The most annoying thing about me, well the “online representation that is me”, is something that happens when you do a standard Google search for my name.

Over the years, I’ve become somewhat possessive over the first page of search results for “Chris Baboolal”. I figure my last name is uncommon enough that I should be able to dominate the first page without very much effort. And by most accounts, I do.

By most accounts. Settling in the top 3 (or sometimes, much to my chagrin, at #1) is a Facebook result for an individual who IS NOT ME, Chris Baboolal. I repeat, I – Chris Baboolal – am not one of the 3 younger-looking people in this person’s profile picture who are happily flipping the bird to the entire world. In fact, aside from the dummy account that’s linked to this blog, I’m not even on Facebook! I am however, the Chris Baboolal that appears in the LinkedIn entry, the Chris Baboolal that appears as the owner of this blog, the Chris Baboolal that appears in the AgencyScoop profile, and so on.

My issue isn’t so much with my namesake from Facebook. In fact, he’s probably completely unaware of his search result placement. At least I hope so. Unless you posess the same nerdish leanings as I do, personal-SE rankings aren’t the kind of thing the average human loses that much sleep over. My issue is moreso to do with the fact that people remain largely clueless about how their online information is accessed and presented to the rest of the world (as I indicated in my previous blog post).

This world – that of SEO, Web 2.0, social media, and all other things “Digital” – happens to be the world that I play in, and make my living from. Further, as Gina Trapani has mentioned recently, Google has largely replaced the business card when it comes to exchanging professional information. Given that, the content of the first page [of search results] may be slightly more relevant to “this” Chris Baboolal (me) than others.

The problem of course is that Facebook is such a behemoth, that trying to knock “that” Chris Baboolal off of the first-page would be about as successful as trying to ressurrect the career of Pauly Shore. Nonetheless, the only failed effort is the one that ceases I suppose. Alright, how many is that…*counts* 8. Not bad.

Well, we’ll see if see how much of an effect this has on the top 3 results at least. Until then, this is Chris Baboolal.

Chris Baboolal Chris Baboolal Chris Baboolal … *runs*

[I apologize to any Bjork fan who reads the title of this post and now has that song stuck in their heads. ]

It’s no secret that I’m fairly liberal when it comes to my views on online privacy, so long as a few important caveats are considered. Be conscious of what you post online and where you post it. Where possible, make sure that you have a copy of all information you post online. Resign yourself to the fact that once you post something online, it is PERMANENT, and chances are slim that it will ever really disappear. Falls into the realm of common sense when you think about it, but it’s usually the case that we start freaking out whenever we’ve posted something online and one of those tenets have been ignored.

This isn’t me by the way… I swear

So that being said, I was wondering, where do you draw the line, when it comes to protecting your privacy online? How far do you go to make sure that photo of you doing the Elaine Benes at last year’s office Xmas party doesn’t spread further than desired? Think about this. You’re at said party and you’ve had a drink or two, and you start to bust a move on the dance floor. There are a couple dozen people around, and there’s a good chance that most of them have a cellphone that can snap a sub-par image of you kickin’ those heels at awkward angles. There’s also a good chance that some of those cellphone shutterbugs have access to a Facebook/Twitter/Blog account of some sort. Further, with almost frightening ease, that same image can be online and available to hundreds of thousands of people before you’ve had a chance to stumble off the dance floor.

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve instilled the fear of God in all of those around you, there’s actually nothing you can do to prevent your submission to become the next iconic YouTube star. Now sure, should you become aware of embarrassing content, you can always go through the process of trying to have it removed from the internet. That’s always worked in the past, right?

This makes me think about the intense amount of effort that’s going into making behemoths like Google and Facebook try to conform to privacy legislation. Presumably the point of such legislation is to ensure that when you sign up for services provided by the Goog et al, that you are explicitly made aware of what information you’re providing and how it could be used in the future (which, as you’ll recall is related to one of the caveats that I listed above).

Even if this is accomplished, it does nothing significant to allay peoples’ actual fear of unwanted information being released/exposed to other people. The reason for this remains the same; people post information online without full realizing what they’re doing, for whatever reason. A recent by-product of this type of behaviour is the “Texts From Last Night” (TFLN) website (link), a site which allows anyone to submit text messages that they’ve received, to be broadcast to the world. Names and other personally identifying information are usually unattached, but it’s an example of how the onus should always be on the user to monitor and control the information that they make available to others, and to accept (or at the very least be aware of the consequences of doing so).

And yet, we still give our credit cards to complete strangers and watch them disappear from sight when we purchase things offline.

