A Call for Ethical Tech
Software developers must consider the ethical impact of their actions or risk dire consequences.
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Protecting our electronic infrastructures
The US government gets serious about electronic threats.
Dark Side of the Blogosphere
Death threat against a popular blogger represent a new challenge to free speech on the internet.
Blog, Internet, and Marketing
For the past week, I’ve been posting a fair amount about the raging cow and about establishing trust in a market where marketers are trying to get in side by side with other bloggers. Chris Pirillo makes some good points about the raging cow campaign: Is it so bad if they are trying to engage us in a conversation? If markets are conversations, as a popular book says, is Dr. Pepper doing the right thing? It’s a tough question to answer. After all, they are trying to do what we told them they should do. On a related matter, the blog world is now abuzz with a description of the Internet as an agreement. While the document provides an interesting set of concepts that are sound from a purely technical standpoint (yes, the underlying standards of the Internet are based on an agreement), it does not cover the variety of choices of what is on the Internet. If the goal is to say “hey, the Internet is just an agreement to tie networks together” then World of Ends succeeds. But the contention that this makes a difference does not really matter much in today’s world. What world of ends does…
Trust, truth and networks
The raging cow incident shows that there’s a need to establish trust in the blogging (and maybe the web) world. Tim Bray demonstrates that most bloggers have relationships to products, concepts, companies, and other bloggers. His declaration of truth is a good start but there are a number of things that still need to be done. Meanwhile, Scott Johnson asks the important question: How will we establish the current level of trust we have for blogs?. It is an important question that requires much thought. In the discussions surrounding my suggestion of how we can level the playing field, I’ve learned a couple of things: First, whatever solution we come up with must be easy to implement. It is easy for those of us who are more technical to come up with XML rules and complex structure to represent the world. However, most people neither have interest nor experience in experimenting with such thing. Hence the first rule of any answer is that whatever solution is implemented, it needs to be simple. Second, trust is a very large issue and some portions of it are being addressed. For example, FOAF allows you to establish trust between friends. But what about…
