Not Stopping Traffic? Blame Wikipedia

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m not one to court fame, although it is flattering, I must confess, to be recognised in the street. First there’s the odd sideways look as they approach you. Then the diffident approach:
“Excuse me, are you Jeremy Wagstaff?”
“Why, yes, I am!”
“You don’t remember me, do you?
“Er, no.”
“I’m your wife.”
“Oh, yes. So you are. Sorry.”

Actually, that almost never happens. In fact, it’s unlikely to for the simple reason that no one has thought to create a page about me on Wikipedia. Of course, why should I be so presumptuous as to think I deserve one? And would I not be obsessively checking it were such a page to exist? And do I want people to know what I did that night in Bangkok in 1990 when I was chased by a woman in a car reversing at speed through heavy traffic on Sukhumwit? Probably not although I’ll tell you if you really want.

Still, there’s definitely a cultism about Wikipedia biographical entries. The organisers have had to gamekeep against congressional aides, PR companies and even the entries’ own subjects to prevent them whitewashing their past. Even one of the founders has been alleged to have indulged in a bit of airbrushing of his own past.

But my beef is this. Why, should the mood take me to search Wikipedia for my humble name, do these matches appear?

Results 1-13 of 13

I am not a rugby league footballer. I never went to the RCA, although I once won a Lego competition. I am not, as far as I know, fictitious although my lack of an entry on Wikipedia may suggest I am; my mother was born in Yorkshire but I, alas, was not, and while I suppose the Nonjuring Schism is a part of my heritage, I never went to Charterhouse and therefore cannot claim to be an Old Carthusian, let alone a notable one.

Still, given the amount of airbrushing out, and bland self-hagiographic rubbish one does find among biographies on Wikipedia, it’s probably as accurate as any other entry on a living person in the otherwise excellent online tome. In any case, it kind of captures the kind of person I sometimes wish I was: an artistic scrum half Yorkshireman playing notably in the Charterhouse First XV , not averse to a Schism or two so long as it’s Nonjuring and doesn’t leave any stretch marks. Now that kind of entry I would like.

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Sponsoring Theft

By | November 22, 2011
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Are companies like eBay knowingly peddling stolen goods? Surely not, but I wonder about their advertising strategy.

I get confused about how sponsored results work. You know, those textual ads that appear alongside search results or on a webpage. I mean, I thought I knew how they worked: someone buys a word and when that word appears they get their ad next to it. But when I look for “laptop stolen” on Yahoo! Answers, I get this:

So what keyword are eBay, DealTime and Shopping.com sponsoring here? Or do they really have good stolen laptops for sale? And if so, wasn’t I told? Or these poor folks, whose tales of woe appear right next to these add:

Interestingly, trying the same search but for “laptop vomit” throws  up no sponsored ads at all. So “stolen” must be a sponsored word? (It does throw up, so to speak, cases of people feeling unwell over their keyboard. I guess that’s the Yahoo! Answers type of crowd. )

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A Directory of Tagging Software

By | November 22, 2011
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I’ve long felt that tagging is the unsung story for Web 2.0. Sure it’s abused, but it’s one of the best ways to “move beyond Google” as a way of finding stuff. If everyone tagged what they found on the net, we could all find stuff so much more easily. Actually, come to think of it, that would be a nightmare, since then we’d need a search engine to sift through all the tags. But in general, the idea is a good one: if you’ve ever looked for a range of sites on Google and been confronted by a mess, checking your keyword on out something like del.icio.us gives you some idea of the power of tags.

But the question I have been trying to ask myself then is: what software lets you use tagging in a non-social environment — an anti-social environment, if you will? Tagging, it seems to me, is just as powerful for sorting and accessing one’s personal information. Why hasn’t more standalone software got tags built in? (And to be simple, I’ve excluded anything that is more like a category, in that it’s either a fiddle to add or else only allows assigning one category.)

So here’s the beginnings of a list. As usual, I’d love to hear more. And this is very Windows biased. Sorry about that.

