Author: Perry Hewitt
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#50onfire 2013
Celebrating at BostInno’s #50onfire 2013 with Natalia Zarina and Peter Boyce -
How to navigate child consent in the digital era
With college students, obviously, we assume that they are young adults–even there, we still need to do a lot more to educate them as they, too, struggle deal with the ramifications of privacy in a networked world where exposure can get out of control much quicker and in hard-to-anticipate manner.
— Your Children are not Your Children, a post by Zeynep Tufekci in response to recent exposure of children in the media by their parents and journalists. Tufekci objects to the widespread oversimplification of privacy that if there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just fine to make it public, and points to the risks of exposure for children far below the age of reasonable consent.
Many adults are now diligent documenters of their own milestones and minutia through images on social networks and newly-quantifiable data captured through apps and wristbands. Young hipsters transform seemingly overnight into dads who post everything from in utero shots to Vine video of their toddlers daily. Was the 2009 David After Dentist video intended to be exploitative, or a way to share an amusing parental anecdote in a contemporary way?
It’s a more complex world in which parents now navigate child consent. Parents receive pressure from schools to sign blanket image consent forms, which meant a lot less when the biggest risk was a flattering shot in a private school marketing brochure or a spelling bee win on the cover of the community weekly. There’s a structural lag for both individual parental and social/institutional approaches to privacy in the internet era, and most are making it up as they go along. And, as Tufekci points out above, college students are not magically immune, but face similar challenges figuring out privacy boundaries and the ramifications of broad exposure.
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Pick your collaborators wisely
I have learned that when it comes to successful idea translation, whether in labs, ateliers, or startups, it is not only the breakthrough eureka ideas, but the chemistry of the team, that determines success or failure. Venture and academia are not polar opposites, as some might have you believe. After all, serial entrepreneurs and productive labs are known for their ability to rapidly re-assemble teams to exploit new opportunities. Pick your collaborators – your tribe – wisely.
— from Hugo Van Vuuren’s blog re the 2014 launch of the Lab Cambridge, but applicable to any project where people need to use ideas to build stuff.
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What words reveal about online community
Research by Bryden, Funk, and Jansen looks at word usage in Twitter, and finds that communities can be characterized by their word choice. Even better, the words used by an individual can accurately predict the community that user belongs to.
We all speak in our own workplace jargon and the acronym-laden tech community, myself included, is more guilty of this than most. This study reminds us that words are about more than information transfer—they also serve as tribal identification. The words we choose to use on a public social network are a way of signaling the community we belong to as much as the suit or T-shirt and jeans we choose to wear to work each day.
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Teens as mobile challenge to enterprise IT
Anyone who’s spent time in a high school or college campus recently won’t be wholly surprised by Pew Internet’s recent study on U.S. teens and technology. 78% of teens have a mobile phone, and 47% have smartphones — meaning that a whopping 37% of all teenagers have a smartphone.More surprising may be the number of mobile-mostly users, people who access the internet mostly through their mobile device. About 15% of adults mostly use the internet via mobile, but there’s a big leap to 25% of mobile-mostly teens — and a full 50% of teens with smartphones.
What does this mean as older teens entering college campuses and the workforce? The communications and ecommerce worlds have been living mobile-first for a while. Jonah Peretti reminded us at SXSW that mobile used to be where content stopped, but today mobile is instrumental in content spread. Black Friday 2012 was a wake-up call for any remaining retailers who didn’t see the opportunity for mobile transactions.
The seismic shift will occur for enterprise IT when these teen mobile-everything users expect to be able to perform tasks from registering for class to entering time in PeopleSoft to submitting expense receipts. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has been an IT practice for a number of years, with non-trivial concerns about support and security. Make no mistake: this teen mobile usage data shows there’s a tsunami of application development work awaiting organizations for this rising generation of mobile internet users.
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Lovely and functional football table
Most of the football visualizations I find seem to vanish after a few weeks or months, but I sure hope The Beautiful Table sticks.
Designed by Jon Ferry, this lovely and functional visualization shows you how your team (in my case, sadly, Arsenal in the Premier League) is faring. There are many small details that make this work, including use of club colors, smart mouseover behaviors withe match details, and data from both played and scheduled matches enhance the timeline.
Kudos for making something elegant that solves an actual problem: show me how my team is doing without making me look at a HTML table on a web page designed in 1997.
Found via infosthetics.
