Posts tagged Online
As Retail Sales Have Worst Year Since 1984, Online Sales Buck the Trend – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Feb 10th
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As Retail Sales Have Worst Year Since 1984, Online Sales Buck the Trend
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Perth SEO Company Oracle Digital have reaffirmed that the use of online tools is necessary in order for businesses to rise up from the financial slump that many have been experiencing over the years. Over the past 27 years, retail sales in Australia … |
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A Proposal to Fix Online Identity
Feb 10th
Facebook’s social graph of you isn’t you. It’s an approximation and an extrapolation based on little clues you’ve left lying around the Web. Using your Facebook or Google identity gives those services more data points about what you do, but that doesn’t mean it substitutes for whom you are.
The central thing wrong with the social Web is that users don’t own their identities. Users share themselves with identity services – like Facebook and Google – that then act as representatives of the people using them. Facebook and Google allow other sites to rent those identities. But when you log in to a new service using Facebook Connect, you are actually constraining your identity to the Facebook version of it, though you’re expanding Facebook itself. Do you want to be the same version of yourself everywhere else as you are on Facebook? Or Google?
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Facebook & Google Act On Our Behalf
By doing things this way, Facebook, Google et al can lend your name to things without really asking you, like ads and promotions of various kinds. You have implied your permission by ‘liking’ things or ‘checking in’ to places.
But you didn’t create the ad. You just initiated an action that triggered it. Social applications that speak for us this way are using our identities without us.
Identity Is Prismatic
Our Facebook and Google identities are like constellations. The stars are our actions on the Web. Facebook and Google are on the ground, staring up at the sky with a bunch of marketers and advertisers. They’re the know-it-alls pointing at abstract shapes and confidently labeling them with names.
But the actual user, not the vague constellation of her online actions, is a multi-faceted person. “Identity is prismatic,” as Chris Poole says, and “Facebook and Google do identity wrong.”
“It’s not ‘who you share with,’ it’s ‘who you share as,’” Poole says. In other words, we’re only presenting one, Facebook-facing aspect of ourselves when we share online via Facebook. The advertisers who make Facebook possible don’t have a full picture; they have a Facebook caricature.
Today’s Social Web Is A Performance
The more about ourselves we share with Facebook, the more stars you can see in the night sky, the clearer the constellation appears. Hence, Facebook rolls out Timeline and asks us to share our entire life story.
But what Facebook has to acknowledge is that this is still a performance. It’s a make-believe Facebook self. And Facebook’s (and Google’s) business consists of spinning that self on our behalf, mapping it and stereotyping it and selling it.
It’s not wrong of Facebook or Google to do that, per se. But I have a feeling that better products, better ads, and a better Web would be possible if users owned their identities, showing as many (or as few) facets as they want to show.
A Proposal: Online Identity As A Fingerprint
Users should have signatures that are truly theirs, instead of their Facebook and Google guardians signing on their behalf.
Identity on the Internet should be embedded by the user like a fingerprint. It should be written into the digital material we make using hardware we have authorized. We should also be able to withhold it whenever we choose and make the content anonymous.
We should also be able to sign multiple and pseudonymous identities, but we’ll have to hash that out later, as a political issue, once this is even technically possible. The first step is to create a protocol that lets us sign off the bits we’ve written as being of us, so that they remain identifiable no matter where the content is repackaged or republished.
Why Do We Want This?
We want this because it would delineate a difference between something we made or we said and something an outside service extrapolated about us.
We want this because it would simplify problems of attribution and copyright on the Web. If we didn’t sign something we created, it would default to the other ways we deal with unsigned content. But content that is signed would have an unmistakable origin.
“There would be a layer of protection between whom we declare we are and whom companies assume we are.”
We want this because it will make identity services like Google, Facebook and the rest compete honestly for our attention instead of boxing us into their worlds.
Facebook and Google can only make enough money from their profiles of us by tracking our activity and extrapolating who we are and what we do. But that would still be possible on top of a layer of authentic identity that those services didn’t own. They would be able to compete based on whose recommendations were more accurate, but there would be a layer of protection between whom we declare we are and whom companies assume we are. We would no longer be tied to just one of those identity constellations.
OpenID is not what I’m talking about, either. It’s more than just logging in to websites. This is something we write in. It’s not a handle and a password. It’s like one of those wax seals on a letter, except with Information Age security measures.
The Naïve Things About My Idea
Many things about my above proposal are naïve. Here are just a few:
- I am not well-versed enough in the longstanding projects of this nature that already exist, like GnuPG signing or Mozilla’s BrowserID, to know what the challenges are. But I’m working on it.
