

Robert Scoble's Facebook Cortex - PeterMcCanney
http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14253

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dredmorbius
Scoble is the counterexample to mature restrained online presence.

There's been a lot made of the oversharing which occurs with teens and
20-somethings on Facebook and other social networks, often painted as a
generational change.

For those of us who were alive and tech-conscious in the 1990s, there was a
very similar trend, though rather smaller (as the Net and Web were also much
smaller), of a small number of high-profile "online diarists" who shared,
often fairly compulsively and excessively, life details.

Some remain online, some have largely disappeared, some are much more muted
than previously: Eve Astrid, Xeni Jardin, Rebecca "Net Skink" Eisenberg,
Violet Blue, (many were notably women), and some of the early bloggers:
Dvorak, Ito, Weiner, and others.

Andersson at last check worked for Google. Jardin continues to blog for Boing
Boing, though more quietly since a dust-up with Blue and recent breast cancer
diagnosis. Eisenberg is corporate counsel at a tech company. Blue continues
her sex blogging, though less prominantly than I recall. Life, jobs,
relationships, breakups, kids, and the like, tend to take the edges off over
time.

It's something I'm presuming FB and G+ will discover over time. Google's
approach has been more nuanced in part, I suspect, as its creators were more
mature than Facebook's.

Past age 35 or so, the most voluble social networking types tend to be those
with a vested interest in noteriety. Mostly marketers, entertainers, other
media types, technology evangelists, CEOs, and VCs.

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ojbyrne
I recently learned that Scoble lives in a gated community. I find that the
contrast between real-world privacy and virtual world exhibitionism
fascinating.

~~~
csel
WTF...I don't see how this is even related. Have you thought for a second that
Scoble's family (his wife and kids) live with him?

In fact, everything that is related to Scoble "personally" is public. You want
his direct email, direct phone, cell phone etc, you have it.

~~~
ojbyrne
I wasn't really trying to imply anything other than it was an interesting
contrast. I'm not sure why his wife and kids come into it - is it not possible
to be safe if you don't live in a gated community?

~~~
lmm
There is no such thing as absolutely safe; if your threshold is high enough
(and for many rich westerners thinking about their children, it is) then it
really is not possible to be safe enough if you don't live in a gated
community. (Of course, if you're rationally applying that high a threshold
then that implies never driving your kids anywhere).

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ecspike
Meh. There are things that are normal for Scoble and that which is normal for
the rest of us. For every piece of frictionless sharing gold, there are 5-10
pieces of crap to filter through.

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k-mcgrady
"Because, of course, Facebook is all about you being able to take your data
out of it."

You don't need to be able to take your data 'out' of Facebook to use it in
contextual applications. That's what they have an API for. For example,
Highlight can look at all my likes and compare them with the likes of the
people around me to show me people with whom I have similar interests.

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dinkumthinkum
This guy has become a caricature from a cyberpunk novel, maybe without the
cool clothes. He's so insufferably pretentious. Why is he popular again,
something about Netmeeting?

