Forgive, forget or just honest reportage?

Your real digital future, don't kid yourself.

"I am who I am today because of the choices i made yesterday" - Eleanor Roosevelt

Should one’s past  be held against you for the rest of your life, and beyond, or should you be allowed to retreat into obscurity? This debate is a fascinating example of how far removed most commentators, legislators and regulators are from the technology which is driving the question in the first place. From the usual points of view this is being driven by people who don’t want youthful and trivial discretions to be held against people thirty years later. This is partially a red herring, there will always be finger prints of past actions available, in the decades and centuries before the internet it was called a reputation and no one was taken seriously without one, for good or bad. What this particular legislative demand is about isn’t the right to be forgotten, it’s about wanting to edit your past, to edit your online reputation to remove the sleazy bits. Now various people will champ at the bit and state that the right to correct errors is vital. But who chooses what is an error and who chooses to edit it? the moment you open that particular Pandora’s box a world of nasties can explode from political figures editing their pasts to criminals attempting to slide away from the consequences of their actions.

the dark side of marketing and analytics

too perfect for words..

“Data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” Neuromancer: William Gibson

As I’ve mentioned before, once you get enough data in one place you can throw processor cycles at and reach some interesting conclusions pretty fast. What’s stopped us from doing this in the past was two simple factors, not enough accessible data and the price of processor cycles.

Twit, tweet and edgy marketing

I’m enjoying the cautionary tale of the latest ham fisted twitter marketing campaign as reported by the Telegraph here: Twitter users angered by Rio Ferdinand's Snickers 'adverts'. I’ve always found it amusing how quickly common sense goes out of the window for marketers and celebrities when that locus of time and money gets tight enough.

Peace and quiet

Is your data really as complete as you think it is?

Today is one of those quieter days, which generates rather mixed feelings, on one hand I can get on with a tonne of stuff and finish off this nightmarish proposal but on the other hand the reason the place is quieter is that my daughter has gone back home to her mother’s and the place feels a little too quiet.