Dan's New Blog

Gigaom reports on yet another leadership upheaval at MySpace. This time, CEO Owen Van Natta is gone after less than a year.

I pretty much ignore MySpace in my blog and presentations. (I’d love to do the same with Facebook, but I can’t ignore all the security oopsies.) I think it’s been nigh on irrelevant for some time now. But I’m posting this to highlight a great soundbite in the article:

“There was a time when celebrities used MySpace to stay in touch with their fans. Now they’re all using Twitter.”

The social networking landscape changes constantly.  Now that Google Buzz has launched, at least one notable blogger thinks it could kill Facebook. Makes my head spin.

Wired reports that the Judicial Conference Committee on Court Administration and Case Management has issued new jury instructions regarding the use of social media. Here are the instructions that U.S. District Court justices should give to juries before they begin deliberations:

“During your deliberations, you must not communicate with or provide any information to anyone by any means about this case. You may not use any electronic device or media, such as a telephone, cell phone, smart phone, iPhone, Blackberry or computer; the internet, any internet service, or any text or instant messaging service; or any internet chat room, blog, or website such as Facebook, My Space, LinkedIn, YouTube or Twitter, to communicate to anyone any information about this case or to conduct any research about this case until I accept your verdict.”

It’s about time. I’ve blogged previously about the havoc a chatty juror can cause using Twitter during a trial.

I wish state and local courts would get on top of this as well. Last month I served as a juror in a two-day criminal case in Delaware County. The judge admonished us not to read about the case in the papers, watch anything about it on TV, visit the areas mentioned in the testimony to do research, or discuss it with family members and friends. Not once in the half-hour of jury instructions did he mention the word “Internet”, let alone Google or Twitter or Facebook. Nor did he mention text messaging. It would have been soooo easy for him to say something like, “Don’t use any Web sites or electronic devices to do research about the case or talk to others about it.” But we know that the whole legal profession changes very slowly, in some cases much slower than the rest of the world. At least the judge in my trial wasn’t required to wear a powdered wig.

This morning, two outwardly disparate stories hit my feed reader. But taken together, they spoke to me about privacy in the digital age. I read this one first: A Recluse? Well, Not to His Neighbors. It was an amusing look back at J.S. Salinger’s relationship with his neighbors in Cornish, NH. To them, he wasn’t a crank — he was “just Jerry” — and they respected his need for privacy:

“‘Nobody conspired to keep his privacy, but everyone kept his privacy — otherwise he wouldn’t have stayed here all these years,’ said Sherry Boudro of nearby Windsor, Vt., who said her father, Paul Sayah, befriended Mr. Salinger in the 1970s. ‘This community saw him as a person, not just the author of “The Catcher in the Rye.” They respect him. He was an individual who just wanted to live his life.’ The curious constantly descended on Cornish and the surrounding area, asking residents for directions to Mr. Salinger’s house. Instead of finding the home, intelopers would end up on a wild goose chase. How far afield the directions went ‘depended on how arrogant they were,’ said Mike Ackerman, owner of the Cornish General Store. Mr. Salinger, he said, ‘was like the Batman icon. Everyone knew Batman existed, and everyone knows there’s a Batcave, but no one will tell you where it is.’”

(That’s exactly how Salinger was portrayed in Shoeless Joe, btw, the book upon which the movie Field of Dreams was based. And imho one of the best books ever written.)

Then I viewed the second post, which was a link to a video of Clay Shirkey’s talk, It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure. at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York in September 2008. Shirkey talks about the problems of managing privacy, which is essentially managing information flow, in today’s online environment. He gives us the example of a colleague who created a “self-inflicted privacy meltdown” when changing her relationship status on Facebook. Shirkey says it happened because managing online privacy preferences is an “unnatural act”. He points out that prior to the present era, only Greta Garbo — “I want to be alone” — had privacy preferences that worked.

To which I’d add J.D. Salinger. And those two kept their privacy simply by trusting a relatively small, *analog*, circle of people. Once you go digital, the filters will inevitably break (so says Shirkey) and it’s so much easier for information to escape. And then you become just like Ashton Kutcher.

Royal Pingdom gives us the Internet 2009 in numbers. I always have trouble digesting lists like this — do I really care that there are 234 million Websites? And can I be sure that number’s correct? — but there’s one thing that just jumps right out at me: the explosion of “non-traditional” Web content, to wit:

• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009)