Mike English dot Net - Latest Comments

Re: Blogging

Mary — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:59:03 -0000

Use this one. You can't get much better than Mike English dot net :o)

Spanish, I miss your poetry.

- Mary (face)

Re: Thinking About Hardware

gazoombo — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:34:11 -0000

Feature comparison of the NetGear ReadyNAS line:
http://www.readynas.com/wp-content/uploads/2008...

Re: identity

wow power leveling — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 21:17:18 -0000

A wonderful article…. In my life, I have never seen a man be so selfless in helping others around him to get along and get working. I feel good that there are people like you too. Thanks for this great weblog of yours. Its surely going to get me to go to higher places!|*|wow power leveling|*|http://www.wotlk-power-leveling.com

Re: Mike English dot Net : virtual friendship

Steve English — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:41:14 -0000

'What facebook would look like in real life'
http://eatingsandwiches.com/?p=353

Re: Mike English dot Net : virtual friendship

Mark V — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:06:44 -0000

As a usually very private person, I've already had an internal argument that was very similar to this. I still feel stuck in a sort of middle ground though. I'm careful to mention people as "Facebook friends" in order to differentiate those relationships with my friends in the "real world." On top of this, I have been able to adopt a mentality that asserts I have nothing to hide -- at least to a point. I don't really care if acquaintances know my favorite bands or movies, and really personal information will only be given to friends I when talk to them in person. On the other hand, I do find myself engaging in friend purges, where I scroll through my Facebook friends and delete scores of them for various reasons.

Re: Mike English dot Net : busy busy busy

Chris Saad — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:06:02 -0000

Thanks for the nod :)

Re: thoughts on the “open” panel at le web

Rob — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:30:59 -0000

Nice blog.....

Re: Mike English dot Net : the global village(s?)

George Smith — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:14:54 -0000

Was just going to comment but became too long - so I posted some of my own personal musings on the subject in response: http://nosenseoftime.org/2008/12/23/friendfeed-...

Re: Mike English dot Net : upgrading

Mike English — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:49:33 -0000

Testing Comments on WordPress 2.7 to see if everything still works properly.

Re: facebook connect is go!

Mike English — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:06:02 -0000

@Manuela Yes, I haven't seen another Wordpress plugin for Facebook Connect yet, but this one has been working well for me so far.

Re: facebook connect is go!

Manuela Mazziotta — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 06:43:13 -0000

Guys, so do you recommend the plug in then?

Re: facebook connect is go!

Greg Vedders — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:26:28 -0000

You probably didn't notice the problem because you don't use Internet Explorer. When I set my site up, I had the same problem...worked everywhere, but in IE. Luckily, the answer to the problem is in the README file...if only I had read that the first time through.

Re: facebook connect is go!

Mike English — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:18:35 -0000

Oops! Somehow it's displaying correctly for me despite the fact that I left that out. I'll add it pronto!

Thanks for a great plugin!

Re: facebook connect is go!

Javier Reyes — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 09:00:52 -0000

Hi,
to show login button and photos, please add this to your "header.php" theme file:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

......

Thanks for using the plugin!

Re: why facebook?

Paul Martin — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:40:37 -0000

Testing out Facebook Connect as a possibility for a website or 5 of mine! :-)

Re: privacy 2.0

Mike — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 18:33:21 -0000

Thanks for the comment, Jon. I agree; with relationships, the more you put in, the more you get out of them.

Re: privacy 2.0

Jon Gatrell — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:52:06 -0000

Thanks for the link and it appears you have some great conversation over this one. Since we have no privacy/less privacy everyday, we should try and establish something of importance and share things of value. I continue to find that more I invest, the more I get online or offline. Relationships are funny like that

~jon

Re: privacy 2.0

Daniel — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:19:05 -0000

Mike, perhaps the key is in giving users the choice. You can keep it private, or you can allow controlled access to it (bearing in mind that once it's out there it's out of your control), your you can open it all.

Either way the value is in you having that data at your own disposal, to do with it what you see fit. Most of us currently pro-actively share explicit data, which is an important bit, but I'm also interested in the implicit data waiting to be extracted from my own behaviour.
As you suggest, language is an extremely important component of our behaviour, and a very good candidate for analysis.
I don't necessarily go along with Linguistic Determinism, although as a teenager I used to be a hardcore determinism advocate (perhaps to the extreme of fatalism), eventually learning about quantum physics put an end to that belief. Conditioning is another matter, which I think is beyond doubt. But this is going slightly off topic.
These are very interesting times to live in. :) Thanks for your views on this.

Re: privacy 2.0

Mike — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:47:31 -0000

<span class="reply vcard tag">@Daniel</span> We're moving toward transparency at a fairly rapid pace. I think you'd be surprised how soon people will be willing to expose the degree of information you suggest. Check these articles for example:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/05/20/MNGMFIVF4U1.DTL (2006)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/business/30privacy.html (recent)

The younger generation is ready to provide information, so long as they feel they have control over who gets access to what. I think that knowing you're sharing data as opposed to suspecting that data is being collected about you, makes a big difference.

Regarding, your project of collecting personal data on yourself for personal gain, I'm curious where you stand on linguistic determinism. It seems like there's already a wealth of information we could collect about ourselves if we systematically wrote our thoughts and analyzed our writing.

Re: privacy 2.0

Daniel — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:45:39 -0000

BTW just thought I'd clarify that there is a difference between what VRM is and what I am working on, which is more of a myware application with a VRM component.

Re: privacy 2.0

Daniel — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 18:28:13 -0000

Well Mike, you are certainly not alone in this trend towards total transparency, and I would be interested to know how far people are willing to go in that regard.

