When Google rolled out Buzz in mid-February, people were angered by the type of privacy breaches which have plagued another social medium. The three main issues for Buzz were:

• auto generation of follower lists from individuals’ private email and chat behavior
• auto completion of some email addresses in a feature similar to Twitter’s @reply
• auto connection to Google Reader and Picasa Web Albums.

Google responded to privacy concerns within days. However, for some who had very real privacy concerns, this simply wasn’t good enough.

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.

There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?

My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

There’s still a lot to learn about how we integrate privacy into new products, but we know the golden rule - personal information should never be published without personal consent.

This is what we want.

We want our inventions to make our lives better, not to make us their slaves.

We want our progress to serve us, so that we can enjoy our lives, nurture our relationships, be better people.

And this guy–David Merrill–is making it happen.

Technology that delights, that amazes, that doesn’t change who we are but that exposes us to the joy of who we are.

Cool.

From ars technica: Two-thirds of Americans without broadband don’t want it:

But when we look at the overall reasons why Americans don’t have broadband, availability isn’t the biggest barrier. Neither is price. Those two, combined, only account for one-third of Americans without broadband. Two-thirds simply don’t want it.

…The bigger issue is a lack of perceived value. 19 percent of dial-up users, for example, say that “nothing” would get them to upgrade, not even lower prices. Of the 25 percent of Americans that don’t regularly use the Internet at all (Hi, Mom!), a third said that they were “not interested in going online,” almost ten percent thought it was too “difficult,” and seven percent simply don’t “have time.”

Two-thirds. Of all Americans. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 million people.

Think about that, next time you’re reading your blogroll and believing there’s no life outside of Facebook. Think about that, next time your mom or uncle says something hopelessly ignorant about the Internet. You think they’re behind the times? Perhaps. But they’re not alone.

If you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you’re a Web convert. You wouldn’t have gotten here if you were just a drive-by connector. And so, like me, you perhaps have a hard time conceiving of life without a computer; like me, you may chafe with frustration if your access is cut off even briefly; like me, you may wonder how you got by without, and what could those people who don’t want broadband possibly be thinking?

Do you know what that makes us? Converts. Evangelists. Kool-Aid drinkers. We realize — or at least, we think we realize — that our lives are vastly better thanks to our connectivity. And we think everyone else’s lives will be better, if only they’d wake up to the possibility of what’s out there.

Ars also points out (thank goodness, or we might as well all give up and go home) that “(t)hose who have broadband tend to want more of it”, and that’s certainly been my experience. Living in a country that’s even more accessibility-challenged than the U.S., I have noticed that the ones who don’t complain about the broadband here (or the ones who complain about the people who complain about broadband) are the ones who haven’t experienced the joy of unrestricted bandwidth.

So what is our societal obligation? What is the best thing to do for a city, a state, a nation, an economy?

To me, tummy full of Kool-Aid, the answer is simple: if you build it, they will come.

Full connectivity will soon be table stakes in a flat world. Full connectivity is the best hope we’ve ever had of offering a level playing field in terms of education and trade. Full connectivity is what will allow small, remote countries to compete on a global scale.

If people don’t want to take advantage of it, you can’t make them. But if you’re not even giving them the opportunity, then they don’t stand a chance.

What do you think?

Technorati has just come out with its State of the Blogosphere report for 2008, and the results are either promising or disturbing, depending on your viewpoint.

As Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim points out, the key statistic is that, while the number of blogs in the world has nearly doubled in the past year and a half, post frequency has plummeted in absolute terms, from 1.3 million posts per day to 900,000 per day. This means that the drop in relative terms is even greater.

In short, starting a blog is still trendy, but maintaining a blog is less so. It’s like reservations. Taking them is easy; holding them, less so.

It’s obvious why a drop in blog posts is disturbing. We’re afraid they’re losing their cool, that our vibrant blogosphere will fade into a shriveled husk to match the newspaper industry.

What Andy Beal doesn’t mention, though, is the upside: pretenders come and go, but contenders persist.

We all know the best attribute of the blogosphere is also its biggest weakness: anyone can start one, and anyone can write anything. Even I can write stuff. But, as Andrew Keen so elegantly rants in The Cult of the Amateur, the bulk of what gets written is garbage (except my stuff).

So all of the people who thought blogging was an easy way to fame and fortune have realized the sobering truth: as in every other endeavor, there’s no magic pill. You won’t become an instant superstar. You have to work at it, invest in it, contribute to the community.

Which means that the people who aren’t ready, able and willing to give blogging the attention it needs find their blogs withering on the vine, while the people who put in the requisite effort reap the rewards. Long term benefit to the readers/writers/webbers: less material, but higher quality.

Incidentally, this expansion-contraction is utterly normal and should be totally unsurprising. It’s in economies and governments. It’s in design, as my friend Dorenda points out. It is, essentially, universal.

Management guru Peter Drucker said that you can’t legislate morality, meaning that you can’t force someone, for example, to care about her job. All you can do is manage symptoms. I agree with him, but I’ve also noticed that success or failure is more dependent on ‘morality’ than on symptoms. Starting a blog is a symptom. Maintaining a blog is morality.

What say you?

