countries, which allow citizens to participate or influence politics and to give more transparency. There is even a German-British cooperation called e-participation.net. On a workshop, full of interesting presentations about this topic, Christoph Dowe said that it is still not easy to get citizens to engage on those platforms. Some websites do not get any attention and others, such as ich-gehe-nicht-hin.de ( “I do not go there”) for nonvoters or abgeordnetenwatch.de (ask the member of Parliament), are successful. Mysociety.org has great projects in this regards, based in the U.K. For example, Fix my Street.
• On both events free and open source software (FOSS) played an important role. It is clear that FOSS invites for collaboration and allows to build platforms for social innovation, which proprietary software cannot do because it is for commercial purposes. Regarding knowledge sharing, I really like the presentation of deepmehta software, in which knowledge is represented in a semantic network and is handled collaboratively.
• The whole topic around social change, innovation or entrepreneurs plays are far more a significant role in the U.K. Whereas on the re-publica, social entrepreneurs, e.g. startups for social change, played no role although there were promising projects such as betterplace.org and helpedia.org (will blog soon about them). The social innovation camp was fully devoted to this topic.
• Whereas at re-publica privacy laws and data protection were high on the agenda, on the social innovation camp they were of no importance. In contrary, I was surprised how openly people took user generated content for granted. The all over camera surveillance (CCT) in London is rather not amusing.

Local vs. global news

Another interesting development, is the emphasis on the local, as a sicamp08-fellow pointed it out to me during the first evening. The internet is truly global and it is great to connect with people worldwide, but there is this paradox that in the UK or in Germany one often does not even know its home-neighbours. So, there are projects coming up to have social network applications, so that people from an area can find similar interests and engage in community development.

At the re-publica.de, I listened to a presentation by Sean Bonner about “Blogging about local issues, on a global scale.” It dealt with the high relevance of local news in the global web and how metblogs.com tries to cover that. Sean Bonner said:

Before the web local issues did not get as much attention – national and international stuff was more important. Money was made through those kind of news. The Internet changed the distributing and exchange of news specifically on the local level. Blogs play a decisive role. Blog networks are key in local news exchanging.

Back in 2003, Sean Bonner and friends found that there was a lack of local information. Opinions, thoughts and recommendations about local issues. They started working on a local blogging network in L.A, and then opened up a platform called metblogs.com for a overarching network of local bloggers. Nowadays, over 50 cities are participating.

One interesting example is the coup back in 2006 in Bangkok, Thailand. First news appeared 6 hours before CNN on metblogs.com by people equipped with mobile phones. Similarly happened in Pakistan during the web blackout last year. There was also an interesting attempt by AOL to copy their concept, but it did not work out without a community. Sean Bonner said the newspapers rather copy the tools, but forget about the social dimension behind local community blogging.

I did not know about this network before, but it looks interesting. However, it seems often quite individualistic and with random topics. Global Voices Online follows closer developments in countries and translates them in other languages.

An in depth Social Innovation Camp blog post is in process.

No related posts.

This blog post veers a little bit from my usual topics, but in my opinion it is still quite important. Since January 1st, Germany has had a new online surveillance law. The result is an unfortunate wide scale intervention in the privacy of German citizens. Once again, it is another anti-terrorism law since 9/11. It strikes me how these laws systemically undermine citizen rights. Furthermore, I doubt very much it will help fighting terrorism. I also criticize that it suspects that all internet users are potentials criminals. Here is a detailed explanation about the law’s consequences by the Vorratsdatenspeicherung initiative:

According to a law passed by the German parties CDU, CSU and SPD, from 2008 on it will be possible to trace who has contacted whom via telephone, mobile phone or e-mail for a period of six months. In the case of mobile calls or text messages via mobile phone, the user’s location will also be logged. Anonymising services will be prohibited.

The data that will be collected about the entire population will allow our movements to be traced, any calls or communications with personal and business contacts to be monitored and will remove privacy in our personal relationships. Information regarding the content of communications can be deduced relating to personal interests and the individual life circumstances of the persons communicating. Access to the data is to be granted to the police, public prosecutors, secret services and foreign states which hope for better prosecution of crimes.

Luckily there is good news. A constitutional complaint against the law has been filed in the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany. 30.000 complaints were collected — never seen before in German history. I really hope this complaint will inhibit the law. The blog Netzpolitik is giving updates but only in German language.

These are the complaints in detail from the initiative against this law, which I fully share:

• Data retention constitutes an excessive invasion into our personal privacy.
• Data retention disrupts professional activities (e.g. in the fields of medicine, law, clergy, journalism) as well as political and business activities that rely on discretion. It ultimately harms our free society itself.
• Data retention doesn’t prevent terrorism or crime. It is unnecessary and can easily be circumvented by criminals.
• Data retention violates the human right to privacy and informational self-determination.
• Data retention puts a financial strain both on businesses and consumers.
• Data retention discriminates against users of telephone, mobile phone and internet services in comparison to other means of communication. Data retention constitutes an excessive invasion into our personal privacy.

No related posts.

In my last post I described the potential for social networks by tweets and statuses, but now I would like to add to it some links of interesting blog posts about Twitter and its potential. There is, for example, Nancy White, collecting collaboration stories over Twitter. Another interesting post from Marshall Kirkpatrick, “Why Twitter pays my rent,” describes how you can follow on Twitter in real time what is happening in the world wide web. Lastly, Caroline Middlebrook wrote a nice Twitter guide.

However, in this post I also intend to highlight some possible pitfalls for micro-blogging, how Facebook statuses and Twitter messages are also called. Developments are so fast that reflection of these tools is important, and even though  I risk some culture pessimism, I pointed some out:

• Quality
  Some things can be expressed through statuses, but is the outcome really needed information? Is it worth the effort to read all these messages?
• Micro-content
  In 140 characters a lot can be said, but surely nothing thoroughly elaborated and roughly in depth. Can this micro-content help in terms of knowledge sharing or learning? Micro-content is rather vague, or not always precise or self explanatory.
• Attention
  Clearly, this kind of information needs another attention and might even pressure for more multitasking and loss of concentration. It is another step to blur the border between being online and offline.
• Time consuming
  The question here is whether it is more efficient to email or add another piece to the information overload. Or is it really an own channel for communication?
• Privacy
  There is without a doubt a privacy issue of how much you want to let others know about yourself. Being virtually connected does not mean you want to share so much of your privacy.  How can one compromise with the dilemma of being public and private at the same time?
• Time span
  Mostly, there is only a certain window of reception for a message before it is gone. It is a bit like blog posts which get attention the first few days and then they are often forgotten.
• Engagement
  It needs a certain size of network and engagement from it to really get feedbacks. Does micro-blogging really lead to exchange or are there just many voices and no responses?
• The zero sum game of communication
  The time used on these tools is spent less on others. On Skype chats or Twitter, communication is divided into small bits, what makes it even more difficult to get the whole picture.

No related posts.