TheCustomer

another piece of innovative communication from Melbourne (see car park signage below)
Craft Circle Fights The Power, Martha Stewart Style | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration
I wonder what they’re putting in the water?

Ze Frank on Breaking the Metaphor of the Web
There’s momentum building here, towards a watershed. In recent weeks we’ve seen VRMWorkshop, big forward steps from Dataportability, Facebook’s adoption of those principles… I’m sure there’s more - there’s certainly thinking about the problems created by social media

So is 2009 going to be the year in which we get a technical breakthrough, that changes Web 2.0 from being a technical achievement into being social & commercial?

BBC NEWS | Politics | Voters’ data ’should not be sold’
Of course it shouldn’t.

If a business compelled customers - and non-customers - to register their details, and then sold on that information, they’d be strung up! But that’s what ‘government’ does with voters’ data. Yes, there’s an opt-out - which is widely used - but the practice of selling-on information undermines trust in government & the democratic process. Which is not a good thing - so it’s not a good trade.

It’s a practice left over from analogue marketing days, when profiling was in its infancy, and targeted marketing almost always created direct mail - where profiling, print, production and postage costs created commercial limits on the volume of direct mail. The first of those - profiling - has moved on dramatically, which allows data companies to do much much more, with less starting data, for a lot less money.

And customers’ relationships with companies has moved on too. Digital marketing centers more on rapid 2-way engagement - there’s less commercial need for electoral data, and the business case is weaker.

Around the milennium I used a 10.4 inch Sony Vaio laptop… and only stopped using it around 2005, when its inability to run anything more modern than Win 98se stopped it connecting to networks.  The Mac Air launch had me digging for reviews of my old Vaio - this one ending “After 6 months, there still isn’t anything to upgrade to. That’s
unheard of in the PC market.”

Come to think of it, after more than 6 years, and reading the mixed reviews of Mac Air at launch, there’s still precious little to compare. It’s (almost) tempting to find a late PII Vaio pcg505, & pimp it with Linux.

Almost.

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“That said, a study issued last month found that Facebook members themselves were somewhat careless about safeguarding their privacy. IT security firm Sophos found that 41 percent of Facebook users surveyed were willing to give personal information - such as e-mail address, date of birth and phone number - to a complete stranger, greatly increasing their susceptibility to ID theft.” Charlie Taylor, on TheRegister

If you take that info (by phone, or scraped from social networking sites), and add it to the delivery address given on amazon’s wishlist, could it be all that an Identity thief would need to clone your ID…