Lately, every time I manually flagged a comment as spam, I started to have the impression that they all were posted on the same post, namely an old announcement for my plugin "Absolute Comments".

An SQL query later, my impression was confirmed: this blog post *is* a spam magnet:

I suspect that some particular keywords in page titles act like pheromones to spammers. These keywords probably include "comments", "guestbook", "feedback" and anything that will make them think there's a form they can spam.

The SQL query I used to list blog posts sorted by the number of spam they get is:

If you want to play with it, I made a quick standalone script that will run the query and output a pretty interactive pie chart. Download spam-magnet.txt, rename as .php and put it in your blog root (where wp-load.php is)

If you run it and notice a pattern on your blogs too, share your analysis! I've always enjoyed useless fun stats :)

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Top Spenders

The top spender in June, AT&T Mobility, spent $8.08 million on search ads to coincide with the release of the iPhone 4. According to Ad Age, AT&T's the third-largest U.S. advertiser overall, so its Google spending is not a big surprise.

Other companies that made up the top 10 include:

• Apollo Group You know them as The University of Phoenix and they spent $6.67 million in June 2010
• Expedia $5.95 million
• Amazon $5.85 million
• eBay $4.25 million
• Hotels.com $3.30 million
• JC Penney $2.46 million we'll admit, this one surprises us
• Living Social $2.29 million
• ADT Security $2.19 million

Why Brands Buy Google Ads

The data shows us that for big brands, a heavy investment in Google is usually tied to revenue that comes directly from search traffic (as in the case of Amazon, eBay, Expedia, Hotels.com) or in instances where companies are trying to build awareness (AT&T) or weather a PR crisis (BP).

It's also interesting to note some of the brands that aren't on the list. The documents obtained by Ad Age indicate that companies like GM, Disney and BMW spent less than $500,000 on Google ads in June. Even Apple spent just less than $1 million on Google ads, despite its high-profile launch of the iPhone 4.

However, we also think it is possible that some big brands are spending money on search, but not directly with Google. For instance, although Ad Age cites Walt Disney as one of the companies that spent less than $500,000 on Google ads in June, the movie studio released Toy Story 3 that month, a film supported by a massive ad campaign. The film has gone on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide, making it one of the most successful animated films of all-time. It seems odd that Disney would spend only $500,000 on search terms for its big summer release.

What seems more likely, however, is that Disney purchased advertising through companies like Fandango or MovieTickets.com and those companies have their own arrangements with Google. In other words, when it comes to evaluating search spending, don't count out the potential middle men.

This also makes sense when taking a big-picture approach to Google's own revenue. The top 10 brands only accounted for 5% of U.S. revenues for the month.

Google is a big target for advertisers because of its strength in search and because of its ubiquity across devices. We do wonder if ad buys will shift to other outlets, like say, Facebook, as users spend more and more time on those networks.

More About: ad age, advertsing, att, bp, Google, google adwords, online advertising

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So taken was I by William J Mitchell's comments on the impact of the network and mobile communications on space that I have quoted it here a couple of times already ;-) Here it is ...

The fact that people are no longer tied to specific places for functions such as studying or learning, says Mr Mitchell, means that there is "a huge drop in demand for traditional, private, enclosed spaces" such as offices or classrooms, and simultaneously "a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces". This shift, he thinks, amounts to the biggest change in architecture in this century. In the 20th century architecture was about specialised structures--offices for working, cafeterias for eating, and so forth. This was necessary because workers needed to be near things such as landline phones, fax machines and filing cabinets, and because the economics of building materials favoured repetitive and simple structures, such as grid patterns for cubicles. [The new oases | Economist.com Behind a paywall]

As we are more connected we are better able to 'micro-coordinate' our activities, postponing arrangements until they need to be made, conferring with others about what to do next or where to go up, arranging ad hoc rendezvous, checking on a detail or request. This is now routine, and as Mitchell suggests it can change the way in which we think about space. In fact when we talk about the social use of space, it is likely that such uses are also shaped by the network and mobile communications.

I have come across several examples of this recently ....