Before I ramble, let me qualify by pointing out that this may very well be common knowledge amongst the few enlightened individuals out there that “get it.” I fully and completely admit that I quite simply didn’t get it (and I probably still don’t). I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, taking mental note of what’s going on and how it works. I think I can communicate the essence of what Twitter is, in one simple word.

Everything I’ve experienced with Twitter thus far has enforced the idea that it’s all about the present, give or take the last 12 hours or so. People could care less about what happened on Twitter before then. I haven’t seen anyone retweet something that’s older. Trending topics only seem to cover that time span as well.

It’s NOT an archive. It’s NOT a storage space, or a “traditional” online community that’s geared towards sifting through past content. It’s a constant stream of peoples’ personal bi-lines and reference links that … for reasons that still elude me, seem to generate interest. I’m not exclusive from that group either. I’ve often found myself responding and contributing to that stream just as everyone else is.

Maybe there’s nothing to explicitly understand. Perhaps Twitter is no different than conversation amongst large groups of people in an offline context as well. Now there’s a thought. What would conversation look like if I were to say, plonk myself down in the middle of a busy courtyard or some other meeting place where people engage each other. Would it be the similar?

… more to come.

As I fell asleep last night, a thought began to coalesce which accurately summed up what I’ve learned so far from being on Twitter. About a half hour later I woke up in a daze and wrote down that thought, hoping to expand on it at some point today. Of course, when I looked at that note this morning it was apparent that my moment of clarity was anything but (hence the title of today’s post – 2 points to anyone who gets the reference):

Fortunately, with a little caffeine and some online radio tunes, I’m able to recover some of the highlights. The early-adopt / early-abandon method was definitely taken by a LOT of people, as evidenced by several accounts that only 1 or 2 posts in the first couple of days since joining. There’s a strong, active community of people (celebs and non-celebs alike) that post no less than a half a dozen random thoughts per day. And then there are some that post one or two well-crafted thoughts with attached links whenever the mood strikes. Of course, there’s a healthy number of hybrid Twitterers (Tweeters? – forgive me, I still haven’t really absorbed the clique-lingo) that fill out the scatterplot as well, of which I consider myself to be one of.

From what I gather, people haven’t come to a consensus about exactly WHAT Twitter is. To some it’s a blog, to others it’s a megaphone, and still yet to others it’s like some sort of lasso, used to corral the random thoughts of others for later processing. As I posted some time ago, it’s not unique, but I suppose all that matters is that it’s still standing.

Some other random highlights:

Brent Spiner – Still amusing, still weird, still strangely compelling to read.
Alan Cross – Yet another channel to follow one of radio’s most knowledgeable and entertaining personalities.
@EverySpam/PornBot that has ever added me to their list – Perpetual proof that there will always be a mechanism out there to add noise to balance out the signal.

I’ll keep this (kinda) short, because I expect that among the people reading this, there will be some who know me, and some who don’t. Of course, that expectation presupposes that a lot of you actually read this blog. Hah. We’ll see I guess. Oh, and for those of you that don’t know me, don’t get scared off by the title of this blog. I’m not trying to sell you anything.

I signed up for Twitter a few years ago when a friend (@joanna) introduced me to it. I hadn’t used it since. I’ve posted quite a bit about it in the past, but I’ve never actually used it.

As time went by, I heard about more and more people hopping on, but I never took to it. I just didn’t get it. In fact, I still don’t. As far as the communication angle is concerned, I’m already waist deep in instant messengers, websites, message boards, text messages and a cellphone. So why am I here/there then?

Well, I’ve noticed that like with many mechanisms of communication, people use Twitter in very different ways. Some people are letting the world know about their breakfasts, some are self-promoting, some are staying in relatively close circles of communication, and some people are actually engaging in conversations with, well, just about everyone. This is something I didn’t expect, and in retrospect it should have been obvious.

One look at the list of people that I’m following, and your next question is probably…”WTF?” Well, there’s no semblance of order there, really. In addition to the few people that I know, I just started going through the lists of people that were following others, and adding names that I recognized. I will admit that I was rather surprised when I was notified via email that “Richard Moll is following you on Twitter!” Now, this is likely due to the fact that some people return the favour of a follow-action in order to expand their own networks. But hey, I thought it was kinda neat regardless. Thanks Richard!

So I guess I’m here to [attempt to] join the conversation. I’ll be blogging (here) about some of the things that I really can’t cram into 140-characters, but I’ll also be in and amongst some of you, trying to be somewhat entertaining, but mainly trying to figure this whole Twitter thing out.

