Jericho: Has Spock beamed you?
It's cliche by now: the web has changed everything.
But, indeed it has. No matter how hard we try, our information is no longer our own. We are all public figures now. I have often laughed at public figures who go out of their way to promote themselves, then have very public struggles attempting to keep a "private life". Andy Warhol said we would all be famous for 15 minutes - how little he knew!
So, if you were an Internet entrepreneur, how would you get a lot of hits to your site? These days the simple answer is "force everyone to come to my site in order to protect themselves"! It's a neat trick if you can pull it off and Spock.com just did. At your expense!
Spock.com's premise is simple and even useful: become a "people search engine" by crawling the web and setting up profiles on all the people one can identify. I have to admit there have been times I have sent an email to a friend listing all of my various social networking pages (MySpace, Friendster, etc.), this blog and other info and wished I could simply point them to a page where all of that info lives - now I can. My Spock profile is right here.
However, not all is perfect in this scenario. Spock uses tags as a way to describe the individual in question. When the Spock bot crawls a person, it finds words associated with that person and makes them into tags. The profile it made for me listed several normal things "married", "likes reading", "likes politics" - all of this it seems to have culled from looking at my Friendster profile. However, it added one that mystifies me: "likes sex". It's true, I do like sex, I think most humans do to one degree or another. I would just like to know why it picked that tag from my Friendster profile - a rather family friendly profile if ever there was one.
I got off pretty easy, others have gotten worse treatment from Spock. Check out this article. Yipes!
My advice to you: if you have a profile on the web, check Spock and see what they have done to you. If Spock hasn't found you, make a profile and connect up all the loose ends of your profiles on the web and police the site regularly. I imagine if this kind of thing takes off, your friends will not be the only people checking out your tags.
If you do set up a profile on Spock - add it to the comments below, I'd love to connect to you!
But, indeed it has. No matter how hard we try, our information is no longer our own. We are all public figures now. I have often laughed at public figures who go out of their way to promote themselves, then have very public struggles attempting to keep a "private life". Andy Warhol said we would all be famous for 15 minutes - how little he knew!
So, if you were an Internet entrepreneur, how would you get a lot of hits to your site? These days the simple answer is "force everyone to come to my site in order to protect themselves"! It's a neat trick if you can pull it off and Spock.com just did. At your expense!
Spock.com's premise is simple and even useful: become a "people search engine" by crawling the web and setting up profiles on all the people one can identify. I have to admit there have been times I have sent an email to a friend listing all of my various social networking pages (MySpace, Friendster, etc.), this blog and other info and wished I could simply point them to a page where all of that info lives - now I can. My Spock profile is right here.
However, not all is perfect in this scenario. Spock uses tags as a way to describe the individual in question. When the Spock bot crawls a person, it finds words associated with that person and makes them into tags. The profile it made for me listed several normal things "married", "likes reading", "likes politics" - all of this it seems to have culled from looking at my Friendster profile. However, it added one that mystifies me: "likes sex". It's true, I do like sex, I think most humans do to one degree or another. I would just like to know why it picked that tag from my Friendster profile - a rather family friendly profile if ever there was one.
I got off pretty easy, others have gotten worse treatment from Spock. Check out this article. Yipes!
My advice to you: if you have a profile on the web, check Spock and see what they have done to you. If Spock hasn't found you, make a profile and connect up all the loose ends of your profiles on the web and police the site regularly. I imagine if this kind of thing takes off, your friends will not be the only people checking out your tags.
If you do set up a profile on Spock - add it to the comments below, I'd love to connect to you!
posted by Jericho Brown at 8/25/2007 10:15:00 AM
11 Comments:
Once again, I am below the radar.
Yet another blow to my narcissism.
Did you build a profile anyway?
Did you vote on my tags?
What is the value of builing a profile?
I didn't vote on your tags. I didn't know I could|should.
This doesn't ping your paranoia?
Why wouldn't you want to control what is said about you?
Eventually one of these sites is going to catch on. Then, everyone will use it for many purposes. This site could be to looking people up like Amazon and eBay are to selling. I could easily see HR departments in the future using a site like this.
Why wouldn't they?
So what your are saying is, as I am below their radar I should jump up and down and scream, "Hey! Here I am!" and get on their radar because it might say something not nice about were I on their radar.
Poke fun all you want. When you can't get a job because Google cached a page from Spock that said you were a deadbeat or that you hunt baby whales or something - just think back to this moment ...
I look forward to it. I would love to have a good reason to not have a job and not feel guilty about being supported by someone else.
Sometimes I wonder if you go out of your way to miss the point? Other times I'm positive you do!
This is my 7th staight hour in 100 degrees. If I am missing the point, it's because my brain has shriveled into a neural raisin.
Okay, all my modern paranoia aside. I have actually been having fun with Spock. They allow you to add people to your Favorites. Since none of my friends are out there yet - I have been adding writers and political figures and musicians, etc. I have been voting on their tags and adding tags of my own - it's been kinda groovy!
So, even if you are not worried about what others will do to you - it's fun doing things to other people!!! :)
What I don't get, Jer, is that if you're not already on Spock, (aka under their radar), how could a potential job find a profile of you there? I'm very happy I'm NOT on that site. I was disturbed to see that the "other links" section had a link to a page that had both my name and address on it. I wrote to that site and asked them to take it down. It was on a reality site, and I know that info is technically public record, but they made it FAR too easy to find that info. No need to sign-up or anything.
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