Personal data mining: benefits and costs

Nic Brisbourne has written a thoughtful post called "Mining personal data - the next big frontier":

[Last] week Eric Schmidt of Google said he would help us answer questions like “What am I going to do tomorrow?”. I applaud the sentiment here, I really do, but I don’t think Eric is the right guy for the job, and he certainly isn’t going about it the right way.

A lot of people have a bad reaction when Google does things like this - Does Eric Schmidt want to sniff the armpits of my mind? is a very funny example, and indeed this post was in part inspired by some friends saying at dinner last night how much Schmidt’s arrogance pissed them off.

Underlying all this are some very real privacy concerns which I will come back to, but first I want to focus on how useful these sorts of services could be.

Nic goes on to discuss how some potential benefits to end users of allowing their behaviours and preferences to be tracked in exchange for cheap/free services and better ad personalisation could offset their privacy concerns.

I'm looking forward to chatting with Nic this week in preparation for a post I'm planning on "Identity for web startups—opportunities and threats": I'm sure his insights into the economic aspects of the topic (Nic is a Venture Capitalist at Esprit) will be extremely helpful.

Google as "the Internet"

Seamus McCauley muses on "Google" as synonym for "the Internet" (click the link for a nice bonus photo illustration!):

I've been wondering for a while how it came to pass that "Google" became visual shorthand for "the Internet" amongst advertisers.

The current campaign for Thomson holidays exhorts holidaymakers to use "our Google Maps" (which turns out to be a slightly customised version of what is very clearly Google's Google Maps). Mobile phone companies in particular, when they started wanting us to know that we could access the web on our phones, showed us phones with Google on them. Here's another one.

So I'm intrigued by the sudden cultural shift implied by Nokia's latest online ad for the N800 (left), a phone with Internet access, majoring on the BBC website and Flickr and MySpace and Wikipedia without a mention of Google. "Take the Internet to new places", it says. Or, in other words - not just Google search.

Google has an incredibly powerful brand (BBC) that for the last couple of years has been semiotically synonymous with the Internet. Assuming, not unreasonably, that advertisers are on the cutting edge of understanding cultural significance, that psychological dominance of what people mean by the Internet may be coming to an end as consumers are considered able to accept more nuanced symbols of the web.

When millions of people identify your brand with the Internet itself, you know you have a decent business. Whether or not Google can continue to convince the masses that they are "the Internet" will play a huge part in determining their future fortunes.

However, it's also intriguing to note that the growing privacy concerns around Google provide them with the inverse challenge of convincing people that they are not too omniscient for their users' comfort—when striving for omniscience kind of goes with the territory of trying to be "the Internet". This would seem to pose Google with something of a strategic and branding conundrum.

There's money in that there identity—we just don't quite know where yet.

[also left as a comment on Seamus's post]

Billboards as whiteboards?

Sam Sethi picked this up:

Boing Boing is reporting that in December, 2006, the mayor of the 11-million-person Brazilian city of Sao Paolo banned all outdoor billboard advertising, citing advertisers’ unwillingness to comply with the city’s rules on what sort of billboards can be placed where.

Now the rule is in effect, and Flickr user Tony de Marco has documented the eerie sight of a city stripped bare of commercial visuals.

Imagine if Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, ever found out!

What a powerful image—it brings home to me just how omnipresent adverts are in urban spaces. Maybe Sao Paolo should turn the billboards into giant whiteboards (with facilitating stepladders and giant marker pens) upon which citizens could collaboratively brainstorm their vision for the evolution of the city? ; )

Visual identity mashups

From Joi Ito:

A subway mirror with an ad. In Web20-ese that's "Advertising driven user generated media".

I like this kind of visual identity mashup. It's much like the reflectoporn craze of 2004—a remixing of branded product, or in this case branding message, with the intimately personal.

The ad generator

For a few minutes of culturally-significant amusemnent, check out the ad generator:

The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.

The ad generator was created by Alexis Lloyd as a component of an MFA thesis project in the Design and Technology department at Parsons The New School for Design.

For me, the most fun part of this is trying to guess the Flickr tags that have allowed the matching of phrase to image—sometimes far from obvious!

[via TechCrunch]