StumbleUpon Relaunch
StumbleUpon relaunches its brand and website, prepares for going international; http://eicker.at/StumbleUponRelaunch
Updates from December, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Surveillance
Stallman: Facebook and Google Plus mistreat their users… Facebook does massive surveillance; http://eicker.at/Surveillance
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Gerrit Eicker
Stallman interview on RT (Russia Today) and video on YouTube: “Facebook and Google Plus mistreat their users… Facebook does massive surveillance. If there is a ‘like’ button in a page, Facebook knows who visited that page. And it can get IP address of the computer visiting the page even if the person is not a Facebook user. So you visit several pages that have ‘like’ button and Facebook knows that you visited all of those, even if it doesn’t really know who you are… Free software literally gives you freedom in the area of computing. It means that you can control your computing. It means that the users individually and collectively have control over their computing. And in particular it means they can protect themselves from the malicious features that are likely to be in proprietary software… This doesn’t automatically give you freedom in some other area of life. To get that you have to fight for it. But human rights support each other. In an age when a lot of what we do, we do with computers, if we don’t have freedom in our computing, that makes it harder for us to defend or fight for freedom in other areas. You loose one set of rights – and it’s harder for you to keep the others…”
VB: “Social networks are under constant scrutiny by their users but also privacy watchdogs as companies add more sharing tools to to connect millions of people from over the world. – Facebook, created by Mark Zuckerberg, hit the headlines over the past week after its co-founder admitted the company had made ‘a bunch of mistakes’, agreeing terms with the FTC to make its networks more transparent and allow users to control their own levels of privacy. – However, there are many that believe companies like Facebook and Google aren’t helping their users, insisting that they are mistreating them. Richard Stallman, creator of the GNU Project and founder of the Free Software Foundation, is one such person, believing that not only do Facebook and Google mistreat users on their social networks, they are putting some people in danger. … Circling back to social networking and the privacy implications involved, many still believe Facebook and Google are working hard to track users across the web, extracting their preferences and information for their own gain. Facebook has said moved to employ two dedicated members of staff to oversee its privacy practices on its website, also agreeing to have its practices audited by the FTC on regular intervals. – Stallman might not believe that Facebook is doing all it can to remain transparent but with the FTC on its back, it is a case of making sure it does to ensure it doesn’t land itself in more hot water. With upwards of 800 million people, Facebook’s growth shows no signs of slowing, suggesting many people simply don’t care about the information they share with third-parties.”
Wikipedia: “Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16, 1953), often shortened to rms, is an American software freedom activist andcomputer programmer. In September 1983, he launched the GNU Project to create a free Unix-like operating system, and he has been the project’s lead architect and organizer. With the launch of the GNU Project, he initiated the free software movement; in October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation. – Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and he is the main author of several copyleft licenses including the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management, and what he sees as excessive extension of copyright laws. Stallman has also developed a number of pieces of widely used software, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU Debugger, and various tools in the GNU coreutils. He co-founded the League for Programming Freedom in 1989.”
Winer: “Why I stand up for Stallman – But I still see it going on for Stallman, and that makes me feel ill. I think a guy like Stallman should be heard and we should think about what he says. And if you disagree, have the self-respect to express it with dignity. And if people start getting personal about it, there should be moderators around to put a stop to it at least stand up to it. No one should stand alone when being subjected to personal attacks. … What Stallman does is what any good blogger would do. He says what he thinks. And if you really listen to what he says, you’ll learn something. Probably the biggest thing you’ll learn about is your own fear. Because there’s something about Stallman that scares a lot of people. They wouldn’t try to isolate him so much, if he didn’t evoke their fear.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora Growth
Diaspora just hit a quarter of a million Diaspora Seeds on the developers’ Diaspora Pod alone; http://eicker.at/DiasporaGrowth
Gerrit Eicker
Entertainment
The Internet is for information only? Not anymore! Pew: it’s for diversion and a destination; http://eicker.at/Entertainment
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Gerrit Eicker
Pew: “Americans are increasingly going online just for fun and to pass the time, particularly young adults under 30. On any given day, 53% of all the young adults ages 18-29 go online for no particular reason except to have fun or to pass the time. Many of them go online in purposeful ways, as well.”
Pew: “These results come in the larger context that internet users of all ages are much more likely now than in the past to say they go online for no particular reason other than to pass the time or have fun. Some 58% of all adults (or 74% of all online adults) say they use the internet this way. And a third of all adults (34%) say they used the internet that way ‘yesterday’ – or the day before Pew Internet reached them for the survey. Both figures are higher than in 2009 when we last asked this question and vastly higher than in the middle of the last decade. … The trend also suggests the degree to which the internet has become a competitor to all kinds of other leisure activities that are pursued on other kinds of media. Still, the competition is fuzzy because most other kinds of leisure pursuits that can be digitized – from reading to game playing to ‘watching TV’ and ‘listening to radio’ – are now available online. … Our question wording was simple and did not ask about any particular online ‘fun’ activity, so people were allowed to answer that they were online for fun however they defined the term. – The increases in the number of people going online for fun on a typical day and in the general population of those who ever go online for fun came across all age groups and other demographic cohorts.“
Gerrit Eicker
Digitale Gesellschaft?