  • Taglocity allows you to tag your content from within Microsoft Outlook. Tagging helps you find things more easily, organize a lot of information and to communicate more clearly to others – all without complex rules or a new way of working. Tagclouds? Yup.
  • MyInfo a personal-reference information manager. MyInfo is a complete solution for collecting, organizing, editing, storing, and retrieving personal-reference information. You can search and list entries in the usual tree form, or via tags. Tagclouds? Yup.
  • TiddlyWiki like a blog because it’s divided up into neat little chunks, but it encourages you to read it by hyperlinking rather than sequentially: if you like, a non-linear blog analogue that binds the individual microcontent items into a cohesive whole.
  • Email: ThunderBird 2.0 supports tagging, although it’s a bit basic. TheBat! does a more comprehensive job, turning tags into virtual folders, a bit like GMail’s labels.
  • Photos: Picasa and Adobe Photoshop Album both support tagging. But be warned. Photoshop Album is, er, no longer available. Instead you’re nudged towards the $90 Photoshop Elements.
  • EverNote: still one step too many for me, but version 2.0 makes it easier to assign categories to items. And they’ve changed the icon from a stamp to a tag, so I’m guessing they’re getting it.

Some notes

Windows XP tagging

You can add tags to files in Windows XP by the following, according to the company:

Right now in Windows XP, the best way to tag and annotate files is to right-click on the file, select “Properties,” select the “Summary” tab and then insert the metadata (tags) you want to associate with that file. The basic categories are Title, Subject, Author, Category, Keywords and Comments. An additional click on the “Advanced” button in the Summary section provides a few additional categories. For photos though, Digital Image Pro today enables users to add meaningful keywords to your pictures so that you can view them in lots of different ways. Those keywords are applied directly to your photos and so when you put them on a Windows Vista PC in the future, you can immediately take advantage of the built in organization capabilities of the system.

Windows Vista tagging

we have made dramatic changes and improvements to the ways in which the operating system uses that metadata. For instance, all Windows Vista Explorers will include a Preview Pane that displays the metadata associated with the file the user has selected. With the Preview pane, you no longer have to right-click a file to open the Properties dialog box. Instead, a rich set of file properties (metadata) are always visible in the preview pane. You can also add or edit properties easily, for one or many files by selecting the “edit properties” option also found in the pane. Each Explorer also includes an Instant Search field, which immediately searches file names, file properties — including any metadata added by the user — and text within each file, and returns results instantly. Users can also save their customized searches as “Search Folders;” a Search Folder re-runs a created search anytime you click on it showing you the latest results. That way you no longer have to worry about where you put your documents and email as your Search Folder instantly looks across your PC and automatically finds them for you.
Users also have the option of following essentially the same steps as in Windows XP to add metadata to their files. The “Summary” tab is called “Details,” and one change that has been made is that all of a file’s properties (metadata) are included in this view in a scrolling menu, so the extra click to get to advanced properties is no longer necessary. However, with Windows Vista, users can select multiple files, right click, follow the same steps, and the metadata is added to all of the files selected. This makes it much easier for users to add metadata and saves them time.

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The Privacy Myth

By | November 22, 2011
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If there’s one myth that endures in this age of online participation, blogs, shared photo albums and Web 2.0, it’s that we’ve overcome our concerns about privacy. It sounds on the surface, logical: We must have gotten over this weird paranoia, or else why would we share so much online? Why would we bother about privacy issues when there’s no real evidence that people, companies, governments and the NSA are out to get us? This, for example, from Web 2.0 blog TechCrunch guest contributor Steve Poland:

I’m sure there’s data to back me up on this, but today compared to 10 years ago — people are way more comfortable with the Internet and have less privacy concerns. Or at least the younger generations that have grown up with the Internet aren’t as concerned with privacy — and spew what’s on their mind to the entire world via the web.

