saraewood.com

I rarely go into Facebook these days, preferring to keep my profile updated via Twitter. But for some reason, last week I decided to go in an waste a few minutes. While there I also decided to update a few things in my profile with the aim to make it a little less personal. I’ll get to some of the reasons why in a minute. At any rate, I went into the “edit profile” and changed a few settings. Namely the ones that let you hide things.

I also selected not to show my relationship info, because it is really no one’s damn business.

What I expected to happen, ie, my personal information simply be hidden from my profile is not what happened. Instead, this note:

“Sara E Wood and John B Pike ended their relationship”

was sent to my 276 friends and John’s 354. How is that something you would expect to happen when choosing to “hide” information from people?

(Within 5 minutes both John and I had both received countless condolences. Even phone calls and people in my office coming to see if I was all right. Thank you all for you concern in my non-crisis moment! )
Another reason Facebook is for losers, I have had to unfriend people - who I actually maybe knew for like 5 minutes sometime in High School possibly because I was being sent Facebook CREEPY cruft such as:

And even being invited to groups like:

DESPITE not yet having blocked my personal info like my political affiliation (Vote Obama!).

LinkedIn, Flickr, etc know to give the content provider decent controls over their own private content. Seriously, how hard can this be to grok? That content is about me, provided by me upon which Facebook exists and claims to have some value in the world. At the very least allow me to control my own bytes!

xkcd makes my day.

The readership of this blog is approximately one (Hi Mom!). On occasion two (Hi Dad!). So when a TechCrunch piece about Flickr mentioned me by name, it was funny to see this in my log report:

Wouldn’t it be great if I could annotate that graph with the event that caused that spike? Maybe even share it with my readership of two? Did someone build that already? It would be awesome.

So, I am having a bad day. And a good day.

I found out that the startup idea I have been planning and talking (and hinting) about ad nauseaum for the past few years has been built.

The soon-to-be-launched Swivel seems to be EXACTLY what I have been proposing to build. It is an idea I feel passionate about - not only for the cool factor of what can be done when data becomes comparable, but for the fact that by making data accessible, it becomes a way to generate hypothesis and promotes innovation.

I am a huge believer in the power of data and in my various roles over 10+ in dotcoms and places like the UN and Harvard I have found that is the most challenging aspect of web work: Combining information in new ways to form new ideas.

Do sports outcomes affect the stock market? Can presidential elections be predicted by polling data in one rural area? Do airplane flight patterns have an influence our health? Do tides or sonar testing cause whales to beach themselves?

These guys, as I have, imagine a site where you could cross reference incidence of avian flu cases with migratory bird flight patterns with local rainfall tables. Or whether your own personal information on the wines you prefer have anything to do with pollen count. Imagine then the ability to discuss these findings with others who are interested, either personally or professionally, in these same issues. The ability to cross-reference information from different sources and create maps, charts, data tables, discussion groups, and then collect more and different data easily does not currently exist on the web.

This type of ability on-line would encourage cross-referencing, data mining and discovery and leads to evidence-based decision making. As we have seen with the proliferation of sites like MySpace, Flickr and Wikipedia, users are actively looking not only for access to information, but the ability to engage with other users in a community environment as well. Furthermore, people are becoming more comfortable with concepts such as user ratings and social networking on-line. The power of the web as a social medium to filter and weight importance, relevance and quality of content also applies to data. The advent of devices like WAP-enabled mobile phones and blackberries further feed our need for instant access to data in real time.

Data are incomparable for five main reasons. First, for many users there is no effective way to know what datasets exist in the public domain on a particular topic. For example, at present, it is not easy to know who has measured global temperatures over the past century. Second, even if one can identify what datasets exist on a topic; a different standard is often used for reporting, different data architecture and different ways to describe data set documentation. Third, some data that make it to the public domain are only in the public domain temporarily. The organization that collected the data may not support the data archive except for a short period of time. Fourth, enormous volumes of data are only available in hardcopy from sources such as government annual reports or statistical digests and have never been digitized. Fifth, unfortunately, many datasets are collected but never put in the public domain. The reasons include the extra costs and effort of putting the data in a public archive, providing documentation and the tendency for some groups to see datasets as their personal property.

A solution to these problems such that any individual whether they are in Bangladesh or in Boston would have equal access to all relevant data both for their own decision-making and for research purposes. It seems that Swivel’s on-line community and suite of functionality and tools enables users to compare and contrast indicators from vastly different data sets on different topics for a variety of purposes - which is EXACTLY what is needed.

So, I feel like crying - the laws of inertia have done me wrong again. But at least I can take comfort in that the idea was thought feasible by people other than me (I had the experience of people saying: “I don’t get it” or “Data are boring.”) And I feel even better when I realize that now these tools will exist in the world.

I am an avid long-time reader of the New Yorker. I find the writing provocative and informational. Many articles are on topics I would not have thought would interest me in the least, yet I often can’t put them down. The writing is normally so compelling that I find myself reading theater or film reviews of performances I know I will never see.

For example, in this week’s issue, there is an article by Elizabeth Kolbert on how global warming will affect the oceans. It is both dire and depressing and made me want to stop everything I am doing and join the fight against the use of fossil fuels, among other things. It reminds me of a 3 part series she did last year on climate change, which was similarly dire and depressing yet amazing.

The week before, there was an article on water use and what that means for people who live in places like India, particularly the poor. I found myself underlining interesting lines and quoting from it at the dinner table.

My complaint here is that I cannot find reference to any of these articles on the New Yorker web site. If you search “Elizabeth Kolbert” on the site, you get 324 results (17 pages) - none of which seem to be even remotely related. If you search “elizabeth kolbert climate” you get 487 results. If you search “elizabeth kolbert climate science” you get 874 results. You get the idea.

Magazine content is only listed by the current issue. “From the archive” seems to refer to some randomly selected issue from their past. A very small percentage of any content actually appears full-text on the site.

So, my question is, how can the company that also owns Wired be so web ignorant? Their online attempt is not only pitiful but rude, as subscribers (and non) spend too much time giving them the benefit of the doubt - that they can’t be as lame as it appears that they in fact are. I can only assume this is some sort of knee-jerk reaction by the “old guard” media towards the new - when, in fact, to still make that distinction is just plain silly and SHOULD hurt the business. But seeing as there is no other New Yorker, and nothing remotely like it, I guess they CAN have the world’s worst web site. But they should be ashamed of themselves.