The Dangers of Google Docs?

(image by Dunechaser)

Garrrr! I'm a big fan of the 'owl Goggle Docs thing (the book I recently authored with two friends could not have been done without it) but it now appears that there are some serious flaws in the design of Google docs which could accidentally allow randoms with similar names to yourself to get access to the mucky contents of your docs and spreadsheets. Ouch.

From the Bits blog at the NYT:

'There was a time when it would have taken a fair amount of criminal activity to get access to this much information about a company’s internal workings and Web site performance. Now an employee can accidentally drop it into the lap of a random outsider without even knowing that anything is amiss. That’s the power of cloud computing at work.

Most of the discussion about the security of online applications revolves around whether or not you can trust Google and its competitors to protect your data. ... Google could help with this by, for example, flashing a warning before you share a document with a person you have not exchanged e-mail with in Gmail. But in the end, security requires careful typing — and perhaps some careful decisions about whether some documents would be better left behind the corporate firewall.'

Amen to that brother. Google need to sort this out, before what's currently a superb service becomes another spam and identity theft boondoggle.

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'This means nothing to me'

Vienna, Austria

A Collosal Redneck

And now, sunburnt from Rome...

The Death of the Remote Control

(image by sanofi2498)

The ever-entertaining Jay Cross threw up an amusing blog the other day, riffing on some observations by David Brooks in the NYT that reciting obscure factoids from our cultural past no longer gives you any street-cred. The new 'cool' [*makes embarrasing white-boy pseudo-gang gesture*] is to be connected to 'the now', via your iPhone or other mobile web device.

Jay sez:

'Last night at a party, instead of one-upping each other with modernist cultural artifacts, people talked of Tweets and Twirl and other blips on the radar of the greater social network. Esoterica still rules, but the successful social climber has to stay ahead of the curve: very early to the game but also among the first to announce that the new stuff has become old hat.'

And too right he is - I've noticed lately that when friends come around to my place we no longer argue over obscure facts and arcane movie trivia. Because there's no point - any of us can just search for the relevant piece of data online in seconds, leaving a previously insufferable smug git (usually me) with a sheepish expression on his face as he's proven wrong.

Another shift has been the death of the remote control - as we now no longer argue over the TV or even the iPod, but instead fight over Youtube with ever more hysterical cries of 'No, I'm just playing one more and then you can have it' as we body-block our mates from getting at the keyboard.

Brave new world etc.

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Is this Web 3.0?

Has someone, finally, given us a glimpse of what the much-fabled Web 3.0 will look like?


Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Has Google Knol already failed?

I said in a previous post that I had my reservations about Google's answer to Wikipedia, Knol. Specifically I have a serious problem with the model of placing the 'expert' at the top of the knowledge creation chain. This is in stark contrast to the Wikipedia model where (with some exceptions) anyone can create content. That content may be changed by the greater community, but that's the whole point.

Knol on the other hand places content creation in the hands of one individual - who can then choose to invite collaborators to help author or edit that 'Knol'. Ostensibly, this has a certain attraction, making content accountable as it's controlled and owned by one person. There's only one problem; this has been tried before and it failed spectacularly. That failure was known as Nupedia.

'Unlike Wikipedia, Nupedia was not a wiki; it was instead characterized by an extensive peer-review process, designed to make its articles of a quality comparable to that of professional encyclopedias. Nupedia wanted scholars to volunteer content for free. Before it ceased operating, Nupedia produced 24 articles that completed its review process (three articles also existed in two versions of different lengths), and 74 more articles were in progress.In June 2008, CNET hailed Nupedia as one of the greatest defunct websites in history.'

What amazes me most about Knol is that Google seem to have entirely failed to learn the lessons that Wikipedia taught us - the bigger the pool of authors, the greater the potential for content creation.

And I'm not alone in thinking that the entire concept of Knol is flawed. Dana Boyd comments:

'Frankly, from my POV, Knol looks like an abysmal failure. There's no life to the content. Already articles are being forgotten and left to rot, along with a lot of other web content. There's no common format or standards and there's a lot more crap than gems. The incentives are all wrong and what content is emerging is limited. The expert-centric elitism is intimidating to knowledgeable folks without letters after their names and there is little reason for those of us with letters to contribute. While I don't believe in the wisdom of a crowd of idiots, I do believe that collective creations tend to result in much better content than that which is created by an individual hermit.'

Worse still is this Guardian report which suggest that Knol is a perfect breeding ground for spammers:

'Google's new Knol system has come under fire for making itself open to spammers seeking to push their products up the search engine's rankings - in effect with the blessing of the company, which has previously sought to exclude them from its listings.

Knol, which was announced in December but only opened for wider use last month, is already being targeted by people who have realised that its characteristics are a godsend to spammers.'

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Michael Wesch's 'Anthropological Introduction to Youtube'

Uber-guru Michael Wesch (he of the The Machine is Us/Ing Us fame) is back with another Youtube goodie - this time weighing in at a whopping 55 minutes. Hilarious, brilliant and occasionally deeply touching - this is essential viewing for anyone interested in social media.

I think Michael Wesch is becoming my new hero.



(Via Stephen Downes)

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What's wrong with Cuil?

Clay Shirky threw up a tweet yesterday asking why there was so much Cuil-bashing going on. It's an interesting question. Surely a new search engine should be welcomed by those of us obsessed with social media and its close cousin search, yet cuil has been met with some fairly stiff criticism. Why?

It's hard to say exactly , but for me cuil has two fundamental problems: a seemingly overstated ability to do what it does and a marketing drive that put people's noses out of joint. Of course, cuil may not be entirely at fault here - at least in the media pronouncements about the new engine being a 'google killer'. This is most likely because Cuil have a few former Google employees on the books and sub-editors just love mentioning this.

More pointedly cuil just doesn't cut the mustard. A good number of people have reported running a search for their own name (we all did it) and being presented with a list of results showing a picture of someone from the opposite gender. Had cuil made it clear that the service is in beta (a marking which is pointedly missing from their pages) people may have been more forgiving.

This isn't to say that cuil can't evolve into something useful over time (I hope that it does) but right now, it doesn't seem quite right.

Finally, a small personal observation: the word 'cuil' itself is (according to the site's blurb) an ancient Irish term for 'knowledge'. Now, I'm Irish. I don't pretend to speak for all Paddies, but there is a certain cultural resistance amongst many of us to Irish words being appropriated for their phonetic similarity to English words in an attempt to be down with the kids. It smacks of just the sort of neo-Celtic smugness which really winds Irish people up. Frankly, it makes me think that whoever chose that name is a smug marketing prick. Sorry - knee-jerk I know, but there it is.

Anyway, here's hoping they get it right over time. And show some humility.

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