Policing the Interwebz

As we have oft banged on about mentioned occasionally, one of the joys of social media is that it let’s you hear what’s actually being said, and as we warn clients, what is being said is not always good. This is because our actions and interactions on the interwebz tends to accurately reflect real life, and unfortunately real life is not the place of pink fluffy warmth and kindness that we like to pretend it is. On a personal level, one of the other joys of social media is that it allows us to create rather effective filters so that we can easily avoid the iccky stuff that might put us off our cornflakes. Of course, when this self-created cocoon does occasionally get burst it enhances the shock value.

It’s not surprising that social media darling, Twitter, has a dark underbelly. We know about the spammers, who hasn’t been followed by a gaggle of horny Brittany’s at some point, but they are easy to block and ignore, making sure our filters stay intact. But it seems that Mike Butcher, over at TechCrunch UK has discovered an even seedier side, when he was tipped off about a user called Dinner_Guest, who appears to be blogging about the kidnap and subsequent killing of someone. Mike suggests that it could be a stunt, but also says:

Now, clearly this could all be part of some sick fantasy. The trouble is, should we take that chance, or do the Police in Brighton need to know that they have a potential serial killer on their hands who has taken to Twittering his killing spree?

It’s clearly not possible to know either way, until real-world events start to match up with Dinner Guest’s Tweets.

I hope that Mike did actually call the cops before posting, even though I do believe that it is a stunt. The account is only eight days old but has a professional background and its very second tweet was from Twitterlator. Most unusual behaviour for a n00b, unless of course this is not their first account, though why would they then ask how to follow people later on, unless of course they are pretending to be a n00b?Plus, what kind of serial killer realises that no matter who says it that 80 followers does not a viral make. In short, the whole thing smells worse than my rugby captains lucky socks by season end and I have a sneaky suspicion that all will be revealed by Saturday.

Stunt or not, it does raise questions about how we should react to incidents like this, and how we should then deal with the perpetrator if it does turn out to be a stunt. Mike raises a good point about how once the mainstream media finds out about this there will no doubts be calls for Twitter to be policed, which to me is equally as unpalatable as some of the stuff that appears online. It would also be practically impossible plus, if there is a serial killer operating in Brighton, wouldn’t it be handy if he kept tweeting about it so that he could be tracked down via his email and IP address? Must be far more effective than tracing anonymous notes and phone calls.

Also posted on Clicking & Screaming

Techcrunch bans embargos and helps out PR firms

Apparently PR firms are out of control, at least according to Mike Arrington over at TechCrunch, who has decided that the site will no longer honour embargoes.

For those outside of the PR/media business embargoes are usually employed when a company has big news to break, often publications are pre-briefed and asked not to publish until a pre-determined time. This enables the journalist/blogger to have more time to do more research and break the story ahead of the most of the rest of the pack. Usually a company would pick a handful of key targets to brief under embargo and then issue the announcement via a press release to a wider list at the embargo time. Occasionally if the announcement is linked to a physical event that a key contacts can’t make, a pre-briefing might happen under embargo to ensure that coverage still appears in the key title.

The problem is that embargoes get broken, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose to get a scoop. This isn’t why Arrington is fed up though and has decided to no longer honour any embargoes. Rather he is fed up with PR firms issuing news under embargoes willy-nilly in order to make news seem more important than it is. Which is fair enough, although a poor story is a poor story and should be rejected out-of-hand even if does have an enticing offer that you may get the news first stamped on it.

Obviously not foolish enough to completely cut his nose off to spite his face, Arrington added that TechCrunch will honour some embargoes, but only if they are from “trusted companies and PR firms who give us the news exclusively, so we know there won’t be any mistakes. There are also a handful – maybe three – people who we trust enough to continue to work with them on general embargoes”. So potentially this is a move designed to cut down some of the PR spam they have been receiving.

Now to the helping PRs part.  TechCrunch will now publish a blacklist of companies who have broken embargoes, obviously listing themselves at the top of the list. I assume this is how they will be spending the time freed up by not going through emails with spurious embargos.

To be honest I’m not actually sure how this will help TechCrunch. Savvy PRs, ie those who read TechCrunch, will stop sending them news in advance, the non-savvy ones will keep sending it and  everyone will get a handy list of which outlets can’t tell the time in return.

Hyperdrive

Almost as much as I love magic quadrants, I adore the Gartner hype cycle.  I think it’s because the phraseology reminds me of Pilgrim’s Progress.  The Peak of Inflated Expectations could easily be called the Delectable Mountain “from whose heights one can see many delights and curiosities”.  The Trough of Disillusionment, where early adopters sink with the weight of hyperbole is also interchangeable with the Slough of Despond, though the Pit of Despair would also work.

Gartner has just released its latest Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, which includes all the social media tools that we love so much, most of which Gartner deem to be two to five years away from mainstream adoption.  Web 2.0, which has been defined by some as the sum of the various social media tool parts, is yet to enter the Trough of Slough but is less than two years away from mainstream.

Disappointingly it’s more than ten years till we all get mobile robots, though it is nice that Gartner thinks augmented reality is at least ten years away, when anyone with access to class a’s can prolly achieve it in ten seconds.

There’s some interesting chat over at Tech Crunch on what technologies are missing from the curve, with OpenID being a major MIA

The original from 1995 features considerably less technology, not all of which have made it to the platform of productivity – namely handwriting and speech recognition.  Both have moved on leaps and bounds but would you consider them truly mainstream?  Also, who the hell has heard of the Information Super Highway?

The 2005 version actually seems a little more reasonable, though from being only five years out in ’05, Grid computing has disappeared by the latest version.  Corporate blogging has slid down towards the trough a little but is still two years away, which is where it was three years ago and handwriting recognition really hasn’t shifted since the original cycle.

There is one major and very welcome change over the past three years, we seem to have shaken our addiction to acronyms.

NB: Apologies for the quality of the second graphic, that’s the only version of the 95 chart I can find