A sheep in wolf's clothing

With the underpinnings of privacy of social media sites on the internet, there is a groundswell of opposition to who exactly owns your data. The fine print in the legalese of the privacy statements of sites like Facebook and mySpace is precocious... and removing your data, from their 'service' is, at best, a painstaking ordeal.

Some have gone so far as to launch a QuitFacebookDay, although saying it and doing it are two wildly different undertakings.

Not exactly what you thought you were signing up for.

One such 'new' social media site is Diaspora*.

diaspora /dī-ˈas-p(ə-)rə, dē-/
origin: Greek, διασπορά – “a scattering [of seeds]”
1. the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network

In many ways open source works. And diaspora* is showing some of the 'theory' behind how they plan to make it work. They have a plan. They raised money by using Kickstarter, which itself, is a very cool concept, and I encourage you to check out the site. There's been some interesting projects funded by using it. The project is not overfunded, but they have certainly exceeded their initial expectations of $10,000 by June 1, 2010.

As of today have raised $175,894.03.

1759% funded with 12 days to go.

So as the 'who owns your info' debate crawls along, will an upstart protect your rights. The problem will be with the creators. At some point it will become big enough, to be a takeover target. That's the reality of it. Is it another great idea that will be bought out, and then data mined to provide more targeted advertising.

Only time will tell.

Eric Schmidt's anarchy quote

'the internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.'

Eric Schmidt
April 2, 1997

Eric Schmidt is now the CEO of Google.

Shaman or sage?

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Lazy Monday morning, not super warm... but at least it's not raining, and the wind has calmed a bit. I should do yard work today, now that I have fallen behind. At a minimum, I should try to get some fresh air.

The last couple of weeks, have been spent researching copyright law, and sitting within arms length of a landline, waiting for industry people to call me back. For obvious reasons, none of the details can be posted on the internet, until there is some sort of resolution. It is causing me to lose sleep. And my appetite. The moral and ethical scope of protecting my work is expensive. Not just financially, but mentally. If it goes unchallenged, someone 'gets away' with something. But if I pursue it, I'll ruin somebody's career and livelihood.