http://consumerist.com/5150175/facebooks-new-terms-of-service-we-can-do-anything-we-want-with-your-content-forever

I was hoping you would explain the tradeoffs you mentioned in greater detail. What sort of complexities, unpredictabilities, and vulnerabilities do your foresee in a “meta-infrastructure” environment?

For me, against the backdrop of massive new infrastructure spending and esp on “smart grid”, it triggered the question of what would one call a common IS layer that supported all traditional infrastructures(water, transportation, telecom, etc) if not meta-infrastructure?

And would that even be desirable if the tradeoff for gaining efficiencies through integration also yielded greater complexity(unpredictability) and perhaps vulnerability?

Interesting thoughts. I have no idea whether this is possible (but I’m guessing you do!), and I don’t know if Facebook would agree to it.

I could see this being beneficial and desirable in contexts where privacy and free speech issues are important. For example, a person might appreciate this if he wanted hospitals/ physicians to have access to his medical records in order to properly treat and diagnose him. But he didn’t want to risk the hospital inadvertently making his medical records known to others. Or a blogger in China, Cuba, Korea (North or South–surprisingly) or any number of places (and I’m guessing this list will grow as economies weaken and governments strengthen) may want to allow Facebook or someone else to access his profile and user-generated content, but he would also want to be able to physically keep the data himself for security purposes. But with respect to Facebook accounts now, I don’t think there would be much of a demand for it. It seems that the whole point of Facebook is reduce a person’s privacy (at least to some extent). I’m guessing that most Facebook folks wouldn’t be concerned about not having control over their data.

By the way, here’s the site for Mars Hill Audio Journal I was telling you about. There are some free discussions on there. I highly recommend it.
http://www.marshillaudio.org/default.asp

Blessings,
Jeff

Have you finished your house yet?

As one facebook stalk led to another, on a sleepless night in Roswell, I happened upon a blog entry by one Rocky Dunlap. Very enjoyable, Mr. Dunlap. I have been at a loss for inspiration in my own writing and it is a good reminder that one only need look around and appreciate the thought and design that went into everything we come in contact with.

Sincerely,
Megan from Berkeley, CA

It’s funny; I’m in a knitting community and we can tag knitting projects (personal folksonomy). You’d be surprised how many variations there are in tags generated by a cohesive community of “experts” about related content. For instance, one person’s project might get the tags “cable”, “cables” and “cabled”. Another person’s, knit from the same pattern, might just be tagged “cables”. I may only think to search for “cables” but not “cabled”, and I’d miss out on some relavant content. Thanks to your article, I know this is an artifact of “stemming”. =) There are other issues, too…there’s a way to look up patterns and projects by designer, but sometimes projects will get tagged by designer as well….