Category: markets

Your Cookies Have Already Been Sold

Published March 26, 2009 by cgerrish

hand_in_cookie_jar

If I’m interested in buying a car, soon advertisers will know it. When I surf the web, I’ll see nothing but car ads. As my preferences for car type are revealed in my online behavior, the ads will become more focused, I’ll just see ads for blue hybrids with 4-doors and GPS. As my transactional intentions across a number of threads surface, my advertising environment will mirror the state of my desire. They’ll see me coming a mile away.

Under the rubric of an evolutionary improvement in the targeting of advertising, Stephanie Clifford, of the NY Times, writes about two firms: BlueKai and eXelate that want to buy your cookies— although not from you. As part of their session management and optimization processes, most commercial websites record user interactions with web pages and some of that data is stored in a cookie that serves to identify the behavior of unique users.

These new firms are setting up an intermediary market for user cookies. They’ll buy the cookies from firms that have set them on your behalf, and then sell them on to other sites that want to sell you things based on the implied intentions contained in your cookie. Your gestures are being sold and you’ve been cut out of the take. Saul Hansell of the NY Times Bit Blog puts some more context around the issue, especially as it’s implemented through the Google/DoubleClick combination. And of course Steve Gillmor conceptualized all this stuff about five years ago.

In order to maintain the common good and a civil society, there’s a rule that says that both scripts and cookies may not operate across domains. But as is often noted, there’s no problem in software engineering that can’t be solved by another level of indirection. While another site may not directly read the cookies I’ve set on behalf of a user, apparently this doesn’t stop me from selling that cookie to a third-party who can then create a market to sell it to the highest bidder.

We assert that the user owns her own data– and presumably this means that the user should benefit from any value derived from that data. This new breed of “service” will sell your data and you’ll never know it happened. The whole thing will be quite painless. There’s nothing to be afraid of. And yes, of course they take your privacy very seriously. That’s why they’ll let you opt out of their service. The usability of their opt-out process, no doubt, is one of their top priorities. Explicit licensing of user data by users, along the lines of creative commons, may ultimately be part of how this story plays out.

Turning this model around, there’s Phil Windley’s new company, Kynetx. In this model, the user has the capability of sharing information with a web site through information cards and possibly other means. Ambient data like a user’s location as implied by an IP address are also fed into the mix. A site, knowing you live in Chicago, might offer you a special discount. In Windley’s model, the user has a much higher degree of control. He discussed his new firm with Jon Udell on an episode of IT Conversations‘ Interviews with Innovators:

Contextual Browsing w/ Phil Windley – Contextual Browsing

The user experience industry has been working hard on developing consistent and simple user interaction experiences within particular web properties. Many companies, financial institutions in particular, with multiple web properties with divergent websites and experiences are endeavoring to merge them into a single visual and interaction design with a common authentication/identity system. There’s ample evidence that next horizon of cross-domain user experience is gaining traction.

A person’s intention to buy a car isn’t limited to a single web domain. Her search will take her through many physical locations (recorded w/ GPS?) and many different online locations. The capability to address the cross-domain/multi-domain gesture set that expresses a user’s transactional intention is the next frontier of commerce on the Network. The question is: who will be doing the targeting, the customer or the vendor?

It’s a discussion that should happen out in the open. Perhaps the next Internet Identity Workshop in May could provide a forum for a discussion that could include Omar Tawakol of BlueKai, someone from eXelate, Phil Windley and Doc Searls from the VRM point of view. If cookies become valuable, companies will increase their revenue opportunity by putting more and more behavioral information into them. There’s a hand in your cookie jar, the question is, are you going to do anything about it?

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Voter Suppression By Proxy

Published January 15, 2009 by cgerrish

Voter Suppression

Dominic Jones of the Investor Relations Blog sent me a link to ProxyDemocracy.org this morning. We’ve recently seen the power the of the vote in our Presidential elections. We marvel at the power of the community as we vote with our attention and gestures to surface the wisdom of crowds in social media applications. There’s another form of suffrage that is within our reach, but largely ignored. Shareholders have a say in how public corporations are run. One share of stock in a public company gives you a vote.

ProxyDemocracy.org explains it this way:

A company’s stockholders have the legal right to decide important decisions at the companies they own: they elect directors, review aspects of executive compensation, and weigh in on shareholder proposals addressing a variety environmental, social, and governance issues. History has shown that shareholders can use their voting power to create value — both economic and social — at the companies they own.

Whether you invest in mutual funds or individual stocks, you have a say in how things are run. While the recent market crash may have caused you to curse Wall Street and wish a pox on all their houses– if you’d like a say in how our financial institutions are run, a single share of stock gives you the right to vote.

