Presidential Limos are armored, yes, but Gregg Merksamer reveals that George W. Bush’s limos sport five-inch thick glass, more than twice as thick as in Clinton’s limo. Merksamer should know, he wrote the book on so-called “professional cars”. He says half an inch is enough to stop a .44 magnum at point blank range, and BMW’s X5 “Security” model features only a little more than that. So what’s it mean when a person needs ten times that amount?

Who knew an ad that targeted our fear of the dark could work so well or playfully? Then again, what would this ad feature if it played here in the US?

Our CIO is asking whether or not Plymouth should get involved with blogs. Not to be overly academic, but I think we should define our terms.

Despite all the talk, “blogs” are a content agnostic technology being used to support all manner of online activities.

What you’re really asking is instead: what kind of content do we want to put online, and who do we want to let do it?

In thinking about that question, I’m immediately reminded of John Lovas, who’s blog at De Anza Community College I discovered via some web searching some time ago. His post on street texts, for example, is a contribution to the community of knowledge on that subject. Most interesting, perhaps, is how he addressed controversy within his professional community. Though he succumbed to cancer in June 2005, his blog still stands as an outstanding example of the quality of De Anza’s faculty.

At the University of San Diego, Lawrence B. Solum’s Copyfutures blog illustrates how valuable the (default) open nature of blogs are to the class exploration. In Copyfutures (active from 2004 to 2005), Solum’s students posted their work and thinking on matters of copyright and got quick feedback from the intellectual property community. Open source education it wasn’t, but current and topical (on a subject that demanded such) it was.

Harvard’s Berkman Center hosts blogs for all Harvard students, faculty and staff (“anyone with a harvard.edu, radcliffe.edu, or hbs.edu email address [can] host a blog with us”). The list is longer than I wish to count, but they’re clearly active, and the aggregation of selected blogs at the Berkman Center’s website reveals a number of thoughtful, no doubt influential, bloggers. Best of all, their terms of use and legal FAQ are offer great templates for any other university considering such services.

Terms of service, of course, mean nothing when what we’re really afraid of is bad publicity. Washingtonienne Jessica Cutler, who blogged about her Capitol Hill trysts, and former Delta flight attendant Ellen Somonetti, who posted photos on her blog, are among a small handful of bloggers who’ve lost their jobs when they crossed one line or another. Bad publicity, of course, can come from non-employee bloggers as well. Kryptonite is still living down blog posts that explained how to open their locks with a Bic pen.

Branding consultant James Torio explains: “Blogs are effective for disseminating information because they have similar characteristics to word of mouth.” But also counters that, for those who understand it, the blogosphere responds to correction and facts in ways word of mouth never did. As an example, he offers Microsoft’s deft handling of the MSN Spaces censorship controversy.

Microsoft felt the backlash from the blogosphere, and to their credit they did not issue press releases or create new advertisements for damage control, rather a blogger [joined] the conversation; he worked with Microsoft’s customers and listened to what they had to say.

Both the Microsoft and Kryptonite cases offer examples of how the internet is changing the public relations demands on any enterprise. Blogs are just one of the tools consumers now use to communicate their satisfaction, delight, frustration, or pain in their dealings with others. Amazon.com allows readers to comment on books, Epinions.com and a raft of other rating sites do the same for every other product, and for better or worse, Wikipedia reports everything the crowd knows on any subject (including Kryptonite locks and the controversy).

It’s worth noting that in none of these cases of fired employees or public relations snafus were the blogs hosted by the companies at the center of the issue. The fact is, if somebody says something embarrassing about you, it doesn’t matter where it’s hosted. What matters is how deftly you handle it.

academia, academic blogs, blogging, class blogs, examples, faculty blogs, fear, plymouth state university, policy, psu, student blogs, blogs

Troy expressed both great amusement and trepidation in his message alerting me to Riya, a new photo sharing site:

I don’t know whether to say cool, or zool.

The tour explains that you upload photos, Riya identifies faces in your photos, then asks you to name them (or correct its guesses!). Then you get all your friends to join up and we can all search for everybody by people, location, and time. So say “hi” to Andrejs and Nora in Normunds‘ photo, above.

