From The Online Photographer blog:

Eastman Kodak Company has two blogs: A Thousand Words is written “by, and about, everyday employees who share a passion for photographic storytelling,” in the words of Kodak’s David Kassnoff. Its companion blog, A Thousand Nerds, “shares insights into the technical aspects of making photography an enjoyable experience.”

I don’t know these blogs, but I sure like their names. And their stated approach. [Tags: blogs kodak ]

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According to the Center for Media Research:

A recent survey on current attitudes towards customer ratings and reviews by Bazaarvoice and Vizu Corporation, shows that about three out of four shoppers say that it is extremely or very important to read customer reviews before making a purchase, and they prefer peer reviews over expert reviews by a 6-to-1 margin.

Of couse, Bazaarvoice provides customer review capabilities to vendors. [Tags: marketing bazaarvoice ]

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Ross Mayfield, who has ably led Socialtext in all the right directions, is making way for the next CEO. He’s blogged about it, looking for recommendations. I can tell you personally — I’m on the board of advisers [disclosure] — that the Socialtext people are smart, solid and upright. So, if you know how to grow a company of 50 people and 3,000 customers, with a commitment to doing right in the new world, let Ross know… [Tags: socialtext ross_mayfield wikis ceo ]

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When talking with Brad Templeton at Supernova, he put perfectly the misgivings about even the best of the digital ID systems that I’ve been trying to express for years. In The Paradox of Identity Management, Brad says, “If you make something easy to do, it will be done more often.” Thus:

The easier it is to give somebody ID information, the more often it will be done. And the easier it is to give ID information, the more palatable it is to ask for, or demand it.

Because it’s easier, more merchants will ask it of us. We will thus give away more and more personal information.

Brad goes on to connect this with fears about how this technology might be (= will be) used by tyrannies.

I continue to believe that we are best off addressing the identity problems locally, at the edges, rather than by putting in place a new layer or infrastructure. Let sites continue to design their own solutions to their own problems. If the credit card companies need stronger authentication, then let them handle it. If you want single sign-in, then get yourself a password manager like RoboForm. There are just too many unintended consequences of monkeying with something as basic as identity. And we should be especially concerned that the demand for identity management is coming mainly top down, not bottom up.

Doc responds to Brad. Doc hopes that VRM (vendor relationship management) can overcome the “market power asymmetries” that are at the heart of Brad’s (and my) concerns. Doc writes:

In a VRM system, IDM (identity management) provides (perhaps even defaults) to the choice not to provide data the customer would rather keep private, including names, addresses and every other piece of information not required to do business at hand. And let’s face it, in many (if not most) retail transactions there is no reason to give the vendor anything more than our money.

First, I’m surprised that defaulting to keeping info private merits only a “perhaps even.” I think this may have been a slip o’ the pen on Doc’s part.

Even so, Doc is ignoring the existing asymmetry. If Amazon is your favorite place to buy books, if Amazon requires more info than you think you want to give, you may be willing to pay the price. If it asks for personal info in order to “improve your shopping experience,” you may give it even if you don’t see its relevance. And if every bookstore on the Web decides it wants to ask for more info than it did before, you will start to take that as the norm. I believe that’s a predictable result — as per Brad’s paradox — of making it easy to give out personal information.

In fact, it seems to be a requirement for VRM to succeed. As Doc concludes: “VRM cannot succeed unless it overcomes Brad’s Paradox. If it makes that jump, it will bring IDM systems along for the ride.” But, since VRM is all about letting vendors know more about your preferences and intentions, it really doesn’t overcome the paradox. It depends on making it easier to give out personal info so that it can be done more often.

Doc makes the case for the benefits of keeping vendors well-informed. It would mean, for example, that we aren’t subjected to pointless, annoying ads for stuff we wouldn’t want anyway. And I may well be willing to trade my biography for that. (Of course, I would also want to be able to control how much sharing a merchant does of the information I’ve entrusted with it.)

I am more concerned about the effect of Brad’s paradox on social and political forums where anonymity is currently, and thankfully, the default.

Here‘s the much less elegant and clear way I put it just about a year ago when arguing for keeping anonymity as the default:

My fear is that we are in the process of building a new platform for identity in order to address some specific problems. We will create a system that, like packaged software, has defaults built in. The most important defaults in this case will not be the ones explicitly built into the system by the software designers. The most important defaults will be set by the contingencies of an economic marketplace that does not particularly value anonymity, privacy, dissent, social role playing, the exploration of what one is ashamed of, and the pure delight of wearing masks in public. Economics will drive the social norms away from the social values emerging. That is my fear.

