Social Computing and Privacy

I just discovered a series of interesting blog entries from Danny Weitzner, W3C Technology and Society Policy Director and co-director of MIT CSAIL. These aren't especially new links, but I thought they might be worth relaying ...

Reciprocal Privacy for the Social Web - provides an introduction for a proposal "to establish a reasonable privacy balance in social networking environment" using FOAF. Also of interest is a link from Shahan Khatchadourian describing the use of FOAF and OpenID to establish trust/prevent spam. Apparently the solution could be available from Ryan Lee as a Drupal module? In some ways, this sounds similar to the Social Network Portability concept mentioned by Stephen Downes.

OCLC has issued a new report that sounds like a must read for those interested in navigating the waters of the social web and I look forward to delving into it. I, personally, have mixed feelings about what I've skimmed of the report. I'm particularly vexed about a call from OCLC to "relax the rules of privacy" ... I haven't read the report yet, but that's an interesting call to action. Personally, I'd love to see a call for a more research and experimentation into alternative approaches to the social web that might find a way to protect privacy and raise awareness of why it might be important.

NPR's Andy Carvin recently joined Talk of the Nation to cover social networking and sites like Facebook and MySpace. During the recording, they covered a number of issues related to their use in education.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14993512

First Monday is starting up a new series of podcasts. The current recording features an interview with Ian Bogost about his new book, Persuasive Games. Next up is Siva Vaidhyanathan ... I was forwarded a preview of the very interesting recording, but they haven't linked it up yet.

http://www.firstmonday.org/podcasts/

In this 15 minute recording, Lisa Hinchliffe shares some thoughts on, among other things, the role of librarians in the social computing sphere and shares some thoughts on her experiences there.


This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2006 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org