So the good news is that there’s a chance that you’ll be able to use this to reconnect with that interesting someone you hooked up with the other night, but the mixed news is he or she may be able to find you — not so great if you instead hoped to disappear anonymously.

And all of this connects to my old chorus: identity is reputation. It’s too early for me to judge how this will effect our lives — well, my life anyway — but 2006 is now the year that facial recognition emerged from the dark halls of law enforcement and counter-terrorism and started greeting us on the street.

That foolish face you made in the background of some unknown tourists photo might be tracked. But is that really so bad? Sure, it might lead to embarrassing explanations, but it might also lead to new connections. Stealing the words of a friend, we seem to enjoy gossamer stories of lives barely touching, and maybe we’ll appreciate the opportunity to occasionally find or be found by the anonymous people who fill the blurry edges of our pictures.

I’m betting we’ll become aware of our social identities, our electronically tracked reputations, and we’ll start to act with some greater consciousness of them. Many bloggers are already familiar with this, sometimes painfully. Our notions of privacy and anonymity will certainly change, but we’re unlikely to be able to stuff this genie back in the bottle. And I’m not yet sure we’ll want to.

anonymity, brave new world, face, face recognition, facial recognition, fear, identity, identity is reputation, idm, photo sharing, privacy, recognition, reputation, riya, six degrees, social software, spy, spying, Spytech, surveillance, tracking, zool

Arguments about Wikipedia’s value and authority will rage for quite a while, but it’s interesting to see where the lines are being drawn.

On the one had we’ve got a 12 year-old pointing out errors in Encyclopaedia Britannica (via Many2Many) and now on the other side we’ve got John Seigenthaler, a former editorial page editor at USA Today, piping mad about some libelous content in his Wikipedia biography page.

Now, I have to agree with Seigenthaler in as much as I would never want anybody to make such claims against me, and I’d probably consider my legal options in such a matter, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who gets a chuckle over the matter. I mean Seigenthaler is the founder of The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, after all.

It all sounds the same as the Attack of the Blogs story in November issue of Forbes Magazine. That story began ominously:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

But Forbes and Seigenthaler both conveniently ignore the fact that lies, libel and invective are common in other, older media. And Seigenthaler should know well the limitations of editorial authority over the millions of words published by hundreds of writers in a newspaper every day. Mistakes are made, and yes, counterfactual material is often slipped in. (Sadly, it’s also worth noting that real lynch mobs of the post-reconstruction South often enjoyed the support of their local newspapers.)

And unlike those old media, corrections are easy and quick, and in context with the original information. Take a look at how the Wikipedia entry addresses Seigenthaler’s complaints as an example.

Yes, the decision structure around these social applications is different from old media, but that doesn’t make it any more wrong or bad or dangerous. It is, perhaps, a comment on the obscurity of Seigenthaler’s biography that it went uncorrected for four months, but it’s also a comment on how responsive the system is that accommodated Seig’s corrections so quickly. Now, imagine how much Seigenthaler could contribute to Wikipedia. Imagine how much richer our online community could be with his participation?

And that’s what Seigenthaler and the Forbes article miss: the blogosphere and Wikipedia are built by those show up to the game. People and companies who ignore it do so at the peril, but there are many examples of success for those who participate.

wikipedia, wiki, social, social software, community, communities, moderation, editor, editorial control, Seigenthaler , John Seigenthaler, usa today, editorial, opinion, slander, libel, blog, blogs, bloggers, forbes, fear, findability, google economy

Boing Boing has an exclusive profile of neutron bomb inventor Samuel T. Cohen by Charles Platt. All the reports so far are that it’s a 10,000 word “must read.”

The article, Profits of Fear, is available in PDF, plain text, and Palm doc versions at Boing Boing.

Thanks to David Rothman for the heads up. Extra: Rothman asks what it all says about mainstream media when respected authors eschew traditional media for blogs.

tags: boing boing, boingboing, bomb, charles platt, fear, inventor, moral weapon, neutron, neutron bomb, nuclear weapon, nuclear weapons, nuke, sam cohen, samuel cohen, samuel t cohen, samuel t. cohen, weapon, weapon designer