• Groupfinder is a service provided by NCSU libraries. It helps students 'micro-coordinate' their activities across several communications environments ..

  GroupFinder is a tool designed to help students let group members know where they are studying in the library. In a building with high use and uneven cellular service coverage, it is often difficult for students to locate a space to work in a group, and it is also challenging for groups to let latecomers know where they are working. GroupFinder is an attempt to solve these problems by providing a low-barrier method for students to broadcast their location in the building. Once an activity is posted to GroupFinder, it is displayed in a number of places:

  • The GroupFinder kiosk in the main lobby
  • The library's e-board system
  • Any computer with an internet connection
  • The Libraries' mobile site

  [Groupfinder]

• The redevelopment of library space is aligned to the "huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces" that Mitchell notes. The Guardian recently discussed changing university architectures and the interaction between space and teaching and learning.

"The most convincing new university buildings", says Neary, "are those where students are given real responsibility for managing and supervising the spaces within which they learn, as well as acting as support for other students' learning. The Learning Grid at the University of Warwick is the most developed form of this new kind of space."

Neary was at Warwick before Lincoln. Designed by the university library with architects MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, the Learning Grid is, according to its manager, Rachel Edwards, "a technology-rich, flexible and informal learning environment, open 24/7 with a capacity for 300 people". Essentially, this is a fusion of a library and a common room. It allows disciplines to cross. It encourages students to help one another as well as themselves. It is generating fresh lines of research. "It's been breaking down the gap between students and teachers," says Neary, "with students becoming part of the academic project rather than consumers of dispensed knowledge." [University architecture shapes up for a revolution]

• I noted Andy Walsh's talk at Emtacl10 a while ago. I notice that he has a selection of presentations and papers available in the University of Huddersfield repository. Together, they provide a nice overview of various ways in which library spaces and the network experiences of their users can be usefully tied together with QR Codes, mobile communications, and social network services.

As the OAuth specification editor, I am approached daily with comments, questions, ideas, and some very odd solicitations. It is quite fun. It seems that most people joining the work are determined to undermine their contribution by doing their best to alienate or insult the community, and often the editor.

This is not unique to OAuth I have seen the same mistakes in many other places. Since working on an early draft of the OAuth 2.0 specification, I started collecting tips for newcomers. Here are some that would make your entrance into a standards working group much smoother and productive.

Don't start with a proposal, start with a question.

Assume you don't understand everything, especially if you have feedback or ideas for changes. Instead of jumping in with some new re-architecture of the entire protocol, start by asking why it is the way it is. Engage the community first with a question, and work your way to change requests based on the answer you receive. By asking a question, you allow for the possibility that whatever if bugging you has a valid reason.

Keep your message as short and to the point as possible.

You are an unknown so people will look for reasons to ignore your message. Most people don't even open messages from newcomers. Instead, they wait to see if a thread develops. In other words, they wait until someone else puts in the extra work to deal with the new guy. If your message is short, it is more likely not to be ignored.

Don't email the editor privately, asking for permission before asking the list.

You don't need permission to ask questions or post to the list. All the specification editors I know (and certainly me) are usually busy and work in bursts. This means your email is most likely going to be moved to some queue of questions and feedback about the specification, to be processed right before the next editorial cycle. You are also wasting their time by forcing them to read your message twice (once directly and once on the list), and in many cases, repeat the discussion. This is why we have a public list just join and post away.

Don't prefix your message with I'm new here.

It's never a good idea to start a relationship with an excuse. The only reason to put an I'm new here disclaimer on your message is if you were too lazy to do your homework, read group archives, read the full specification (and revision history), and think before writing. If you do all that, your contribution is as valid and relevant as that of anyone else. The working group regulars know you are new.

Focus on what you know best.

Pick an area where you have experience and provide feedback to show you know what you are talking about. Don't start with a multi-page review of the entire specification. Instead, focus on the areas you are most knowledgeable about and demonstrate your skills and experience through the quality of your contribution. Don't provide a summary of your career saying you have many years of experience is the least effective way to get that message across. Let you work speak for itself.