BTW, I don't think we can 'own' our data. In my opinion the best we can hope for is some degree of control over it. I'm just not sure how transparency will help in gaining control of the data. Surely if it's out there it's out of our control. Anyone can use it, for whatever purpose, without us knowing anything about it. It's almost like saying: I don't like you stealing from me, so I'll just give it all away.

Personally I only became interested in privacy when I thought how interesting it would be to work on the kind of technology that I described in my first comment. To be honest, it never crossed my mind that people would agree to such a level of intrusion unless they kept total control of the data. I might be wrong, but that is something that only a good measure of market research will answer.

I'm not exactly a private person. You can probably find the whole of my on-line footprint by searching for what has become more or less my unique ID on the web: ktorn
So in a sense you could say that I'm very much aligned with the total transparency idea. Or am I?

I'm not sure that I'm prepared to share my every thought, emotion, motive, fear and desire with the world. Yet that's what I'd like to capture, so that *I* understand myself better, and so that *I* can use that insight and data for my own benefit.

In doing so, I will have a digital personal profile which is many orders of magnitude richer than the ones gathered by 3rd parties. So where's the motivation for them to pry on me and collect out-of-date footprints when the information is all in one place? All they need is to ask nicely and/or pay me, to have controlled access to some of that data. Collective intelligence is still possible, but with great care so that I remain anonymous in my sharing of data.

Some of the folks around the VRM community are working on various implementations of this kind of ideas, myself included (http://grokya.org).

Still, I will keep a very close eye on threads like this. If people don't mind to live totally publicly then I want to know about it! :)

Re: privacy 2.0

Mike — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:59:41 -0000

Hi Daniel, thanks for the comment.

Part of the reason for argument for transparency, as I understand it, is that information about us belongs to us. In order to ensure our ownership of this data, we need to set ourselves in charge of our identity online. If I understand Mr. Messina correctly, this why we need the tools DiSo are projects like it are seeking to provide.

As far as where to draw the line, I'm not sure yet; that's part of the experiment with this blog, asking the world where we should draw the line. Financial and health data as you suggest are both good candidates for remaining private in the original sense of the word. But with a "Citizen-Centric" web, everyone suddenly has to deal with some of the problems of celebrity. I'm curious how these things scale.

With regards to the hypothetical extreme-monitoring question, it makes a difference who has access to the data. If by 'anyone' you mean that the data would be freely available to anyone and everyone as under public domain or a creative commons type license, then maybe it would be worth the intrusion. That much data available to so many analysts could potentially benefit countless fields of research, and help mankind. Or, it could lay the groundwork for totalitarianism and open up new avenues of psychological manipulation by large corporations or corrupt governments. A similar scenario was explored by The Truman Show ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/ ), although in the movie, the subject was kept in the dark about the project.

It's a very interesting question. Would anyone ever willingly relinquish all privacy in every aspect of their lives? What difference does it make who has access to the information in such a scenario?

Re: privacy 2.0

Daniel — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:23:15 -0000

Hopefully our ability to be heard and our ability to keep our privacy are not mutually exclusive.

You are advocating for complete transparency, but where do you draw the line? Hopefully you draw one.

For example, financial and health info is very private to me.

What if someone developed technology that could, with the use of multiple types of sensors that track your every movement, build a digital mental model of yourself with such an accuracy that it could be considered your digital-self (including private thoughts, motivations, fears, desires, etc), would you want that data shared with anyone?

On the other hand, if that data was under your complete control, working for you and only you... Would you accept such a technology and allow it to continually monitor yourself?

These are not rhetorical questions. It would be great to hear your (and other people's) views on these questions.

Re: privacy on the open web

Chris Messina — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:57:14 -0000

I think there are a couple factors here.

First, one of the problems will not be about achieving privacy; it will be about getting heard in the din of democratized technology. When everyone's publishing, how do you rise above and get your ideas heard? This is a fundamental shift -- one that's quite unintuitive for previous generations who felt that anonymity could provide protection.

Second, the web needs to invert itself from a service-centric world where you must repeat your identity on all of them to a user- or citizen-of-the-web-centric orientation. This is what technologies like OpenID are all about... can you define yourself as the primary authority about yourself without relying on a third party service? You should be able to -- but today we know people by the services they use, rather than by the multi-faceted individuals that they are (potentially with accounts across multiple services).

Third, one thing that we need to begin to cope with — or adjust our expectations about — is the concept of decay, which of course is absent from digital technology where everything is designed to persist, perhaps, indefinitely. What does it mean when you can connect with your preschool friends on Facebook after you've graduated from college? Would that be a meaningful or useful relationship? Would such connections crowd out more happenstance but possibly deeper relationships that might spawn from random associations, or by affiliating oneself with people with similar interests.

In other words, we live in a time of information and social abundance; the same assumptions that worked in a time of relative isolation and desolation should no longer apply.

I've written about these subjects previously. Might interest you:

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2008/06/11/thoughts-...
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/11/11/privacy-p...
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/06/05/privacy-w...
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2006/01/24/pry-to

Re: privacy on the open web

Mike — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 02:27:45 -0000

(Sorry Chris, I edited just as you commented)

Thanks for weighing in. I'm curious to see how long the trend to 'share far and wide' lasts. As I just pointed out in my edit, I think it indicates the stunning impact of technology's shortcomings back onto human behavior. Will the effects be permanent? Is the perceived importance of personal privacy altogether on the decline?

Also, for me, I'm taking as a given a new blank slate outside the walled networks. If I build my own identity endpoint, I'm in complete control of the data there, but I'm still left asking, what to share?

In the long run, I'm less interested in how to my "Facebook data" onto another corporately controlled website, than I am in imagining what ad-hoc open networks are possible with independent control of my identity and social data.