Do you really want to share your clickstream and search history with the world? I’m not convinced…yet.
I think it’s like wearing clothes. You don’t reveal all of yourself when you’re out walking around. You control your level of exposure, and you dress yourself up in clothes that express you. Sharing your raw click or search streams is like walking around naked. Some people are into that, but most would rather express themselves through controlled channels like blog posts, social bookmarks, photo uploads and such.
But as Greg pointed out, we are all naked to the servers that we surf.
Fred Wilson has no problem with letting it all hang out. He says “I am not a fan of privacy (clearly). I believe privacy gets in the way of discovery and learning.” He uses RootMarkets’ worm widgets to show his latest page visits and searches in real time. (Shameless self promotion: This is powered by the Attention Recorder Firefox extension, which I authored last fall.)
For myself, I’m going to keep a tighter reign on my revelations. But then, who would have imagined how willing people would be to share so much of themselves on MySpace? Maybe I’m just being old? I’ll have to think harder about this.
ok stan. i am on your blog, looking at fred’s searches, seeing that myself and jasonz and dgcohen and walking geek are the most recent visitors to your blog. as with flickr’s background authentication service, i am not sure what i am looking at that i have unique access control to, and what i am looking at that anybody else can see. clearly, fred is syndicating all searches to all that can see. but he could authorize this to only those that completed a certain task, such as accepting cookies from him or subcribing directly to his feedburner feed. to simply distinguish between privacy and publicity does not do your own work justice, in so far as informers live in the gray zone. or maybe this is just your setup for your own launch into the attention economy. hmm…. ; )
yes, all good points.
i think the main focus of my post got obscured: that people want to have control over their exposure exposure, and most people aren’t ready to reveal all. but my igorance shows: i didn’t realize how fine-grained controls the worms have. got to get to konw them better!