Cheers!

Here are some quick points to ponder that have me wondering about… well, just about everything.

1) According to Nielsen, The Weather Network was the 4th most accessed site (in Canada) on mobile phones in Q1/2009. They beat out Yahoo Mail, Gmail, iTunes, Google Maps, MSN Games, and YouTube. Windows LiveMail, Google Search and Facebook took the top 3 spots.

Think about this. 674,000 people were in a position where they needed to access information that is questionably accurate at the best of times. Further, it’s winter in Canada (Q1 2009). You do not need a network of trained meteorologists to tell you that it’s going to be COLD.

2) I’ve decided to use the Twitter account that I had abandoned 3 seconds after signing up for it upon its birth, to actually, genuinely see what the fuss is all about. I don’t know if I plan on updating it. I want to see if I can establish a really ecclectic list of people to follow for starters. My first reaction? Following Brent Spiner is equal parts amazing, creepy, and disturbingly addictive. I’d definitely suggest checking out his feed.

“ALARM! ALARM! Someone has breached the security system! “Ernst, Ernst, to me! (learned that from Picard) STAT! (learned that from ER)”

3) The same could be said about any specialized industry, but I’ve always found the task of describing what I do to be a difficult task, especially when the person asking isn’t in the industry (specifically if said person is older and happens to be in my family). I usually start off explaining a particular project, stepping back to mention that it’s in the Digital Marketing space, stepping back once more to mention that it’s just marketing with a particular technology spin to it, and finally I resort to grunting “I do computers.” This is usually met with a lightbulb reaction and a remark similar to “Ah yes. My friend/your cousin Jane is a programmer too!” It’s usually at that point that my soul dies a little and I start fantasizing about violently dramatic ways to escape the conversation and/or the room.

…is that (unfortunately) they don’t resonate with the majority of the North American audience.

Now, a few points I need to clarify here:

1) I’m in North America.
2) I’m not calling the general public a bunch of morons. … …
3) I’m not under the impression that this is a ‘new’ idea.

I’ve been going through the archives at http://www.ibelieveinadv.com/ and I just started to notice that whenever I’d smile and nod, savouring that “a-ha” moment that really good ads are known for inducing, it would be due to one of the non-North American teams at BBDO, Publicis, Oglivy etc etc etc… Seldom were those moments the result of an ad that was grown and cultivated here on this side of the pond.

This post however, is not about the differences between the North American market and… pretty much the rest of the world. I just wanted to make a few observations about ads that make me wonder about them for a little while after I’ve seen them, and the effect that has on the brand the ad is trying to represent. It tends to be the rule rather than the exception, that advertisers want their customers to “get it” immediately after they consume one of their ads. Sometimes, that actually works:

There’s an instant connection/spark/kick to the groin upon delivering their message. However if this fails, well then you can always resort to plan B; play the ad 10-15 times an hour, plaster it within view of any moving organism with a pair of eyes and shove it in every paper publication available on the news stand in order to beat your message over the heads of the public.

Or… you can do something like this (click the image to go directly to the IBIA site):

Now I’m completely open to the fact that I may just be obtuse and I didn’t “get it” instantly. But those of you that (like me) looked at it for a bit and went “…what?” will know what I mean. The internal monologue in my head switched on, and I started to wonder about what exactly was going on here.

There’s a shirt, a tie… a rather extreme closeup of said things. Hmm… It’s for Clearasil. They’re an acne cream. There’s not much of the guys face in the ad. “Say hello to the mirror…” What does that mean? … That guy’s collar’s kinda weird. You’d think he would ha-…

Now here’s an ad that just got me to stare at it for about the same length of time as an average television spot, and all it had in it was a picture of a shirt and a tie (and some stubbly dude). Is this going to have the same effect on me as an ad that repeats… *ahem* ad nauseum (sorry), or one that appeals to my sense of kitsch like a cute ol’ grandma wondering about the location of misplaced beef? Perhaps, perhaps not. I suppose the real question is, what kind of brainpower does one need to apply towards perceiving an ad (active or passive) before that ad becomes ‘effective’? Further, if both types of perception result in increased sales, does it really matter?

As usual, leaving you with more questions than answers,… cheers.

As I was writing the title for this post, I wrestled with whether or not it even needed to be said. Yet, incidences of crime amongst kids and teens attributed to violent video games still continue to make the news (as recently as last month, in fact). I’ve never understood the tendency for the public to imbue video games, movies, and most other forms of media with the responsibility of teaching children right from wrong. “What message is this sending my child?” “How can they be allowed to teach this to children?” Those are just some of the questions that are hurled at the producers of media that contain the blood, guts, and gore that we’ve come to accept as somewhat commonplace.

