antonybrydon

Solving the passive vs active contribution problem

I've been wrestling with this problem for a few years, I'm curious to see how Adaptive Blue's new Glue product tackles it. The problem focuses on how to adequately manage privacy concerns when user information is passively contributed to a community or social network.

In active contribution, it's pretty straightforward. I may actively bookmark an article on delicious, actively share a post on friendfeed, actively add a connection on LinkedIn, actively post my whereabouts on Twitter. The systems have different privacy options (keep private, restrict to your connections, make public, etc), but since this functionality is often difficult to understand, and often keeps changing (along with privacy policies) the general rule of thumb seems to be to only actively post what you comfortable being public.

News thrives, print dies (The Internet is a meteor)

Print is dead. It's delightfully early to say it definitively, but I agree with the harsh prediction Steve Ballmer of Microsoft told editors at the Washington Post earlier this month:

There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.

The defenses, like Bill Virgil's defense in the local Seattle newspaper, have been particularly underwhelming:

The American newspaper, after all, has been around longer than the country has, beginning with the appearance of Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick in Boston in 1690... [Over] three centuries the American newspaper has grown with the country, survived wars, economic panics and depressions, adapted to and adopted technology ranging from photography to the telegraph to high-speed presses and survived the emergence of competing information technologies, including radio and TV.