- I haven’t specified at which layer of the user interface this identity signature should take place, whether at the device level, the browser level, or what. Again, that’s because I am not well-versed enough in the technical requirements of such a project.
- And yes, the inertia of moving away from siloed Web identities (Google/Facebook) towards this is unconscionably humongous.
So I know there are experts on these problems out there. Talk to me. What’s right and what’s wrong about this idea? Who’s working on it? How is it going? Is it impossible? Is it unnecessary? Is it hopeless? In the interest of a better Web, let’s talk about this.
See also: Scott M. Fulton, III’s year-end post, “Issues for 2012 #3: Who Gets to Define Your Online Identity?”
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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SPONSOR MESSAGE: The Purchase Path of Online Buyers – How Shoppers Use Email, Search, and Social
Feb 9th
This Forrester Research independent report discusses: Three recommendations for attracting online shoppers Click-stream analysis conducted over the holidays What you should and shouldn’t expect from social campaigns Download now »
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Numbers Shift but Online News is a Steady Trend
Feb 9th
Have you seen the numbers lately? Brands and marketers like to leverage numbers to create a (desired) reception based on reader perception. Obviously, bigger numbers reflect more popularity and added reason for investors to celebrate. The New York Times issued a recent article on Facebook, calling attention to a subjective view of numbers. For instance, [...]
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Online Newsrooms: A Necessity for Search and Social Content Strategy
Feb 9th
Think content. Think fresh content. Think Google loves content. Think social shares of content. Now when news breaks in a tweet and via mobile device, the online newsroom can hold the keys to dominating online visibility in a three-screen world.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
Add Change Tracking to Online Text Editing with Ice.js
Feb 8th
If you’re looking to add change tracking to a Web app, you might want to take a look at Ice from the CMS group at the New York Times.
Ice (or Ice.js) is an implementation of change tracking for any content-editable element on the Web. It can track changes (inserts, deletes) from multiple users, and has some optional plugins for converting “smart” quotes and creating em-dashes.
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Hands-on experience is probably the best way to get an idea what Ice.js can do. The current demo shows a plain content-editable element with Ice.js as well as a TinyMCE instance using Ice.js as a plugin. The TinyMCE demo includes buttons for accept, accept all, reject and reject all.
Ice.js also has an API, so you could use it as the basis for your own custom editor or integrate it into an editor like TinyMCE. At some point, Ice.js should include code to integrate it with WordPress.
Ice.js looks pretty good so far, but the project is still in early days and the developer is calling for other folks to get involved adding features, plugins and documentation. The licensing for Ice may be a problem for some projects, however. The trend these days seems to be using MIT or BSD style licenses which do not require reciprocity, but Ice is GPLv2 only. This means that some projects won’t be able to adopt Ice due to their own licensing.
Change tracking is something that I’d like to see integrated in just about everything, so I’m hoping this takes off. Any other change tracking projects worth noting?
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3 Ways Enterprises Cripple Their Online Marketing Efforts – Search Engine Land
Feb 7th
 Search Engine Land |
3 Ways Enterprises Cripple Their Online Marketing Efforts
Search Engine Land An increasing number of enterprises are engaging in PR, SEO, social media, and content marketing. Having these four areas covered is great, but many companies are not getting anywhere near the full ROI from their investment in them. Hands-on conference teaches PR and marketing pros how to write social media … SEO Training SW hosts a #Social Media Workshop – Phoenix, Arizona |
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Driving Video Views & Engagement With SEO & Social Media – ReelSEO Online Video News
Feb 7th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
Driving Video Views & Engagement With SEO & Social Media
ReelSEO Online Video News Our founder, Mark Roberston, had a chance to serve as moderater at the Streaming Media West conference on a panel discussion entitled Driving Video Views and Engagement With SEO & Social Media. With Josh Warner of Feed Company, Gregg LaRoche of … Brightcove: Social Media Trumps Search for Viewer Engagement |
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SHAZAM! Interactive Super Bowl Ads Drive Engagement – ReelSEO Online Video News
Feb 7th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
SHAZAM! Interactive Super Bowl Ads Drive Engagement
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… Google has been giving users "instant previews" … What Time Does The Super Bowl Start? What Channel Is It On? |
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RedBox And Verizon Team Up On Streaming Service To Challenge Netflix – ReelSEO Online Video News
Feb 7th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
RedBox And Verizon Team Up On Streaming Service To Challenge Netflix
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… Google has been giving users "instant previews" … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
