Just let me opt-out by default please. Thanks.

So in my ongoing quest to find all things interesting on the internet, I started noticing something strange this weekend. Do you ever type in the wrong URL for a particular website you want to access? We all do.

Normally you’d see an error like this in Firefox:

But if you have Time Warner Cable as your ISP, then you might have started to notice this when you mistype your URL:

Now I didn’t think much of it at first, but then the more that I ran into it, the more irritating it got. So Time Warner Cable is in a way, invading my privacy. Yes I suppose it might be useful if I meant to type in www.annenbergonlinecommunities.com (correct) vs www.annenbergonlinecommunitiess.com (which is incorrect). But more disturbingly, is what is suggested to me as “related searches”. I’m not sure what the hell is going on here, (I clear my cookies out all the time, and delete all private information from my browser on a regular basis) so I have no idea where it’s getting this information from as “relevant”. So military.com, blackpeople.com, Gay Boy, so on and so forth, Road Runner is telling me this is relevant to www.annenbergonlinecommunitiess.com???? Seriously now… that’s ridiculous!

I guess what really irks me is the fact that something so simple as an error message has transformed into an ISPs attempt monetize its users’ mistakes. Yes, I can see how this may be helpful, but can they make it any more obvious what they are trying to do? I’d like to see an initial page explaining what the DNS redirection is doing before they actually do it. And what about giving the users the choice to opt-in or opt-out in the first DNS redirection.

What this all boils down to is net neutrality. We’ve seen users’ Google home pages hijacked by ISPs before which made some people mad. So how does this all relate to the privacy concerns of online communities? Well if you remember, Facebook released a very unpopular feature called beacon. It caused a major uproar for it’s privacy issues. Well long story short, Facebook eventually gave its users the ability to opt-out from using the feature. I’d say I’m definitely a big proponent for letting the user decide whether or not to use a particular feature. Additionally, I say we give the user the choice from the start, before the feature is even used or implemented (like the ISP’s DNS redirection, beacon, etc). Why not make it clear what is being offered as a “service” to those users who don’t understand all of this legal mumbo-jumbo. Yes I know I can turn of Time Warner Cable’s DNS redirection here and beacon as described here.

But can they just make it easy on a user, especially the moms and dads, the less tech-savvy, uninformed average Joe/Jane of the internet. So yes, we can opt-out, but we need to critically think about the options given to us by our online communities, and now, even our ISPs. Give me the option to choose, and give me an explanation that even my grandmother would be able to understand.

Intellectual 1’s and 0’s. On The Virtual 1’s and 2’s.

This week the readings from class deal with intellectual property, so it’s kind of ironic that I just watched this documentary on the Metrolink for the hour trip from Upland to Union Station this week. The 60 minute documentary Good Copy Bad Copy, is about intellectual property, copyright and music culture as it relates to the digital age. The documentary is great because it takes interviews from different members of the music/movie industry, academics, and more as they provide their perspective on new media. What interested me most from this documentary (and related to our readings) was Lawrence Lessig’s interview, and his stance on digital copyright. While Lessig agrees that copyright is necessary and can’t be overlooked in the digital sense, he argues that it is important to keep the creativity for digital work alive by allowing users the freedom to manipulate and use digital material in it’s own context. This argument is the reason why the Creative Commons exists, for a brief summary, view this pdf.

The Creative Commons is important because it allows the creators of content to assign specific freedoms to their intellectual property that would be immediately applicable in their digital form. Flickr takes a proactive approach with the photos that its users upload by letting them attach a Creative Commons license to any photo uploaded to their site. All photos with the CC license can be viewed here.

While I don’t have Creative Commons enabled on my own Flickr, the fact that I can more easily share my photography with others and allow them to more creatively use it with my permission is great. I haven’t given much thought about it, but after the readings this week, I feel like I need to share my work with others in the same way I hope their work can be shared with me.

Getting back to the documentary… it’s clear that the ability to manipulate, develop, and create brand new content from existing musical releases is becoming easier, but it’s also allowing for more innovative and more interesting work. I can remember back in high school, about 9 years ago as a freshman, I was really involved in the whole digital-remixing phase long before it reached the ubiquitous nature of today with products like Scratch Live that most aspiring DJs use (interesting/controversial because it allows DJs to manipulate their digital copies of music on real turntables), and the ones that are solely on the computer (plenty are listed in the ArsTechnica article).

As an avid user of Virtual Turntables back in the day (yes I did use it on Windows 98, we go way back), I was inspired by a friend of mine who lived next door to me. With the power of the internet, a computer, and CDs ready to rip to my computer, I was ready to start a revolution (or so I thought). Night after night, I perfected my craft, I even made a few remixes that I posted to message boards. Thinking about it now I’d love to go back and listen to what I was putting together, but I have to find my old windows desktop… But to think, the power of what I had, what eventually would take place, I couldn’t even imagine… but I did find an old screenshot of the software

[UPDATED] After all of this, if you feel intrigued this school/work day off, you can stream the whole Good Copy Bad Copy documentary on Google Video blip.tv. Watch it embedded below:

from blip.tv posted with vodpod

The best ideas aren’t just from Apple anymore.

Much to my surprise, I don’t think I would have given Dell much credit in being able to create an effective online community, but they have, and it’s awesome. Do you ever wonder how you would make a suggestion to Apple or Sony on how to make their computers better? Well, more commonly you’d find that they have some sort of feedback page, where you can supposedly “contact” them directly about any suggestions or comments you have about their products. Apple has a page like that here. That’s fine and dandy if you have the time and effort to write a detailed piece on why their computer is too heavy, too clunky, breaks easily, etc… Sometimes you find out that your suggestion is similar to the thoughts of other people you know. Pretty soon you realize that there’s thousands of people online that share the same opinion, and all you have is a form that you send out to the company, hoping that someone out there is listening to you. Initially an internet savvy user might go to his/her favorite online community and start a small discussion there, but that doesn’t really mean that Dell, Apple, or whoever is listening. Well that’s all changing right now because Dell has introduced a site called Ideastorm.

Connectedmarketing.org made a good point in it’s first prediction that connected marketing would become more strategic, where innovation becomes the focus rather than promotion. This holds true in the highly competitive market of electronics and especially computers. Once upon a time, Dell would not have been in the same sentence as innovation. But with the connected marketing that is being used with Ideastorm, Dell has provided an online community that gives it a better reputation with its customers, and can potentially help them provide better products in the future.

The format of the website is familiar to the concept behind Digg.com. Basically a suggestion or idea is submitted and posted to the site. From there, users of this website can approve (promote) or disapprove (demote) each idea. Not only does this affect its placement on the site (front page or bottom of the list) it helps show Dell what ideas are most important to its user community. The idea behind this is ingenious because it requires that the users of this online community stay involved, by providing comments on each idea, and checking to see if Dell has recognized any in its ideas in action page. So not only does Dell have a way to easily market it’s new products, they are doing so in a way that is utilizing ideas that originate from its own customers.