I can’t speak for the younger generation, having been kicked out of it some years ago. But if we’re talking more generally about folk who have embraced the Net in the past 10 years, I’d have to say I don’t think it’s that we don’t care about privacy. We just don’t understand it. In that sense nothing has changed. I think what is happening is the same as before: People don’t really understand the privacy issues of what they’re doing, because the technology, and its liberating sensuality, are moving faster than we can assimilate to our culture. This is not new: Technology has always outpaced our intellectual grasp. If you don’t believe me think radio, TV, cars and cellphones. We were lousy at predicting the impact of any of these technologies on our environment. Lousy.

Usually, it’s because we just don’t stop to think about the privacy implications, or we don’t stop to ask deeper questions about the sacrifices we may be making when we buy something, give information to a stranger, register for something, accept something, invite someone in to our digital lives, install software, sign up for a service, or simply accept an email or click on a link. The speed of communication – click here! register here! — makes all this easier. But I don’t really blame the reader. Often it’s us journalists who are to blame for not digging enough.

Take, for example, a new service called reQall from QTech Inc in India. On the surface, it sounds like a great service: phone in a message to yourself and it will appear in your email inbox transcribed with 100% accuracy. Great if you’re on the road, on the john or at a party and don’t want to start jabbing away or scrawling the note on the back of your spouse’s neck.

Rafe Needham of Webware initially enthuses about it on his blog. But then he later finds out that

Update: I’m told that ReQall’s speech-to-text engine isn’t wholly automated. “We use a combination of automated speech recognition technology and human transcription,” a company co-founder told me. Which means there may be someone listening to your notes and to-do items. Yikes!

Yikes indeed. Who would record a message knowing that a stranger is going to be transcribing it, and a company storing it on their servers? To be fair to Rafe he’s not the only one not to initially notice this privacy angle. And at least he bothers to write it up. Dean Takahashi didn’t mention it in his (admittedly) brief Mercury News piece, for example. The company’s press release makes no mention of it either, saying only that

reQall is patent-pending software technology that uses a combination of voice interface and speech-recognition technology to record, log and retrieve your tasks, meetings and voice notes.

(The same press release appears on Forbes’ own website, which I always think looks a bit odd, as if there’s no real difference between a story and a press release. But that’s another rant for another day.) That, frankly, would leave me thinking there was no human interaction either.

But then again, there are clues here and if we (by which I mean us hacks) were doing our job we should probably follow them. Any Google search for reqall and privacy throws up an interesting trail. A CNN report on memory quoted Sunil Vemuri talking about reQall but says issues about privacy and keeping such records free from subpoena have yet to be worked out. When a blogger called Nikhil Pahwa quoted CNN on ContentSutra someone from QTech wrote in:

Please note that there is an inaccuracy in the post. QTech is not “currently working on sorting out issues related to privacy laws, and how to prevent these recordings from being subpoenaed.” Can you correct this?

The text was duly crossed out, so now it reads:

According to the report, they’re currently working on sorting out issues related to privacy laws, and how to prevent these recordings from being subpoenaed are still to be worked out.

So we’re none the wiser. Are there issues? Are QTech working on those issues? Or are there issues that other people are working on, not QTech? Their website sheds little light. There’s nothing about human transcription on any of the pages I could find, nor in the site search. Their privacy policy (like all privacy policies) doesn’t really reassure us, but neither does it explicitly scare our pants off. A brief jaunt through it (I’m not a lawyer, although I sometimes wish I was, and I think John Travolta in “A Civil Action” makes a good one) raises these yellow flags:

  • QTech can use your location, contact details etc to “send you information related to your account or other QTech Service offerings and other promotional offerings.” I.e. the company knows where you are, your phone number and home address and could spam you.
  • QTech may “include relevant advertising and related links based on Your location, Your call history and other information related to Your use of the Services.” I.e. The company could send you stuff based on what information you’ve given in your messages, and any other information you carelessly handed over during the course of using the service.
  • QTech can use the content of your audio messages (and your contact information) for, among other things, “providing our products and services to other users, including the display of customized content and advertising,  auditing, research and analysis in order to maintain, protect and improve our services … [and] developing new services.” I.e. the company can mine the contents of your messages and other stuff and spam other customers. Somehow this seems more scary than actually spamming you.
  • QTech will hold onto those messages “for as long as it is necessary to perform the Services, carry out marketing activities or comply with applicable legislation.” I.e. don’t think your messages are going to be deleted just because you don’t need them anymore.