I thought it would be unfair to spend last week blogging about all the other presenters at WORLDCOMP’08 and OMMA Behavioral without sharing my own presentation with you! So I’ve recorded it, and I’m putting it together with the slide show so you can share in the love. Expect the video sometime tomorrow.

In the meantime, I’d like you to enjoy a delightful piece from Nicholas Carr at The Atlantic called, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Nicholas has written a long article about our growing inability to consume long articles.

Here is one of the many passages that should rekindle your ability to ponder:

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. ‘The perfect recall of silicon memory,’ Wired?s Clive Thompson has written, ‘can be an enormous boon to thinking.’ But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I too read less. These days, when I am inclined to pick up a “book” (a strange device with physical pages and black ink), I lean more towards Grisham than Goethe. I find that I have to force myself to read the sort of non-fiction that keeps my mind sharp and my thinking fresh.

So in the interest of keeping this post at a length commensurate with our newly shortened attention spans, I’ll stop here and turn it over to you. Have you found your thought processes changing with the use of the Interweb? Are you more in the market for ‘War and Peace’ or ‘Dilbert’? In short, has the Internet made you stupid?

Nova Spivack, of Twine fame, has come out with an interesting blog post questioning whether our ‘junk’ DNA (the 97% of our DNA that doesn’t code for amino acids) could be a more effective storage mechanism for communal knowledge than Wikipedia:

There is of course one other place to store knowledge which may be even better than the Wikipedia — and that is DNA. By storing knowledge in human DNA of living humans, or of common bacteria for that matter, it could then potentially be passed down and spread through generations into the far future. However the mutability of DNA over time might gradually introduce errors that would degrade the information within particular lines of DNA over long periods of time.

Perhaps this could however be mitigated by comparing DNA samples from a large cross-section of individuals within the population of descendants of original holders of DNA-knowledge-archives in the future — this would effectively enable statistical error cancellation. The farther in the future from the date at which the knowledge is “written” to the DNA of some number of humans, the more people’s DNA would be needed to eliminate the errors statistically. This would however in principle counteract mutations and enable the reliable recovery of messages in DNA even very far in the future.

Interestingly, the problem that he posits here and his proposed solution mirror the wiki process itself: by gathering data from everyone, errors are likely to occur, but by normalizing across a large sample, those errors should be minimized if not eliminated.

Spivack goes on to cite an article by Karl Kruszelnicki about a language that possibly already exists in our DNA:

According to the linguists, all human languages obey Zipf’s Law. It’s a really weird law, but it’s not that hard to understand. Start off by getting a big fat book. Then, count the number of times each word appears in that book. You might find that the number one most popular word is “the” (which appears 2,000 times), followed by the second most popular word “a” (which appears 1,800 times), and so on. Right down at the bottom of the list, you have the least popular word, which might be “elephant”, and which appears just once.

Set up two columns of numbers. One column is the order of popularity of the words, running from “1″ for “the”, and “2″ for “a”, right down “1,000″ for “elephant”. The other column counts how many times each word appeared, starting off with 2,000 appearances of “the”, then 1,800 appearances of “a”, down to one appearance of “elephant”.

If you then plot on the right kind of graph paper, the order of popularity of the words, against the number of times each word appears you get a straight line! Even more amazingly, this straight line appears for every human language - whether it’s English or Egyptian, Eskimo or Chinese! Now the DNA is just one continuous ladder of squillions of rungs, and is not neatly broken up into individual words (like a book).

So the scientists looked at a very long bit of DNA, and made artificial words by breaking up the DNA into “words” each 3 rungs long. And then they tried it again for “words” 4 rungs long, 5 rungs long, and so on up to 8 rungs long. They then analysed all these words, and to their surprise, they got the same sort of Zipf Law/straight-line-graph for the human DNA (which is mostly introns), as they did for the human languages!

There seems to be some sort of language buried in the so-called junk DNA! Certainly, the next few years will be a very good time to make a career change into the field of genetics.

Incidentally, this type of analysis is what generates most great discoveries: somebody looking at two things that have never before been connected to each other and saying, “Hey, there’s a pattern here!”

Spivack goes on to suggest that all we need is a way of writing to the DNA and we’re sweet (assuming we also have a way to read it).

Wouldn’t it be great? Imagine you’re the first person encoded?you’d be unstoppable at pub quizzes. You’d make millions on Jeopardy! and 1 vs. 100. You’d be totally insufferable (nobody likes a literal know-it-all), but at least you’d be rich.

Unfortunately, there’s an issue. Not with the idea that societal knowledge can be carried within us?that already exists. How else do salmon know where to go? No, it’s more the idea of our ability to mechanically control this process that pulls me up short.

Mainly, the problem is that there’s no single-source option for DNA. If somebody updates Wikipedia, we all see the updated version, but with DNA, you’d have to have an intimidatingly active sex life to make sure new information is properly distributed.

And how do you handle the question of version control? It would be worse than figuring out whether you qualify as a Native American. “Well, my great-great-grandmother was first infected with knowledge in 2014, so my batch is more recent than yours…” What a mess.

Sorry, Nova, I think we’ve got a ways to go before your idea can be made a reality. I will say this, though, if you can make the semantic web happen, I’ll back you for wikiDNA as well.

(hat tip: Brian Hayes)