Ho John Lee’s Weblog

The search query data that America Online posted over the weekend has been removed from their site following a blizzard of posts regarding the privacy issues. AOL officially regards this as “a screw up”, according to spokesperson Andrew Weinstein, who responded in comments on several sites:

All –

This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it. It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.

Although there was no personally-identifiable data linked to these accounts, we’re absolutely not defending this. It was a mistake, and we apologize. We’ve launched an internal investigation into what happened, and we are taking steps to ensure that this type of thing never happens again.

Brad Feld summarizes much of the ongoing discussion about user-generated content into three points, in a recent post. Here’s a recap, with some additions:

1. Trust
2. Attention
3. Relevance
4. Authority (added in a reader comment)
5. Intent (added by me)

These are recurring themes for the current generation of collaborative, intent-capturing, tagged, social-network-based, “web 2.0″ applications.

It’s interesting to look at the difference between Trust and Authority. As an example, Wikipedia is clearly not “Authoritative” on any subject, yet people ascribe “Trust” to the content there. Topics that are strongly subjective or open to interpretation can sometimes be organized based on Trust more easily than through Authority. The “disputed content” mechanism on Wikipedia allows for a little of this, but part of the confusion comes from the underlying model of an encyclopedia, which is generally intended to be authoritative.

Spent a few hours this afternoon at Chris Heuer’s BrainJam event. Wasn’t able to make it to the morning sessions, but arrived in time for the end of lunch and the “youth user panel”, consisting of four college students. They all love Facebook. Not sure how representative they are of the general student demographic, since two of them are trying to put together a web startup. They all use free online music and movie access, mostly through sharing within the dorm networks.