The need to protect the internet from 'astroturfing' grows ever more urgent | George Monbiot | Environment. A real person using the internet. Unfortunately we can no longer assume what we are reading is written by one of these creatures. Photograph: Jeff Blackler/Rex Features Every month more evidence piles up, suggesting that online comment threads and forums are being hijacked by people who aren't what they seem. The anonymity of the web gives companies and governments golden opportunities to run astroturf operations: fake grassroots campaigns that create the impression that large numbers of people are demanding or opposing particular policies.
This deception is most likely to occur where the interests of companies or governments come into conflict with the interests of the public. For example, there's a long history of tobacco companies creating astroturf groups to fight attempts to regulate them. After I wrote about online astroturfing in December, I was contacted by a whistleblower. Like the other members of the team, he posed as a disinterested member of the public. A. B. C. De verleiding van Facebook. De Groene Amsterdammer. The Social Web Needs Smart Mute Buttons. Mozilla announced today a new add-on to its email program Thunderbird, a button called Mute Thread. It's a simple way to say "I'm not interested in this right now, but I might come back to it later. " It's an alternative to unsubscribing forever and it's a very smart idea. If everything had a button like that, people would feel comfortable subscribing to more things in the first place. Can you imagine if your cable TV provider said "this package includes 100 channels - but you have to watch every single one of them every day"?
Thunderbird's Mute Thread add-on is still experimental and the seeks developer assistance, but it sure would be great to see this kind of feature built into more platforms than just email. MuteThread screen cast from Dan Mosedale on Vimeo. Twitter client software Tweetdeck enables a user to block messages containing keywords, a crude way to mute out Lost spoilers or Apple announcement overload. Above: Unsatisfactory options.
There are conflicting paradigms at issue: Forget Social Strategy, Think Social Philosophy: Hippie 2.0.
Website. Web 2.0 Concepts Key to Kiva’s Success | Global Advances Blog - Yahoo! debuts! mobile! creepware! | The Register. High performance access to file storage Camping World Congress If you thought Facebook's Beacon ad program had FAIL written all over it, wait until you see what Yahoo! Has in store for you. Like Beacon, the new "OneConnect" program follows Web 2.0's logic to its natural conclusion – you see what everyone else is doing, even when you don't want to. OneConnect is essentially a single sign-on to social networks such as Facebook and Bebo, web services like Twitter and IM services including MSN, and Yahoo! 's own chat. It then binds them to proximity information so you can see what everyone is "twittering", and how near to you they are. "I want to view the activity of people around me," explained Marco Boerries, Yahoo! ' That's easy enough to do, you're thinking - just look out of the window, Marco.
OneConnect isn't just a "mash up" - it's the best thing to happen to stalkers since the invention of the dirty raincoat. The man in the 2.0 raincoat: Yahoo! ' For example, my Yahoo! Lurker alert! Bootnote. FOAFster -- Mashable FOAF, from MyBlogLog. What's This? FOAFster is a prototype visualizer for Friend Of A Friend relationship objects. What you're seeing here are icons for a bunch of FOAF contacts, scattered around the screen, and network services, in a much neater line at the top. About FOAF I've been interested in FOAF for a long time. Abstracting out all my social relationships into a separate layer, just as I do with my presentation and behavior layers, really resonates. Future possibilities like being able to point marketers at my FOAF object so they will quit wasting their time trying to sell me timeshares seems like a very real possibility. The problem?
What changed today? Why MyBlogLog's FOAF Is Superior All this is generated and re-generated for me, whenever I add a service or a contact, and whenever any of those contacts add a service of their own. Although other services like LiveJournal and FriendFeed are doing this, MyBlogLog's FOAF is superior. Want to Play?
Kennisdelen. Microsoft.