Heard about a woman living in the USA …

… she traded in her baby for a Chevrolet.

Is it time to turn the page on Facebook?

At last week’s WWW2010/FutureWeb conference, there was some interesting discussion about online privacy issues. Unsurprisingly, Facebook was the subject of particular criticism for its increasingly cavalier attitude toward privacy and manifest disrespect for users’ interest in controlling how others may access and use the content they post.

Dan Yoder sums up most of the concerns in this post, explaining why he’s decided to leave Facebook and urging others to do likewise. I find his points to be well-reasoned and highly persuasive. Still, like Charli Carpenter, I remain personally reluctant to abandon Facebook, because, as Carpenter observes, “Facebook has become not just an extension of our offline networks, but to some extent, a space in which our virtual identities live – our most important semi-imagined community.”

This is, to a great extent, a collective action problem. At least for anyone who values the social interaction that takes place on Facebook, the cost of leaving on your own is likely to be very high (I made a similar point at FutureWeb, in relation to unreasonably one–sided terms of service on virtual worlds or social web services). To reduce that cost, it would be necessary to persuade at least a substantial portion of your Facebook friends to leave with you, and for all of you to move to the same alternative place. But the cost (in time and effort) of coordinating such a group exodus would itself be sufficiently high as to deter many from trying.

In any event, I thought that Yoder’s post was sufficiently interesting that I wanted to share it with my Facebook network, in the hopes of prompting some discussion. So, I posted a link, without adding any comment of my own. I wondered whether the powers that be at Facebook would notice and object to the post. I didn’t have to wait very long to find out. Withing about 20 minutes, the Facebook gremlins had deleted the post. I received no notification nor explanation. The post simply disappeared, like the face of Trotsky from a Stalin-era portrait of the Russian Revolution.

As Yoder himself notes, Facebook is not a “public trust”. It is a private company offering a commercial service. “They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws.” That includes censoring user posts that the company dislikes for whatever reason. But the fact that they are so unwilling to tolerate criticism merely serves to persuade me further that Yoder is right.

My consumer choice, vindicated!

Der verlag mit der fleige

German publisher Eichborn staged a clever promotional stunt at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair: they released flies bearing tiny banners attached with wax. Insect rights activists were outraged. Everyone else was amused.

(Thanks to Moldy Chum for the tip)

Classical Glass!

If anyone wanted to get me a really special present (Hanukkah is just around the corner), they wouldn’t go wrong with one of these. The 7-foot 3-weight model would be perfect for Blue Ridge & Smoky Mountain trout streams.

 

 

 

 

Unleashing my inner Don Draper

Once upon a time, I actually considered a career in advertising. I was contemplating dropping out of grad school, and advertising was among the few fields I could think of where someone with graduate training in sociology might be employable. To my surprise, I got interviews with several of the major agencies in Chicago–Leo Burnett, BBDO, DDB/Nedham–and one of them (I won’t say which) appeared genuinely interested, inviting me for multiple callbacks. In the process, however, I decided that I should stick it out in grad school (though I did ultimately drop out and move from sociology to law).

That experience may help explain my obsession with Don Draper. While I maintain the appropriately critical stance toward advertising and marketing for someone of my political and academic ilk, I do find the ad world–or at least the high modern 1950s & 1960s ad world as depicted in Mad Men–tremendously fascinating and rather alluring in the way many things that are bad for you tend to be.

All of which is a long, and perhaps unnecessary, preface to this video. 3banana Notes is a handy little application that I discovered when I got my Android phone. As part of a promotional campaign, I made this video showing how I used 3banana to plan a recent fishing trip. I had fun putting it together (and it earned me a generous gift card to Amazon, which is nice). And I’m happy to help publicize something that I’ve found genuinely useful.

How Would Jesus Cheat?

UPDATE (Feb 22, 2011): The name of the individual mentioned in this item has been redacted at the individual’s request.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting look at the world of essay-writing mills. It includes some amusing anecdotes, in some instances identifying the guilty students by name. My favorite example:

[REDACTED] paid Essay Writers $100 to research and write a paper on the parables of Jesus Christ for his New Testament class. Mr. [REDACTED], a senior at James Madison University majoring in philosophy and religion, defends the idea of paying someone else to do your academic work, comparing it to companies that outsource labor. “Like most people in college, you don’t have time to do research on some of these things,” he says. “I was hoping to find a guy to do some good quality writing.”

[UPDATE: 9:30pm March 17 , 2009] [REDACTED] writes, in comments, to contest the Chronicle’s account.

If only it had legs and a hood too

I hadn’t seen the “Snuggie” infomercial before reading this assessment by columnist Joe Posnanski. The ad is every bit as hilarious and creepy as Posnanski suggests.

McElree’s Wine of Cardui

Washington, North Carolina

“Wine of Cardui” was a patent medicine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, marketed as a cure for “female diseases”.  In 1916, the Chattanooga Medicine Company, which made Wine of Cardui, won a libel suit against the American Medical Association, which had published an article in its Journal calling the product “a worthless fraud”. While the jury found for the plaintiff, they evidently didn’t think much of the product; instead of the $200,000 in damages requested, the jury awarded one penny.

Not as kinky as it sounds

Though the name suggests some type of “naughty Victorian” establishment, this shop in Arlington, Virginia merely sells drapes and related items.