…

I have confidence that the people designing these systems are going to create the right software defaults. The people I know firsthand in this are privacy fanatics and insistent that individuals be in control of their data. This is a huge and welcome shift from where digital ID was headed just a few years ago. We all ought to sigh in relief that these folks are on the job.

But, once these systems are in place, vendors of every sort will of course require strong ID from us. If I want to buy from, say, Amazon, they are likely to require me to register with some ID system and authenticate myself to them…far more strongly and securely than I do when I pay with a credit card in my local bookstore. Of course, I don’t have to shop at Amazon. But why won’t B&N make the same demand? And Powells? And then will come the blogs that demand I join an ID system in order to leave a comment. How long before I say, “Oh, to hell with it,” and give in? And then I’ve flipped my default. Rather than being relatively anonymous, I will assume I’m relatively identified.

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Denise Caruso, author of the new book Intervention, has been thinking about risk. She looks at innovations that have had nasty unanticipated consequences. The way to avoid it? “Have a conversation.” Talk with people before hand. E.g., the company that was going to incinerate chemical weapons in Oregon talked with environmentalists and their ilk and came up with better means of disposal. People don’t always do this because they fear it.

And, Internet tolols and culture exacerbate it. Targeted search taks away serendipity. Blogger bubbles, etc.

There are “potential dealbreakers” for the Net, she says, including copyuright bs. social media. So, we need to re-socialize the Net. We should automate serendipity.

Clay Shirky begins by talking about a disagreement in Japan about whether a temple is old even though it’s been rebuilt as part of continuing process. The dispute is over “solidity of edifice, not solidity of process.”

Then he talks about a big development contract he got many years ago with AT&T in which he was challenged to provide support. “We get our support from a community,” Clay said, but to them it was like he’d said “We get our Thursdays from a banana.” So, he showed them it working in practice. They couldn’t see it work in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory. He points to comp.lang.perl. “It’s doing fine,” but how is AT&T doing? Not so well. The solidity of the thing is evanescent.

Perl is like the temple, says Clay. It continues because the people doing it love Perl enough to stop what they’re doing and help one another. “No contracts are written, no money changes hands.” “We don’t often talk about love” at these conferences. But tools for coordinating and talking — simple things like mailing lists — turn love into a renewable building material. This leads to unexpected, unanticipated consequences. the better predictor of longevity is not the business model but do the people care about one another.

There’s lots of commercial opportunity. We’re not going to all live together in a commune. But the ability to get people together outside of management and profit motive creates a huge opportunity. And traditional work will be intertwined with this way of working.

Within 24 hours of Linus posting his first message, he had a global network of people eager to collaborate. The monitoring of Nigerian election through people using SMS and Flickr, the responses to terrorist actions, the anti-immigration-law protests coordinated through MySpace…we will see much more of that.

Add collaboration tools to love and you can write an operating system.

We can now do big things with love.

[This was a classic and beautiful statement of why the Net works and why it matters…and the fact that those two things are the same is what’s most hope-giving about the Net. Clay is such a phenomenal combination of insight, brilliance as a writer, and, well, love.]

[Tags: supernova2007 supernova07 clay_shirky denise_caruso love social_software everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Joe Andrieu has an excellent post explaining Doc‘s Vendor Relationship Management meme (vrm blog). Provocative in the best sense: Stimulating lots of thoughts and questions. For instance, how does VRM (or Joe’s vision of it) differ from federated identity schemes in which the user has control over her personal info? [Tags: vrm joe_andrieu doc_searls id ]

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David Isenberg tells a story about how a wine’s story makes it taste better. It’s a good reminder that the only products that are only products are products we don’t care much about.

Let me put that differently.

I came to like wine late in life, mainly because for most of my life I had only had really bad wine. Grape juice gone bad. Wine one pucker away from vinegar. Wine that made you appreciate the fine taste of Lavoris. Then, I had a client in the mid 1990s who wined and dined customers, ordering from the bottom of the wine list. The light bulb in the wine cellar went on. I still can’t tell identify a wine’s type without reading the bottle (although I usually can distinguish red from white), and my tastes are in the $10-$15/bottle range. But I like it. A lot. And it’s for one basic reason: The taste of wine is so damn complex. Drinking a good glass of wine is like thinking.

So, David’s story about the taste of a bottle being enhanced by the narrative around it pleases me. [Tags: wine david_isenberg everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Mark Evans reports on a talk given by Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster at the Mesh Conference last week:

1. The site is serving up seven billion pageviews a month from 200 servers
2. All 24 employees work at a Victorian house in San Francisco

3. The company has never had a tech quit in 12 years
4. Craigslist never holds meetings.

BTW, you c an hear my interview of Craig here.

[Tags: craigslist craig_newmark ]