Never start with an editorial suggestion.

Editors like to write, and they take pride in their work. They also have their own unique voice. Starting a relationship with a specification editor by criticizing their style is not a good way to get them to listen. Typos, mistakes, and other technical issues with the specification are always welcomed, but offering replacement text or ideas on how to say something differently will most likely be ignored, no matter how good the suggestions are. Wait for an editor to ask you to suggest text before sending in your own revision.

Start with a compliment, show good progress.

Pick something you think is good about the work, and highlight it. This isn't rocket science, just common sense. Don't compliment any one person in particular (like the editor or chair). Compliment the work and the community and do it in a way that adds value, like highlighting what is strong and good about the work, providing additional support.

Clearly state your role and introduce yourself.

Spend a few words to introduce yourself the first time you write something. Don't just barge in it's rude. Also, standards are highly political, and in a political environment, people want to know who they are dealing with. No need for life story, just the basic facts (lurker, developer, representative for a big company). And don't assume everyone know who you are just because you think you are important.

Do your political homework.

Identify the key participants and align yourself with those you agree with, showing you are well versed in the internal politics. Joining the discussion through agreement with a primary participant allows you to establish a work relationship with those most likely to be in a position to listen and impact. Agreeing with someone is usually better than disagreeing it adds emphasis to an existing view, and doesn't cost you political points going directly against someone else.

Make sure to be right if you are going to keep a thread going.

If you are going to stand your ground and keep an argument going, against the group consensus, make sure you know what you are talking about. It is perfectly fine to keep an issue going if you are unhappy with the resolution, but if you are new, this behavior is more likely to alienate the group than win your argument. If you are going to keep at it, make sure to add new facts and new examples to make your point.

Don't explain basic standards principals.

Assume everyone knows what bike-shedding, design by committee, or KISS are. Don't lecture the working group about process and other philosophical ideals. For most of the people involved, this is probably not the first standard.

Don't prefix more messages with I'm still new here.

You didn't need to state it the first time, so please don't keep repeating you are (still) new. Yes, we got it, you are new here.

I realise this might sound like politician calling for a new taskforce, or a businessman calling for a new tax break, but: we need a new social network.

By this, I don't mean that we need a new standalone service for sharing a kind of media, be it short messages, photos, videos, sound, shopping lists or anything else. Rather, what's needed is a framework to pull all the existing Web 2.0 services together in a way that's fluid, attractive and easy to use.

Social networking versus social publishing

In the beginning of the internet, much time and energy was spent discussing its potential to enable people to reach outside the boundaries of their everyday lives and connect in communities of shared interest. The internet enabled us to explore areas of interest our real' lives didn't allow us to investigate: people who lived in small towns with no galleries could learn about art; fans of obscure bands or niche cuisines or unusual hobbies could connect all around the world.

Equally importantly, the web allowed us to adopt a second identity. People could embrace interests that might not be socially acceptable from kinky sex to stamp-collecting to simple silliness without risking their real-world reputations.

With the advent of Web 2.0' and the development of ever more methods for people to create and share content online from Flickr for photos to YouTube and Vimeo for vidoes to Blogger, WordPress and Twitter for written thoughts this potential of the web was enhanced. Secret identities are no longer the preserve of superheroes: now each of us can have a second persona under which we publish all manner of content and connect with strangers all over the world.

But just as these services were developing, a funny thing happened: real life started to intrude. Facebook, launched in 2004, grew like topsy to become the website many people spend most time on, and the most vital to people's lives outside email. In the process, it became the default method of sharing photos, videos and writing for millions of people.

Facebook's success stems largely from one thing: its grounding in real life. You join under your real name, with a real photo, and connect with your real-life friends. From its origins as a tool to grease the wheels of the stratified social scene at Harvard University, it's become the online complement to people's real lives, used to share holiday snaps and plan birthday parties with existing friends far more than it is to meet new people. It's a true social network' the only true social networking site because it exists almost exclusively as an extension of, and facilitator of, people's real-life social lives.