So, I saw the following article come through my RSS feeds this morning: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/07/games-for-tweens/ After reading it, I wondered where all of the acid-tongued criticism was, and why it wasn’t being being doled out for these games as well. Then I took a step back and asked a larger question. Why are we holding these games (and their movie counterparts, where applicable) responsible for setting the moral compass for these kids? To what degree is society willing to transfer [what should be a] parental role, into the hands of the media?

There’s been a lot of commentary on this subject before, and I’m certainly not going to be the last one to voice my opinion on it. I feel that it’s necessary to maintain a dialogue on this issue though, as whenever an incident occurs that’s supposedly linked to a piece of “corrupt” media, cooler heads seldom prevail. The witch hunts, calls for sanctions, boycotts, and bans usually begin, well before someone opts to take a serious look for root causes.

In 10 years or so, if a contestant for a reality show like America’s Next Top Model (God help me if that show is still on in 10 years) flips out and kills an entire town, I wonder how much blame would be placed on games like those in the Wired article. Or what happens if a girl falls into a manhole while texting on her cellphone? Will the city get blamed, or is it technology’s fault that she didn’t see the large void in the pavement? Oh wait… nevermind.

I noticed that TechCrunch picked up a story today about how FriendFeed launched it’s real-time search feature. Now, you can get search results based on constant stream of incoming data from various FriendFeed blogs.

I’m wrestling with just how useful this feature is. Given Twitter’s recent spot in the limelight, just about all of the other big names in technology have been adopting Twitter-like behaviour in order to stay relevant. So is this in fact like Twitter? Twitter’s main function is to serve out real-time updates. FriendFeed is all about aggregating social network information, so there’s potentially some overlap there.

BUT,… there’s still this question of usefulness. Nearly every successful search paradigm starts with envisioning a use case. “What’s the user trying to do, and how can we make that thing easier for them?” That’s where this whole real-time search results thing kinda falls flat on its face, as far as I can see it. I tried to noodle some scenarios that have a heavy search flavour to them, hopped over to FriendFeed, to see what happens. (http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/07/real-time-search-we-have-it-its-here.html) These are the questions that I attempted to find answers for:

1) What kind of pizza is there around Toronto? (It’d be interesting to see what ‘Za joints people are talking about, no?)
2) How was Transformers 2?
3) What’s this whole thing about the Mythbusters and a Twitter account?

Now, the results are impossible to replicate (*ahem… real-time results and all*), but here’s what I discovered.

1) For the pizza scenario, on the first page of results, there was a small note about Pizza Libretto, and numerous other posts that contained the words “pizza” and “Toronto” without any real… relevance. Still searching for ‘Za.

2) A plethora of links to various Transformers 2 F.A.Q.s hosted on other sites, and a healthy smattering of “Transformers 2 sucks balls” comments. Alright, that was moderately helpful, but it doesn’t take much to get me to avoid the movie theatre these days.

3) The first time I entered “Mythbusters” and “Twitter”, I got jack. I got a few posts that had references to one or the other, but nothing that gave me any real answers. Then I figured I might do the same search over again. THIS time I got 5 posts in a row that all explained the issue.

The thing is, if I want to “search” for something, I’m not prone to sticking my head amongst a group of people so I listen for certain words, which is exactly what FF’s real time search attempts to do. It is sometimes interesting to see what people are chattering on about, and you can accomplish this quite well just by letting the stream update itself as new posts come in. But in that case you’re not really searching for anything, so much as you’re merely people-watching.

As far as the Digital space goes, a mountain of information has been absorbed into the collective consciousness of the world in the last couple of weeks. So much so that it’s hard to measure or even comment on exactly what it means.

The Chinese government hobbles Google, Twitter becomes the de facto source of connection for the Iranian election conflict, Bing says hello world, the Palm Pre makes a surprisingly impressive entry into the marketplace, and the web itself felt the strain of half a dozen celebrity deaths.

With each of these events comes the maelstrom of online commentary, as people attempt to reflect and organize the information into digestable units. But in recent weeks it seems that there hasn’t been enough time to consume one event before another explodes onto the scene.

How do you think this affects our overall ability to communicate about events that occur all around us? Do these things go into a queue for future processing? Do some things get filtered out? Is it possible to process them all in parallel? All of the above?