wanderingstan

This from Greg Yardley sums up my attitude too:

I’ve got no real interest in any of the crappy brands I’m given the ability to ‘endorse‘ on Facebook. You know what I want to endorse? Neat stuff. Handmade stuff. Obscure stuff. Edgy stuff. Things I think my friends will actually like, and won’t hear about on their own from a million other people. When I can click a bookmarklet or fill out a quick form and let everyone know how much I’m enjoying the monster laptop sleeve from Barry’s Farm, without forcing Barry’s Farm to pay a bajillion dollars for the privilege, then we’ll talk. And if Facebook as a company doesn’t realize that that type of recommendation - which disrupts and destroys traditional advertising, instead of trying to prop it up - is ultimately more valuable to them than whatever Coca-Cola’s paying, they’re not nearly as smart as they think they are.

What if a site could record all the behavior of its visitors? I wrote about this a few weeks ago with my about a little hack to record all the text selections that are made here on wanderingstan.com. (It’s still recording, as you can see.)

Well, as is so often the case online, someone has already done it. Yesterday I learned about tapefailure.com.

Tapefailure lets you record your users’ browsing sessions and play them back, just like a tape, as well as view numerous userful statistics about your users.

There are of course privacy concerns, but once again I recall the insight of Greg Yardley from last summer regarding the AOL search scandal.

Stop treating the Internet like a book or newspaper and remember that whatever you’re looking at is simultaneously looking at you.

(Previously mentioned here.)

Yardley’s advice may be lost on us old fogies, but I was encouraged yesterday by reading Dana Boyd’s keynote talk at Etech.

The rules of privacy are fundamentally changing. For the first time, an entire generation is forced to deal and, for the most part, they are dealing. It’s not pretty and there are plenty of hiccups, but they’re doing a lot better than us old folk. … Personally, I think that we need to look to them to see what they’re doing and try learning from it.

Great quote from my insightful former coworker Greg Yardley about the AOL search history scandal.

Stop treating the Internet like a book or newspaper and remember that whatever you’re looking at is simultaneously looking at you.

Every page request, every graphic dispalyed, every search query; each is a small exchange in a conversation. And Web 2.0 is all about conversations. But this is a substrata of conversation going on below all those blogs and forums and comments.