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Harvard Alumni event :: SXSW 2013
Surveying the photo booth damage at the Harvard Alumni event during SXSW 2013 -
What happens in Vegas, Austin, etc. …
What happens in Vegas, Austin, or anywhere else is bound to stay with you forever these days. Many of us now live our lives in public, and embrace social media for the benefits of community and connection and in spite of the risks of indiscretion and overdisclosure.The kids are onto this. High school students applying to college change their names on the social web: Allison King becomes that TheAllie Regal — a code close enough for friends to decipher, but far enough to fool the Google. Apps like Snapchat and its less successful Facebook clone Poke hold out the promise of ephemeral content: what better way to foil permanence than an image that self destructs in less than ten seconds? The app even alerts you if a sneaky recipient attempts a screenshot of the content.
For adults with established usernames and search results, interim transmogrification is less feasible. Instead, we’re left to do what we can to avoid the most frequent areas of social media faux pas:
- too vitriolic (don’t be this guy)
- too much lifestream (hard to be as compelling as the Feltron report)
- too much life of the party
- or, God forbid, a post sent from your company account rather than your own
Spending a lot of time on the social web, many of us will commit one or more of these errors at some point. What’s the mitigation plan? A personal strategy of focusing on planting grass rather than pulling weeds — delivering consistent value through the content you share — is generally wiser than time spent on remediating the missteps. Delete, apologize, and move on.
For those of you headed to SXSW, be careful out there.
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Raju Narisetti in a Q&A with Nieman Labs
I think Twitter — unlike all the fears people had that it’s going to turn us into short attention-span people because we were so focused on the character limit — Twitter actually brought serendipity back into my life in a major way. I now encounter and experience so much more interesting content from around the world that would have been impossible in the days when we had a lot of time and bought a bunch of magazines and a bunch of newspapers.
– Raju Narisetti in a Q&A with Nieman Labs on journalism and mobile and his role with New News Corp. This excerpt encapsulates for me why participation in the social web is worth all the time and effort. And Android keeps me up at night, too.
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How to manage your information diet
It’s beyond a truism that we live in an age of information overload. Email is overwhelming, connection is ubiquitous with most of us tethered to one or more mobile devices, and it feels like a new, must-see social web service emerges every day.Unless you’re a full-time social media specialist, there’s a lot more to your job than listening and posting on social channels. Apart from email, there are hours of meetings, and one would hope, some time carved out each day for focused work. So, how do you put yourself on an information diet that gives you what you need to survive and grow, but lets you stay productive?
There are smart applications and tip-filled websites that will help you determine your own recipe for success, but here’s mine:
- Start the day with filtered RSS feeds. Google Reader is a terrific service (although rumors of its demise persist). I keep a short list of feeds that are germane to my role and my interests, and prune the kudzu of sites I feel I ought to read frequently and mercilessly. A small number of recipes in IFTTT surface content to me more aggressively, like a favorite blogger’s posts as text message.
- Schedule some of your social publishing. Now that you have great feed content, how do you share it? I mostly use Buffer to post; colleagues swear by Hootsuite or Tweetdeck. Scheduling enables sharing of relevant or interesting content throughout the day, but doesn’t replace listening and live interaction.
- Use old-school Google alerts. Google Alerts is an undersung technology that still delivers a lot of value. Create terms that are tight enough a filter for only the truly relevant to slip through, and prioritize terms by importance (as it happens, daily digest, and weekly digest). Newsle is a great service for following real news about people in your social networks.
- Select smart people as human filters. As digital moves into the C-suite, a lot of hedgehogs have to become foxes—moving away from an understanding of one big thing to represent a breadth of strategy, content, marketing, and technical knowledge. Topics I am fascinated by but rely on the deep expertise of others on the social web include: data science, information visualization, responsive design, and time management. Learn from others—and use social to connect and thank.
- Hold 60 minute blocks for working where you don’t check email. Interrupted time is less productive time, but being realistic about small enough chunks to safeguard is what enables some focused work. I leave my phone facing up, and mark only a few folks for the VIP inbox on iPhone and iPad—if there’s a critical message I can see and address it, but no other noise breaks through.
- Between meetings, read, act on, and delete email. This is easier said than done—but if the approach is to read it and get rid of it, it keeps the 1500+ received a day from overloading the system. When something becomes a task, move it to a productivity tool where it stacks up against your own priorities, not just the inbox-driven ones.
- Find the right productivity tool. I’ve written about and tried a range of productivity apps supporting granular tasks and life goals, but Evernote, I just can’t quit you. Task lists, document sharing, web clipper, IFTTT integration, audio, and Skitch make this indispensable. I was slow getting the app on my iPhone, and the recent addition has made even hallway conversations more productive.
- Perhaps the biggest time saver/information management idea is a surprising one: carve out time every week to listen to colleagues and schedule regular 1:1 meetings, even if they are 15 minutes long. Try to put down the device and really listen. What’s your colleagues’ critical path? How can you help? How might you inadvertently be under-communicating or worse, hindering progress? Scheduling time in-person reduces email follow up, and builds the kind of understanding and connection essential for getting things done.