If you’re already a shareholder, are you accepting disenfranchisement? The voting process as it’s currently implemented is a form a voter suppression. Once again, ProxyDemocracy.org:

In practice, it can be hard for investors to exercise their rights and have their voices heard. One important obstacle is information. Shareholders often have a hard time keeping track of when the companies in their portfolio are meeting and what the ballot items mean. Mutual fund owners, whose funds vote on their behalf at the companies in the fund portfolio, rarely know how their funds are voting and thus have no way to be sure that their interests are being represented.

Imagine, for instance, that you’d like a say in the future of the auto manufacturers in Detroit. Perhaps you’d like to have a say in how health insurance and HMOs are run. Now you can certainly vote by choosing to spend or not spend your hard-earned dollars on the products of these corporations. You can stand on a soap box on a street corner and shout at the passing crowd. Or you can buy a single share of stock and express your opinion as a shareholder. Now imagine the power of the swarm, of Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook.

ProxyDemocracy provides tools to help investors overcome these informational hurdles and use their voting power to produce positive changes in the companies they own. We help shareholders vote their shares by publicizing the intended votes of institutional investors with a track record of shareholder engagement. We help mutual fund investors understand the voting records of leading funds, making it possible for them to purchase funds that represent their interests and pressure those that don’t.

We’ve seen the power of bottom-up democracy, but it’s not only in our government that this approach can be effective. Big corporations and institutional investors will a happily vote for you, and they will vote their own interests.

Clay Shirky talks about the power of organizing without organizations, about the cognitive surplus that we have in abundance today. The tools at our disposal and our expectations have radically changed. Shiky tells this story:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Being a shareholder in a public corporation has been a one-way transaction. The tools to make it a highly visible two-way transaction are now ready to hand. They’re here now. And as you think about the investments you’ve made for your retirement, you should be asking yourself, “where’s the mouse?”

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The Form of the Question: The Form of the Answer

Published December 6, 2008 by cgerrish

To what extent does the question establish the possible ground from which an answer can emerge? Does the shape of the question determine the shape of the answer? What happens when the question doesn’t match the subject?

Search is a query against a fixed set of data. To achieve depth the volume of data must be enormous. What happens when you search a real time stream? It’s a batch query against a stream of data. There are two common examples:

Getting a quote on a stock during market hours on a 15-minute delayed basis
Getting a quote on a stock during market hours on a real-time basis

Each is just a snapshot; a moment in time. The 15-minute delayed quote isn’t information you can trade on. The moment for action has long since passed. The real-time quote is almost time you can trade on– but it’s still just a snapshot. A trader has a live quote that changes as trades hit the consolidated tape. The quote changes in real time without an additional query. The live quote gives additional color, one has a sense of the volatility and direction of price.

Map of the Market

Now think about the difference between search and track. with regard to Tw*tter and the micro-messaging stream. If you’ve ever used track via IM you’ve experienced the difference between a snap quote and a live quote. Imagine if you had a watchlist of your track terms that you could see change in real time. A trader can transact on any ticker she tracks– that means both reading and writing. This gives you a sense of some of the possible user interfaces, as well as the economics, of the micro-messaging stream.

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A Note for Karoli on the Production of Value

Published December 3, 2008 by cgerrish

High heel

Karoli Kuns and I exchanged some comments about a recent NewsGang Live where the idea of “value” was discussed. In particular, how one might decide to purchase a pair of shoes. The conversation on the show swirled around the functional and exchange value of shoes. Let’s assume we all buy shoes that fit. Sometimes we buy shoes that are comfortable. We assign value to shoes, or almost anything, based on a number of factors.

For an interesting angle on the production of value, we can turn to Jean Baudrillard. He wrote that there are four ways of an object obtaining value. The four value-making processes are as follows:

The first is the functional value of an object; its instrumental purpose. A pen, for instance, writes; and a refrigerator cools. Marx’s “use-value” is very similar to this first type of value.

The second is the exchange value of an object; its economic value. One pen may be worth three pencils; and one refrigerator may be worth the salary earned by three months of work.

The third is the symbolic value of an object; a value that a subject assigns to an object in relation to another subject. A pen might symbolize a student’s school graduation gift or a commencement speaker’s gift; or a diamond may be a symbol of publicly declared marital love.

The last is the sign value of an object; its value within a system of objects. A particular pen may, whilst having no functional benefit, signify prestige relative to another pen; a diamond ring may have no function at all, but may suggest particular social values, such as taste or class.

Take a pair of shoes and assign a percentage of the total price to each the categories of value. The largest number will probably be next to the sign value. The shoes may have a value within the fashion system of shoes; within the fashion magazine system; within the designer system; and most importantly shoes have a signaling value within our social group. All of these things play in to the price we’re willing to pay.

Now think about the role of a social graph through Tw*tter as a method of signaling value. Compare it to using Search. PageRank uses citation as a method of deriving the value of a link. Citations are painstakingly extracted from spidered and indexed web data. Think about a real-time market where value is established through citations (gestures) across overlapping rings of social graphs. Sign value is largely produced as a social process. The key is: the gesture market needs sufficient volume and market makers.

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