Did I just help you? (day 27)

I have a dilemma.  Do I bring my computer to the Okanagan this weekend so I can write on the blog and not miss a day even though I can't upload (no internet connection), or do I just declare a blog vacation due to a broadband accident?  My obsessive side says bring the computer, there may actually be some cool stuff that happens in the OK.   My adventurous side says no don't bring the computer, do something completely different.  Maybe I'll bring the computer for the option and then see what I feel like when I get there.

Today I went to a great talk at Emily Carr about collaboration.   Jer Thorpe and Simon Levin talked about their projects,  including 'Just Landed', 'Big Picture', 'Glocal', and 'CodeLab'.  An interesting question came up at the end of Jer's talk about the definition of collaboration and whether it is truly a collaborative action to create an art piece or a visualization from data that was contributed freely but with no specific intent toward the author of the visualization or otherwise.   For example. 'Just Landed' takes data from the twitter feed and scans for words that would indicate someone has just arrived in a new location.  The application then looks up where that twitter author comes from and deduces the start and end point of travel in order to visualize it as a dynamic path.   The vast majority of twitter authors whose data was used have no idea the visualization exists.  Is this ok?  For this visualization, I would say yes it's fine and it's wonderful that it was made possible and most people would be pleased to have contributed without having to do anything extra.   The data in 'Just Landed' was anonymized so issues of privacy didn't occur.   But there is a line to be drawn I believe.   That line might just be begged by visualizations because their specific purpose is to make visible derivative data --- trends and patterns.   So while we contribute all kinds of tidbits about ourselves we may not want anyone analyzing that data for things about us that we would rather remain private.  This exact case came up recently when MIT students announced that they could deduce someone's sexual orientation by their list of friends on Facebook.  Well maybe, but should you?  And should you announce that?  In any case, the question remains.  Should there be a pingback when your twitter data gets analyzed for patterns?  Sounds like a logistical nightmare.

The one thing to celebrate is perhaps the overall collaborative intent of sharing such volumes of information.   We obviously didn't have the worst in mind when we slipped into the experiment that is social networking.  That's human nature, and I like that part of it.

Until Tomorrow or Monday,

A song for this post.