Deutschland ist keine Digitale Gesellschaft: 3/4 online, aber 2/3 nicht souverän; http://eicker.at/DigitaleGesellschaft
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Gerrit Eicker
ID21: “Entwicklung der digitalen Gesellschaft stagniert: Mehrheit der Bevölkerung (62 Prozent) nach wie vor nicht Teil der digitalen Gesellschaft. Kaum messbares Wachstum in den einzelnen Nutzergruppen. Leichter Rückgang bei ‘Digitalen Außenseitern’ – Deutliche Unterschiede im Freizeitverhalten zwischen ‘Digital Souveränen’ und ‘Digital wenig Erreichten’ – Die heute vorgestellte dritte Ausgabe der Studie ‘Die digitale Gesellschaft in Deutschland … Vor dem Hintergrund der Diskussionen um Datenschutz, Identitätsdiebstahl und Internetbetrug scheinen die Deutschen ihr distanziertes Verhältnis zu den digitalen Medien weiterhin zu wahren. Das Vertrauen in und der souveräne Umgang mit den digitalen Medien sind entsprechend kaum gestiegen. Nach wie vor können erst 38 Prozent der deutschen Bevölkerung als ‘Digital Souveräne’ bezeichnet werden – lediglich eine Steigerung um einen Prozentpunkt im Vergleich zum Vorjahr. Dies ist eines der Ergebnisse der Neuauflage der Studie ‘Die digitale Gesellschaft’, mit der die Initiative D21 den Status der deutschen Gesellschaft auf dem Weg in die digitale Welt aktualisiert hat und für die TNS Infratest 1.000 Telefoninterviews durchführte. … ‘Sehr positiv ist, dass in den letzten Jahren der Anteil der Onliner an der Bevölkerung von zwei Drittel auf drei Viertel gestiegen ist. Gleichwohl bleibt es wichtig, dass wir allen Mitgliedern unserer Gesellschaft die Vorteile des digitalen Zeitalters noch deutlicher als bisher nahe bringen‘, so Hans-Joachim Otto, Parlamentarischer Staatssekretär beim Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie. Otto weiter: ‘Das erreichen wir nur, wenn wir das Vertrauen in die digitalen Medien erhöhen, die ersten Schritte in die digitale Welt erleichtern und die digitale Kompetenz bei denen steigern, die bisher nur rudimentär die digitalen Medien nutzen. Das Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie hat in den letzten Jahren zahlreiche Projekte gefördert, um die digitale Integration zu stärken.’ … Erstmals wurde das Freizeitverhalten der deutschen Bevölkerung in der Studie abgefragt und zwischen den Digital Souveränen und den Digital wenig Erreichten verglichen. Das Ergebnis zeigt, dass die Freizeitaktivitäten beider Gruppen sehr vielfältig sind und sich auch teilweise deutlich unterscheiden. Dabei konnte eindeutig festgestellt werden: ‘Digital Souveräne’ sind weit davon entfernt ihre Freizeit nur vor einem Bildschirm zu verbringen. Sie surfen in ihrer Freizeit wie erwartet weitaus häufiger im Internet, sind aber gleichzeitig sportlich aktiver, gehen häufiger aus und spielen häufiger ein Musikinstrument. ‘Digital wenig Erreichte’ widmen ihre Zeit etwas mehr dem Fernsehen, Lesen oder Spazierengehen. Dabei wird in der Detailanalyse deutlich, dass das unterschiedliche Durchschnittsalter (‘Digital Souveräne’: 36,9 Jahre; ‘Digital wenig Erreichte’: 53,6 Jahre) nicht alleine für diese Unterschiede verantwortlich sein kann, denn auch jüngere ‘Digital wenig Erreichte’ sind beispielsweise weniger sportlich aktiv oder musizieren seltener.”
Gerrit Eicker
Google Agent Rank
An algorithm based reputation system and digital signature: the Google Agent Rank; http://eicker.at/GoogleAgentRank
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Gerrit Eicker
SEL: “Google’s Agent Rank Patent Application – The method of ranking based upon reputation scores is described in an analogy based upon PageRank. There’s also some discussion of an alternative possibility of using a seed group of trusted agents to endorse other content. Agents whose content receives consistently strong endorsements might gain reputation under that method. In either implementation, the agent’s reputation ultimately depends on the quality of the content which they sign. … The use of digital signatures enables the reputation system to link reputations with individual agents, and adjust the relative rankings based on all of the content each agent chooses to associate himself or herself with, no matter where the content may be located. That could even include content that isn’t on the internet. … This is a very different way of providing rankings for pages, based upon the reputations of agents who may have interacted with, and digitally signed content on those pages.”
