Brave New World

A year ago, Skype launched its “The Skype Nomad”. The story behind this is an Australian writer, Rebecca Campbell, known as the Nomad who travelled around the world, followed digital by lots of fans.

The 26 year old travelled around the world in 33 days, without stopping. Not even to sleep or eat. She slept and ate on the aeroplane or in the train and travelled like this through 15 countries like China, Australia, the US, Italy, Estonia, UK and many more. She not just used traditional ways of travelling but also a hot air balloon, dog sleds and bumboats.

The mission Skype followed by this was to make people aware of the ability it provides to keep in touch all over the world, everytime.

Rebecca Campbell not only told people about her latest adventures in her blog, she also kept in touch with everybody who was interested through a number of Skype enabled gadgets. Additional, she had a Facebook and a Myspace page.

Skype never used traditional advertising tools, but it has over 309 million users all over the world.
I’m a Skype user myself and especially whilst studying abroad it helps me keeping in touch with friends and family at home, but it also helps organising some group work for uni for example.

I think Skype found a really suitable way to point out its advantages and character, but showed as well how all the other social media tools enable people all over the world to keep in touch.

Imagine sitting on your computer, uncovering personal photos, videos, and secrets of other people… tempting?

Well, spokeo.com promotes itself by guaranteeing exactly this.

The Web does not only let emerge new words, as it seems it also gives people ideas for new businesses.
Through a comment of one of my former posts (Does Facebook reflect my reputation?) I became aware of a webpage that offers a detailed “research” on your friends, nearly in real time. It provides the possibility to follow your friends on all of their Internet activities. The user of spokeo.com is asked to provide his Email password, which is used by the server to compare the address book of this particular email address. Those addresses again are used to check out the Internet activities of the friends. The friends, however, will never find out that they were spied on – if friends is still the right expression here.

To learn more about spokeo.com watch this.

To be honest, I find this idea quiet mental and I kind of see some ethical problems here.

First of all, why would someone need to spy on his friends? That would show that this person would have lost any real social contact and the ability to communicate. Besides the fact that status updates and photos in several kinds of social media already reveal a lot about someone. But these updates are made conciously and with the purpose to be seen rather than being spied out secretly.

Additional, wouldn’t this undermine the open and democratic character of Web 2.0?

I guess it just shows again: despite the tempting freedom Web 2.0 seems to offer, it has to be taken with caution. Because the less you expose about yourself, the less can be found.

And when someone really wants to know more about you – there is still something called face-to-face communication…

Critics of the new draft legislation for the closure of Web pages in Germany, which are in relation with child pornography, were successful by setting up an online petition against it last week. In record time of just four days 55.000 votes could be collected to protest against the law. Main tools for spreading the message were again blogs and twitter.

But what could possibly be wrong about a law, which tries to combat child pornography? Well, that was my first thought as well when I read about it in the news.

Looking on the law a bit more in depth makes it a bit clearer I think.

The law would allow the Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany (Bundeskriminalamt) to list every webpage they consider as dangerous in terms of child pornography on a daily basis and the provider would have to block these pages. Lots of Internet providers in Germany already confirmed their approval.

The thing is that that would not solve the actual problem, as the culprit could still operate on other pages or outside the web. This means that the actual problem would not be solved at all.
If the law would be processed probably similar regulations would follow, which would undermine the democratic character of the Internet.

I think it would be better to start at the source of the problem and first of all educate people how to protect themselves from this kind of criminality.

And I think the success of the online petition tells its own tale: it showed that the web really is a very democratic place and that the potential for fighting against something exists.

A few weeks ago I joined Twitter – finally. But still, I do not really get the point of it to be honest. Maybe that is why I am a quiet infrequent user of it. And that again might be the reason why I do not get the point of it.

But now I have learned about a new tool in combination with Twitter which ranks the popularity of the political parties in Germany with regard to the “Bundestagswahl 2009”, which will take place in September.

Here is how it works: if Twitter users in Germany post their tweets, they put the name of the party at the end of their tweet and combine it with the hashtag and a minus or plus, depending on their opinion. This is then used to create a bar chart, which can be viewed on a weekly or daily basis.
I found that quiet interesting, as I generally believe that as a massive part of the general communication moved to the Web, the political communication should as well. And like Barack Obama proved, this can be very successful.

The Wahlgetwitter (election twittering), what it is called, might not be very representative yet, but regarding the 27.000 people who use twitter actively in Germany, there is definitely potential for an effective use of it.

Using twitter like that seems a bit more to the point and might encourage an actual communication about something which really matters and where everybody could profit from.
It might be platitudes, which make twitter looking a bit pointless – although that is what it actually asks for: What are you doing?

Maybe that should not be taken too literal…

When MEP for South East England Daniel Hannan delivered his attack on Gordon Brown on Wednesday in the European Parliament, the press didn’t pay much attention. But the public did. So it came that the video he posted on Youtube got the most hits in less time – 1,270,568 views until now and 8,752 comments so far, not just from English people.

The video spread like a virus through the Internet, with support of first Twitter, followed by links to several blogs.

The media didn’t feel that this speech was newsworthy obviously, but the public did.
That’s an obvious example of how the media turns into pull media. The whole communication process becomes people powered by people actively searching for the information they want to.

But that means for Public Relations as well as for the politicians to give up some control, as Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics states. And I guess that’s something what still scares some people. Understandably to a certain extend.

But democracy shouldn’t be about control anyway, rather than being about participation. And if politicians use these new tools attentive they can get a much closer look on what the people think, need and want, as through new media the thoughts, needs and beliefs of people are exactly reflected.

And then the “risk” of giving up control can be very rewarding in the end.

As Daniel Hannan states on his blog, it was really surprising for him how his speech hit the web. He posted videos like that since seven weeks, but they never got that much attention. And honestly, there are more entertaining videos on Youtube.

Maybe he just said what many people actually thought. Because I suppose people just get active, whether it is online or offline, when they see the need for a change.

After Google launched its new Street View a couple of days ago I naturally searched my present house as well as where I lived last summer. And there we go: there is my towel on the window. At this point my mixed feelings about it turned into an odd feeling and I felt kind of caught – although I didn’t do anything like being sick in front of a pub or leaving a sex shop. But just the fact that there is something I recognise as mine and the mere thought of someone taking pictures of my home scares me a bit to be honest. And I’m obviously not the only one: people fear stalking, planned burglar, terrorist attacks and misuse like that. It doesn’t really reassures me though that they’ve „got 99.9% of it right“, as Parsons insists.

What is the point in it however, besides the fact that it is actually fascinating to search your own street and the houses of friends?

It would make sense if it was just commercial or public buildings or tourist attractions, but why private houses?

Talking of tourism: VisitBritain teamed up with Google’s Street View by hoping that this would drive real traffic to real tourist destinations in the UK, supporting people in their holiday-planning and providing “value for money experiences, on visitbritain.com“ as Mike Bedingfield, director of Britain Marketing states.

But why are then significant points in Britain like for example Buckingham Palace missing in Street View? The remaining 0.1% privacy seems to be reserved for the Queen.

But if we’re honest, it could be worse: imagine the Street View would be live. Like it is now Google just knows what you did last summer… I shouldn’t put these ideas in their heads…