There's nothing wrong with this. Facebook demonstrates that many people probably the majority are happy interacting online under their real names, and have no great desire to adopt a second persona or make contact with strangers who share their interests.

But at the same time, the continued success of self-publishing services like Flickr and Twitter shows that there remains a substantial demand for services which let you broadcast to the whole world, rather than just your own social contacts, and which let you adopt a second identity to enable you to say things you daren't with your first. The success of Twitter, in particular, shows the power of this freedom many people I know joined Twitter with a username based on their real name, before adopting a name that's less identifying to free them to be silly or profane.

Millions of people have a non-identifying username which unites their online publishing activity on a host of services: Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, as well as endless comment forums. Each of these sites has its own flourishing communities.

But here's the thing. Facebook is so popular because it enables you to see what your friends are up to, across all different media, in one place. That's why Facebook, while technically inferior to Flickr as a photo-sharing site, is now the biggest photo-sharing site in the world it's convenient to share photos with the network you've already built.

But in the wider world of Web 2.0 services, there's no united network. My Flickr contacts can see my photos, but not my tweets; my blog subscribers can't see my YouTube uploads. Each service provides tools for finding your connections on other services, but it's laborious and you still have to visit each separate site to see what your contacts are up to. I check Facebook every morning, and frequently again later in the day. It takes a few minutes.

If I checked Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr and Vimeo every morning to see what all those I follow were up to, it'd take an hour or more.

What's needed is a portal which lets us conveniently and easily see what all those we follow are up to across the different web publishing services: to add social networking to social publishing. And it's needed for more than just convenience. As Facebook's power grows, there's an increasing danger that the convenience if offers will lead people to abandon other services and simply share through Facebook. Already I find myself clicking the Like' button where before I would have Dugg' a web page, or shared it on Twitter, because it's so damn easy. If young people joining the internet get in the habit of doing everything through Facebook, the whole idea of distributed Web 2.0 services and of the freedom to adopt a second persona online could wither on the vine.

More than the stream

The most successful attempt at this so far has been Friendfeed. The site, launched in 2007, does a pretty good job of aggregation' pulling in your contacts' activity on various web services into a single stream. Friendfeed was bought by you guessed it Facebook in 2009, and development of the site has basically ceased while its former owners are put to work on its parent's site. But even if it hadn't been effectively abandoned, Friendfeed has serious limitations. To follow a contact, they need to have signed up for the service themselves, rendering it useless for those whose contacts aren't signed up yet. It's ugly, better suited to sharing text-based items like tweets than photos and videos, and it displays links rather than whole entries for blog posts.

Moreover, Friendfeed offers you your contacts' content in a single stream, with photos and blog posts jumbled up with tweets and bookmarks. To be easily useable, a new aggregation service needs to be smarter, automatically separating material of long-term interest like blog posts and new batches of Flickr photographs from short-term material like tweets and TwitPic photographs, and showing them differently.

What's more, Friendfeed offers only aggregation. It does have rudimentary social networking features like messaging and groups, but they're secondary the focus is on, as the name implies, the feed.'

Let me sketch out what's needed from this new social network.

