danielheaf.com

Digital Privacy

Digital privacy and it's implications on society is an issue of growing concern. Over the last month I've been along to a few privacy / identity discussions and I thought it might be useful to post some top level thoughts.

• The lines between personal / public / private / professional are blurring
• Like Moore's Law the amount of personal information online doubles every 6 months
• The UK population are not well versed on how to manage their digital identities
• Children are most vulnerable as parents themselves lack the necessary experience and knowledge to educate them
• We're lost sight of how to define and discuss privacy intelligently
• Privacy allows individuals to experiment and fail without fear of retribution
• To give up privacy is to give up freedom
• A society that doesn't protect privacy becomes a society without trust and integrity
• Companies and governments are not as benign as we have been led to believe

Advertising: future trends

The European online advertising industry is at most two years behind receiving its “fair share” of ad spending based upon consumers’ time spent online. The Internet’s highest possible expected share of the European ad market in 2006 was nine percent, a level it will surpass in 2008 - Jupiter Research (June 2008)

In the global advertising market, traditional television advertising is still the core purchase in advertising campaigns, with higher rates and longer purchase deals than those found in all other media.

According to JupiterResearch consumer surveys, European online users increased their median weekly online time by 25 percent between 2006 and 2007. This growth has created a new advertising opportunities, deeply attuned to digital user behaviour actions and taste expressions.

Subsequently it's of no surprise that internet advertising is the fastest growing segment of all ad spending. In certain markets, industry associations report that online ad spending has overtaken spending on some traditional advertising channels.

Of it's annual $4.8 billion in gross ad-revenue, Google paid $1.4 billion to it's various advertising partners. Ad networks are springing up everywhere to aggregate sales for smaller and more specialised markets. Creating and distributing targeted advertising is happening outside of traditional advertising agencies.

Some numbers:

US online ad spending is expected to reach $48 billion by 2011, and $75 billion globally. However, we should bear in mind that when the relatively lower value of advertising within nonmedia online activities is considered, the Internet’s potential share of all ad opportunities can fall dramatically.

Rich media and video spending will continue to grow reaching $1.35 billion (5%) by the end of the year. By 2011 10% of internet advertising will be rich media / video.

Trends

• Digital media solutions and targeted analytics will evolve differently for each adverting category.
  
• Sophisticated advertising formats and sales networks will be necessary to maximise placement across complementary digital media platforms including mobile, social, video and even game-like virtual worlds.
• Overall, the future outlook of online advertising may be in targeted advertising. However, this particular path still remains a double-edged sword: privacy is a huge issue and some advertisers will still opt for scale rather than niche user profiles.
• Over the long term, Google’s online ad monopoly is likely to end, as there are many new players with increasingly aggressive acquisition strategies.
• Data privacy will be a key consideration as players seek to make advertising more targeted. Serious issues were raised with Facebook over how it might use its members’ data, for instance serving relevant advertisements based on keywords in users’ profiles.
• Advertisers have traditionally paid significantly higher prices for advertising opportunities within media- related activities than for advertising opportunities within nonmedia activities. Developing non-media advertising solutions is key if online advertising is to fulfil it's promise.

Comment is freed

Commenting is synonymous with blogging and the notion of blogging is a conversion meme is a long standing one. Blogs, at their best, are like finely tuned forums where authors serve as moderators, starting discussion threads with posts. However, plenty of bloggers switch comments off. High profile example's include Dave Winer, Seth Godin, and Marc Andreessen. On the whole it's not that they wish to deny readers the opportunity to discuss and debate issues raised, it's that the negative effects of enabling comments outweigh the positive. If your blog is popular or you're writing about on sensitive issues you're likely to face a litany of time absorbing problems including spam, low quality, off-topic or threatening comments. It's another case of the technology and infrastructure not being mature enough to fully support the ambition.

Although comments are one of the most pervasive examples of user-generated the systems that generate and display them suffer from a number of common problems:

• Organisation: wouldn’t it be nice if the comments were organized in a broadly useful way? For example, wouldn't it be cool if I could search horizontally across all blog comments for topics like you can with the blogs themselves. Wouldn't it be great if I could track conversations properly tuning my attention to the latest debates of interest to me? Wouldn't it be cool if I could aggregate in one place the remarks I made over the web.
• Authentication: wouldn't it be great if I could log in once and not need to re-authenticate every time I visited another blog site.
• Reputation: What if identity was actually managed, so you could look and see all the comments that Cory Doctorow made, regardless of which blogs they were on. Or you could rate comments and give them authority based on reputation? Wouldn't it be cool I was recognised as having authority in some subjects and not in others.
• Indexed: comments are rarely indexed so they have become the dark matter of the blogosphere.

Of course some of these problems are rooted in the very architecture of the web itself and so common across multiple sites and services. Unsurprisingly, while nothing has ever really stuck, some solutions like TypeKey were proposed.

Over the last few months the battle for better blog comments has heated up with a rash of services, including coComment, Co.mments, Commentful, Disqus, Intense Debate and SezWho.

All these services offer a slightly different service with varying complexity. Co.mments is the simplest service offering a elementary browser bookmarklet that lets you (or your readers) track conversations regardless of whether or not the stock commenting system offers such a feature.

Disgus and Intense Debate are both offering a distributed commenting system, meaning if several sites have it installed, users can share the same identity (including login) on each site. Each user profile includes commenting karma. SezWho is unique in that it's not a replacement for your existing commenting system, it simply enhances the one you have by offering membership into Sezwho's network. This network layers on a reputation and rating system to comments and users of your blog. coComment is similar but without user voting. Although not strictly comments MyBlogLog offers a much lower friction way adding interactivity and enhanced community your blog through presence.

However, these system are only as good as the blogs they sign up. With each of the services being mutually exclusive, there are only so many strong blog communities to compete over. Until some common protocols are established or a single provider establishes a commanding market share we're just moving the information from one to another, albeit slightly larger pot.