Privacy documents are written by lawyers, so they’re about as weaselly as they can be. And QTech’s is no different. But there is some cause for concern here, and we journalists should at least try to explore some of these issues. I looked for any acknowledgement that there’s a human involved in the transcription, and some reassurance that the content of those messages is not going to be mined for advertising purposes, and that it would be possible for customers to insist their messages are deleted. I couldn’t find anything, although to their credit QTech do say they won’t “sell, rent or otherwise share Your Contact Information or Audio Communications with any third parties except in the limited circumstance of when we are compelled to do so by a valid, binding court order or subpoena”. But if QTech are doing their own advertising then does that really make any difference?

I’m seeking comment from QTech on this and will update the post when I hear it. And this isn’t really about QTech; it’s about us — citizens, readers, bloggers, journalists — thinking a little harder about our privacy before we throw it away for a great sounding service. Do you want, for example, your personal memos (“Calling from the pub. God I really need a holiday. I think I’m cracking up”) mined for advertising (“Hi! Can I interest you in Caribbean cruise? I hear you’re cracking up!” “Hi, need psychological counselling? I’m told you do” “Hi! Need Viagra? I hear from that last message you left you probably do”)?

What a CEO Would Really Write in His Blog

By | November 22, 2011
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My fellow BBC World Service commentator, Lucy Kellaway, lays into Reuters CEO Tom Glocer as the worst case of vapid CEO blogging (via the BBC’s Richard Sambrook). Harsh, because Glocer seems to be a cut above the rest of the old media but she has a point: Blogs are about being honest and authentic, and I’ve seen few CEOs manage to do this. Although the results would be entertaining, if they for once did try not to please but to vent (which is the real distinction between a faux blog and a real one). Here’s an early draft of what a CEO like Mr. Glocer might have written if he could:

Had to fire half the news department today. Would have fired the other half too, had they actually been in the office. They weren’t; as it was 3.30 in the afternoon they were mostly unwell in The Ink Stained Spike so I had to get Mrs. Marpool, the Chief Hot Refreshing Beverage Delivery Officer (formerly the tea lady), to pass on the news to them. Doubtless the old fools will be telling each other war stories and mocking my blogging style. The savvier ones will be pulling up my MySpace page on their 3.5G enabled, beer-splattered laptops and making rude remarks about my dog. Bottom feeders. They’ve probably never heard of Debussy. Pffft.

God I hate journalists. The ones who were in the office sat staring at their Grecian 2000 editing terminals as I broke the news to them, either patheticlaly hoping I’d notice their dedication and spare them, or else because they couldn’t bear to look anywhere else. They’ve brought it on themselves. Ten years ago they could have bought a copy of Microsoft for Dummies from Dillons. But no. They thought they were all still safe, sacred cows in the face of the digital sandstorm (gosh, that’s good that. Might save that for the final version.) Journalists. They’re either gung ho foreign correspondents who can’t stop filing stories no one will read, or burned out subs with faces like a rhino’s armpit (gosh, that is good!) who take most of the afternoon to sub a palm oil report.

Anyway, good riddance to the lot of them. Nothing they could do that a floor full of eager Bangaloreans (Bangalorans? Bangalorii? Bangaloris? Bangalorish? Please check this before you post it on the blog, Edna) couldn’t do at a tenth the price.

Anyway, unlikely to see a CEO rabbiting on like that, so we should stop dreaming. Anyway, I’m still upset with Lucy for suggesting in the same piece that signing off an email with ‘best’ is somehow unacceptable. I do it all the time, although I fear it’s a throwback to my own hackish past, when we wrote our Reuters service messages (open wire emails, as it were, visible to all) in telegraphese, as if there was still a premium on word count. Hence “best regards” either became “brgds” or just good old “best”. I still do it, and will continue to do so until Lucy tells me not to.

Best, Jeremy