1. Users should be able to sign up using any of the services they wish to include, if those services offer a system for signing up to other websites (like Twitter, for example).
2. When a user adds a service to the site, they should see the entries of all the people they follow on that site in their unified feed, whether or not those they follow have joined the site. (This will depend on the service in question's API, but should generally be possible). For example, I should see all my Twitter contacts regardless of whether they've joined the site themselves.
3. Where the same person is a contact on two services, but they're not a member of the site, the site should suggest joining them together into a single virtual contact' based on username (so for example, my friend Joethedough's Tumblr and Twitter, which share a username, would be suggested as a virtual contact for me to approve). If that user then joined the site and connected the different services themselves, the virtual contact would be upgraded' to a real one.
4. The service should smartly separate long-form content and display it in a different, less-frequently-changing area to the main feed. For example, if a contact uploaded a single Flickr photo, it'd go in the feed, but if they uploaded a set of 50, it'd go in the long-term section.
5. Users should be able to filter the feed in advanced ways, limiting it to a single service, type of service (photos/videos/blogs/etc), or by groups of contacts. Service-based contact groups like Twitter lists would be imported and you could add to them on the site. For example, I have a Twitter list of tech journalists; on our new social network, this would show me not just their tweets but their Flickr accounts and blog posts.
6. As well as sucking in information from various services, users should be able to write information to those services from the service. If you want to add a short message to your profile, for example, you'll be able to post to Twitter from the service, adding the message both to your Twitter profile and to your aggregated service profile. Not using a particular service yet? You can sign up, with one click, without leaving the social network site, with an account based on your existing username and password there.
7. Users should have a profile' showing their own feed, and long-term content area, for all the services they've added. They should have considerable control over the colours, fonts etc of the profile (but they should not be able to dump in random HTML, MySpace-style).
8. A user's profile should be able to function as their OpenID provider, giving people a common, effective hub' to use as their online identity across the web (and acting as a counterweight to the growth of Facebook login).
9. Users should be able to message each other, form groups, organise events, and do all the additional things which social networks enable. Ideally these too would be based on external services, with users able to (for example) email each other at their registered email addresses through the site, or organise events through a sevice such as EventBrite.

Ideally, this service wouldn't need to store or produce any information whatsoever on its own systems, besides the basic network of users and their connected services. Everything else would be done through external services that users had connected.

None of this, to the best of my limited technical knowledge, is beyond the current potential of services' APIs the systems by which they let different web services talk to each other (for example, Twitter apps like TweetDeck use Twitter's API to read and write information). But put it all together, and you have a recipe for a fast-growing, super-useful site that could provide the natural balance to Facebook. Each morning, you'd look at Facebook to see what your real-life friends are up to, and our new site to see what your virtual friends are up to. Just as your Facebook profile is becoming a hub for your real-name online activity, your profile on this site this would become a hub for your online identity, perfect for putting in email signatures or on address cards.

You'll notice I haven't said anything about privacy. Facebook's complex and often-changing privacy features have put privacy issues at the heart of the debate about social networking. But for this project, I don't see it as a top priority. Users should probably have the ability to show parts of their profile to only certain people, and information imported from external services should be subject to any privacy controls the user has applied on that external service.

But when you look at the services this network would be designed to aggregate, you find their privacy features are basic and rarely used. Only a very small proportion of Twitter users protect their tweets, and only a small proportion of Flickr users post private photographs. These services are really about publishing in the literal sense of making things public, submitting them to be found and enjoyed by the world. It's normal to follow strangers, and be followed by strangers, on Twitter. That's why it's so vital this new service allows people to mask their real identities frankly, that ought to be privacy protection enough, at least at the start.

Why existing services won't do

There are a range of sites currently vying to be people's online hub. But none of them will do:

1. Facebook.

Facebook actually does aggregation very well; its Platform API makes it easy for services to create applications to suck your tweets, photos and blog posts into your News Feed. Indeed, Facebook's attractive previews of links in messages, and embedding of videos and photos, makes it a better displayer of someone's tweets than Twitter itself. And, with its recent moves to encourage users to share more information publicly, it's making a wholesale bid to be the centre of people's online lives as it is the online centre of the offline lives.

But Facebook's networks are, and will always be, based around real-life connections. Most people with some notable exceptions don't want accumulate hundreds of random strangers as Facebook friends' the way they do Twitter followers. And there remains the problem of Facebook requiring people to use their real names.

The recent introduction of Facebook Pages, which are automatically public and well suited to aggregating information, provides a partial answer. But while actors, musicians and politicians and even some journalists might find it appropriate to complement their personal profile with a public Page, most people find the idea nonsensical. And Facebook has recently increased its restrictions on the names users can give to Pages, making them no more psuedonym-friendly than personal profiles.

What's more, part of the purpose of a new social network would precisely be to counterbalance Facebook, which is acquiring a degree of dominance many find disquieting.