SbtS: “Are You Trusted by Google? – Are you a robot? A spammer? A sock puppet? A trusted author and content developer? A trusted agent in the eyes of Google? … In a whitepaper from last year, Reputation Systems for Open Collaboration, Bo Adler of Fujitsu Labs of America, Ian Pyey of CloudFlare, Inc., and Luca de Alfaro and Ashutosh Kulshreshtha from Google describe two different collaborative reputation systems that they worked on. One of them is a WikiTrust reputation system for Wikipedia authors and content, and the other is the Crowdsensus reputation system for Google Maps editors. – Both systems are interesting, and as the authors note, both fulfill very different needs in very different ways. … I’ve written about Google’s Agent Rank here a few times recently, and Google published a new Agent Rank continuation patent application last week which expands upon one aspect of the patent filing within its claims section. … [T]he newest version of this patent is transformed to focus upon this aspect of Agent Rank. It introduces the concept of ‘trusted agents,’ who might endorse content items created by others. … Are reputation or user rank scores influencing rankings in search results at present? Chances are that they may be in the future, if they aren’t now. – How does one become a ‘trusted agent?’”
SEOmoz: “Building The Implicit Social Graph – Google Plus is Google’s latest attempt at building an explicit social graph that they control, but Google has been building out an implicit social graph for quite some time. This graph is still relatively naive compared to the maturity of the link graph, but search engines continue to develop this graph. Since it is already directly influencing rankings, and its value will increase, it’s important to understand how this type of social graph is being built. In this post, I’ll look at some of the methods for building the social graph, as well as looking at explicit vs. implicit social graphs. … One of the limitations of building an implicit social graph is that you don’t have the data to test against to confirm the predictions and relationships that graph discovers. It still has to depend on the data made public, but is limited by relationships that are held private [aka Facebook]. Google Plus, among other things, creates a massive set of explicit social graph data, which can be used for machine learning and accuracy checking. … Even with publicly available, and privately available, explicit social data, there is still a strong incentive to build out the implicit graph. The explicit graph can be used to make improvements upon this graph. The implicit graph is one area where Google has a significant advantage over Facebook. – It’s no secret that the social graph appears to be the next evolution with increasing uses of social factors, social elements in search, and mechanisms that will lead into AgentRank/AuthorRank, which will tie directly into the implicit social graph.”
ComLUV: “Google Agent Rank and its Impact on Blogging – For many users and businesses Google is the Internet. People don’t search for things anymore, they Google them. The silly sounding brand name has permeated almost every aspect of the Internet and is growing daily. One new twist Google may be adding to the mix is something they call Agent Rank. … Agent Rank has the potential to be an incredible boon to bloggers of any topic or vertical. Trusted writers will not only bring their great material with them to a new project, they will bring a built-in trust boost in Google to whatever site they are working for. … If an author can be confident that their Agent Rank could bring about better Google rankings then they can approach projects with a new value proposition. … When or if Agent Rank will be implemented is unknown. Google recently released an addendum to their Google Profiles they call Authorship. … It is unknown if this is an early attempt to roll out Agent Rank in some form, but it is clearly related to the patent and has some value even in its current state.”
Google: “Today we’re beginning to support authorship markup – a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We’re experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results. – We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. … The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you’re already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we’ll interpret that authorship information as well. … We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.“
Gerrit Eicker 08:01 on 6. December 2011 Permalink |
StumbleUpon: “We’ve made some changes so it’s now easier than ever to Stumble and explore new and interesting things from every corner of the Web. Stumble more with a simpler and easier to use StumbleUpon.com and StumbleBar. Explore more with Channels from your favorite sites, people and brands. Find more using our Explore Box: type a word or phrase and see amazing Stumbles. – Follow Channels and uncover content from sites, people and brands that you already like while you’re Stumbling. – Find More with the Explore Box: Type a word or phrase and see amazing Stumbles related to whatever you’re interested in. – We’ve moved some stuff around so it’s easier to find your way around the things you’ve Liked and to discover even more.”
GigaOM: “StumbleUpon has undergone a major makeover. … It’s the largest and most comprehensive branding and redesign initiative StumbleUpon has made in the company’s history… The redesign is aimed at bringing StumbleUpon’s more granular features – such as the newly-implemented ability to Stumble according to specific interests – to the surface… Essentially, it’s designed to make StumbleUpon more ‘sticky’ than ever. … In all it’s a good move for StumbleUpon, and it’s one that seems long overdue. Once you compare the new look of the site to the old version, you realize how much was hidden under the surface.”
RWW: “StumbleUpon is the inverse of a Google Web search. Instead of typing in a keyword and searching for relevant links within that search, StumbleUpon asks the user to define the parameters by selecting a topic, and then voting the content up or down. Using the Explore Box, users can type in an interest that’s more specific than one of the many comprehensive topic options. It gives a list of related interests, which broadens the breadth of topics to stumble. Over time the user develops an interest profile specific to them. … StumbleUpon is a prime example of the read/write web. Why? Because the user literally writes their own ‘taste graph’ by signaling to the service what interests they want to follow. In the e-commerce space, eBay acquired recommendation engine Hunch to do just that – serve up more relevant content to users.”
Forbes: “One big reason for the changes and simplifying of the website is to make it easier for StumbleUpon to expand internationally, which is one of the company’s major priorities in 2012. StumbleUpon has more than 20 million registered users and is adding more than 1 million per month, but the majority of its users are currently in the U.S. The company wants to address that. … StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay in 2007 and bought back two years later by founders and venture investors.“