Future Visions

Legislating the impossible

There is no way to undo advancement. There is no way to kill a technology.

Regulators and lawmakers can pour money into enforcement, but people will continue to act as they desire so long as the risk/reward payout is worth the effort.

Regulators cannot stop BitTorrent, the market must adapt to this reality. Regulators cannot curb recreational marijuana, it's an accepted part of western society. And regulators cannot stop 3D printed firearms, it's simply the emerging technological reality.

There are laws we must keep on the books because by giving in we lose our integrity as a society.

There are penalties we must escalate in order to escalate the risk of endangering society.

The greatest challenge facing tomorrow's society will not be poor legislation but a poorly educated public. With the power of online conversation, we can and must rise above the black and white of network journalism and learn to embrace the gray. The public must learn to distinguish between safety and security, between privacy and anonymity and between personal safety and economic enforcement. 

In the digital era, lawmakers will learn to look to the collective for our input, and learn to fear our wrath.

We have the tools to overcome all of these challenges. 

But it's going to mighty shaky as we learn to adjust to these new realities.

Is the marketing world prepared for the PRISM backlash?

There is a world of difference between safe, anonymous third party cookie tracking and warrantless governmental intrusion into your online life. It’s time that we, the digital marketing industry invested in telling this story.

Last week the world learned of PRISM – a US federal initiative that reportedly uses backdoors at major online companies to monitor our private data and conversations - without a warrant. The public outcry at this alleged violation of our personal privacy has been spectacular. While there is still much about PRISM that we just don’t know, the public is now more invested than ever before in online privacy. The digital industry had better be prepared to address privacy concerns head-on. Because the storm is coming our way, and fast.

The good news is, the public has little to worry about when it comes to online user tracking. The bad news is, the public doesn’t know enough to make this judgment call.

The average person on the internet knows nothing about third party tracking and targeting. The very idea that there is a third party that is tracking our online behavior feels wrong. It feels invasive. But in actuality this is both old news and benign. Online tracking is nearly as old as the world wide web. And it only feels invasive because as an industry, we have failed to keep the public up to speed with our advances.

There is no material harm in anonymous third party tracking and targeting for targeted media. A computer that has no idea who you really are, is matching you (the reader) with ads the algorithm believes will be the most relevant. No one really knows who you are.

This tracking is in place to help you, the reader. These third party anonymous tracking solutions allow online service and content providers to offer better on-site experiences to users and more relevant advertising to us, their users. These technologies allow sites to recognize you as a user, remembering which links you have clicked and store your login data so you don’t have to log back in every time your visit from your home PC. On the revenue side, these targeted advertisements generate the revenue and profitability that allow Google, Yahoo, Hulu, Facebook, Twitter and MSN to continue to offer their content and services to us for free (or at a lower rate).

Mainstream marketers are not violating anyone’s privacy. But for an industry built on communications, we sure have failed to educate the public about the benefits of safe tracking, and the differences between safe and unsafe tracking.

There are three simple rules of safe tracking

1. Safe tracking is anonymous. 
2. Safe tracking is transparent, informing users of what is and isn’t private. 
3. Safe tracking respects your privacy, protecting your personal content, connections and conversations.

The latest PRISM reports allege that the government prove all three of these principles.

We, the marketing community, need to educate the public about safe online tracking and fast. Or the tidal wave of public concern that is hitting the US Federal Government is going to wash right over the industries we have spent the past 20 years creating.

You don't have a social media crises

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonastana/5274451294/sizes/l/in/photostream/

If your product, policy, support or communications is lacking or broken, your customers will tell you. This isn't a social crises, it's a business challenge to be addressed and overcome.

If your constituents believe false rumors about you, you have a communications problem that needs to be addressed. This isn't a platform problem, it's just magnified by the scale of social.

The rest is mostly window dressing.

Photo sharing and storage is still very broken

My primary camera is my mobile phone. I create a ton of media and want a great, free solution for backup, sharing and nagivation. But I can't seem to find any one platform that can do it all for me.

Moving Into The Cloud
I have relied on Picasa for manual photo and video storage for the past three years. Their auto-tagging features are a breeze, making navigation and discovery a pleasure. However, Picasa can get resource intensive, and in today's day and age, I'm looking for an automated cloud solution.

And here's the kicker that no platform offers - auto-tagging my kids faces. My kids are too young to be onFacebook or Google+. Apparently we only take pictures of adults, not our kids, right?

The Competitive Landscape

Facebook
+ automated backup
+ unlimited storage 

- doesn't auto sort images. Navigating these photos can be tricky.
- down-scales my images, lowering their quality 

Google+
+ automated backups
+ auto-sorts my images for me
+ unlimited photo uploads at a higher quality than Facebook
+ video backups can run up to 15 minutes at 1080p, which should cover me 

- auto-tagging in Google+ is not linked to, or as robust as auto-tagging in Picasa
- down-scales larger images. (full fidelity backup is available, but is limited to 15 gb)
- my parents, in-laws and many of my friends are not on Google+, so sharing is a hassle

Box.net
+ 50 gb of free storage

- no auto-backup option
- navigation is folder-based

Carbonite (free with desktop subscription)
+ automated backup all of the photos and videos

- no sharing or social capabilities
- weak sorting, navigation and discovery capabilities

Flickr 
+ 1 terabyte of free backup. That should be enough space to not worry about space.
+ automated uploads
+ basic image enhancement features

- no automated solutions for sorting or navigating photos
- video backups are limited to 3 minutes. This will surely annoy me from time to time.

Conclusion
No single solution meets my needs. First and foremost, no solution will recognize my kids faces. This isn't the hardest fix, and it is a very real annoyance.

For now, I will continue to automatically backup to Facebook, Google+, Carbonite and Flickr - just because it's free and why not? I will use Box.net or Dropbox to share to my parents and in-laws, though this to is a pain.

However, with a few tweaks Flickr, Facebook or Google+ could easily offer a truly robust solution. Google+ could offer a non-signed in photo experience with unique passwords to each invitee. However, given their unlimited storage I would really love to see Flickr up their automated game. I was a long time Flickr user, and with their new design and new leadership, I could see myself learning to love their platform once again.

Forget Google Glass, this is the value of wearables

The team at Eidos is really on to something here. Augmenting our reality, focusing our reality and enhancing our human experience rather than distracting from it. Art, science, health, culture, life... this is the future of computing.

 

Eidos - Sensory augmentation equipment (full version) from TJB on Vimeo.

Imitation is the sincerest form of plagiarism

Here's the latest Evian commercial, which my kids adore and I thought was pretty original.

And here's a Turkish commercial for water from a few years ago...