2. Google.

Google's Buzz' was generally tagged as a Twitter rival when it was launched earlier this year, but it's fair to say it's also intended as an aggregator it can automatically import Blogger blog posts, YouTube videos, and Twitter posts. But its appearance is heavily text-based, and it doesn't feel like it's committed to aggregation there's no reason to believe that Google would want to enable users to import content from the video site Vimeo, for example, as it's a direct competitor to YouTube, and the same applies for WordPress in relation to Blogger. It doesn't even import RSS feeds, which is pretty much the baseline feature for a decent aggregator.

Google is gearing up to incorporate Buzz into a new, expanded social network, a full-on Facebook competitor, later this year. But the signs are that rather than complementing Facebook's focus on real-life relationships, Google will seek to beat them at their own game. A recent presentation by Google employee Paul Adams, who's believed to be working on Google's putative social network, focused on how online networking can be made to more closely mirror our offline day-to-day activity. It's well worth a look at, and it suggests Google Me' might be really useful. But it's not an answer to this problem, which is not about interacting with your offline social network, but precisely about building new communities and connecting new ones online.

3. MySpace.

Once upon a time, MySpace fulfilled just this function people's public-facing home on the web, a place where bands, celebrities, microcelebrities and regular folk mingled and connected. Had MySpace seized on its potential as people's public-facing alternative to their Facebook profile, and quickly wired in advanced, attractive aggregation, it might have had a chance. (Imagine for a minute if MySpace, not Facebook, had bought Friendfeed, and launched a radically overhauled service with aggregation at its core. Wouldn't that have been something?)

But services with 250 million users don't tend to carry out radical overhauls, especially when they're owned by irascible conservative media tycoons. And MySpace has now fallen so far, in user visits and above all in prestige, it's simply impossible how they could experience any sort of renaissance. Besides, the latest plan for reviving the site is pretty much the opposite of what I'm describing, focused not on social media but on centralised traditional media like TV shows and record-company-approved music.

4. Twitter.

By rights, Twitter should be considered one of the many services to be aggregated by a new social network, a self-publishing platform like Flickr or WordPress. But there are signs that Twitter is becoming, almost by default, the leading aggregator of people's content most services offer tools to automatically update Twitter when there's a new photo upload/blog post/video, and it's common to look at a friend's Twitter feed and see their actual messages outnumbered by auto-generated announcements of new content on other services.

The problem is that as an aggregator, Twitter is really, really bad. An entirely text-based service, it's useless at showing links, photos or videos. A whole industry link-shortening services has sprung up to deal with its inability to handle long links. And it's also not much of a social network: there's no capacity for groups, event management or messaging of more than 140 characters.

5. Diaspora.

The young developers behind a new social network project called Disapora got a lot of attention earlier this year, becoming the focus of attention of the growing mass of people seeking an alternative to Facebook and its (supposedly) cavalier attitude to privacy. The four young men are smart and idealistic, and Diaspora sounds like a great idea. But I strongly suspect it's doomed to fail.

Diaspora's founding principle is that no central hub should be required for people to communicate with each other. They're proposing that users have their own node,' installed on their own server, which can channel information from different web services to their contacts. It's a good idea. But it's impossible to think that a service that requires users to install software on their own server will ever reach beyond a narrow tech audience.

Of course, a central site could offer hosted nodes,' much as WordPress.com offers the experience of a self-hosted WordPress installation on a central site. But nothing I've heard from Diaspora so far suggests this service will allow for the kind of richly multimedia and easy-to-set-up profiles and feeds this service will need to take off.

To provide a really good experience, I think this has to be a centralised, hosted service from the off. That does make it reliant on one company, but because the information being shared isn't stored on the service just on whichever external service the user adds it to there's minimal risk of data being lost if the service disappeared overnight.

It's also not clear how focused Diaspora are on easy aggregation from other web services. Right now their focus seems to be on building an internal structure for sharing messages, links etc. And, Diaspora's system appears to be based on symmetrical' relationships that is, user A and user B have to agree to friend' each other to see each other's content. This new service should be based around asymmetrical' relationships, as used by Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr and most Web 2.0 services, where following' someone's content doesn't require them to follow' you back.

So far, Diaspora seems to be intended as an alternative to Facebook, a tool for messaging and content sharing, for the tech-savvy not unlike a decentralised Pownce. Good luck to them, but it's not what most users are looking for.

6. VIRB.

Possibly the most worrying precedent for this new social network would be VIRB. The little-known social network was launched in 2007, aimed at attracting web-savvy creative types the same types who were fleeing MySpace in droves, but weren't attracted to Facebook. It offered aggregation of external services, messaging, groups, attractive profiles with design tools, and many of the things this new social network all to have.

And it failed. Earlier this year, VIRB announced a total change of strategy, shifting from a social-network model to one of simple website provider. Users were invited to convert their profiles to standalone sites, and pay a monthly fee for them. The direction Virb was headed, just wasn't working for anyone especially our users, explained founder Brad Smith in a blog post. It was time we made an epic course correction, allowing our product to regain pertinence. Virb is not an answer to those seeking a Facebook alternative or a better-looking MySpace.

Pretty depressing stuff. But though VIRB got a lot right the importance of allowing users to style their profiles without letting them make them hideously ugly, for example it just didn't offer a rich enough experience to grow. Setting up a profile was pretty laborious, with profile information needing to be entered and decisions required about layout and theme. Aggregation was basic, with only a FriendFeed-style text-based list of aggregated material and no photo or video previews. And while you could aggregate all your services to your profile page, only certain services Flickr, blogs and Twitter, if I recall correctly could be properly integrated with the site so your contacts were aware when you'd imported new material.

Above all, what all these services have in common is that they require users to rebuild their contact lists on the site. The most crucial aspect of this new service should be that you don't have to do that each time you import a service, you import your contacts from that service, and the service helps with connecting the various profiles of a contact into a single presence in my network, even if that person hasn't signed up for the site themselves yet. This means people could begin using the site every day as their social media hub even before their contacts join, preventing the user-inertia problem that's killed so many aspiring social networks at birth.

If you build it, they will come

Tech is a business, and services aren't built simply because some blogger sees the need for them. But I'm convinced that a service such as this could be a viable concern. If getting started was easy enough, it could quickly become the chief place users go to check their contact's online activity outside Facebook giving decent potential for advertising without extravagant costs for servers, R&D, staff, etc.

Who'll build it? Well, in the industry of a thousand startups, it could be anyone. But here's an idea. Every major, independently-owned social publishing platform Twitter, Tumblr, Vimeo, FourSquare is threatened by the growing domination of Facebook and by the trend towards sharing with real-life contacts replacing social publishing. So why not work together? Each are small companies, but each could spare a little engineering time. Smaller companies still, who could stand to gain most from being plugged in to a service with built-in users, could contribute smaller amounts of time. These businesses could help the new startup get funding (and, of course, benefit from the ultimate advertising revenue). Users, eager to have a central home for their online identities and just one site to check in the morning after email and Facebook could make donations to help get things started, much as they did earlier this year for Diaspora.

Am I crazy? Probably. But you only need to look at the flurry of press surrounding the threat Facebook's new Places feature poses to Foursquare to see that the community of independent social services need to do something to combat the ever-growing Zuckerberg empire. By banding together maintaining their separate communities but adding a service that lets their users meet each other and subscribe to each other's additional services they can carve out a strong second network of social activity on the web to rival Facebook's. A user who thinks they need to check their Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr contacts' activity is likely to give up, not bother and just check Facebook.

Above all, users need this. What Facebook has done in helping people use the web to enhance their offline lives is admirable and valuable. But, if the social web is to fulfil its true potential as a place for people to connect and grow, to share interests and experiences, and to be creative, there must be a strong network of places where users can publish and network without using their real names.

Eric Schmidt of Google made headlines earlier this week when he predicted that, in the future, it would be routine for young adults to change their names to disassociate themselves from all the embarrassing youthful indiscretions recorded online in photos, videos and status updates. But you don't have these problems if people are free to use a pseudonym. And as well as reducing privacy problems, you get more interesting content put online. There's ample evidence that when forced to use their real name online, people are far more circumspect about how they interact and what they publish.

The web helps us do many important, everyday things shopping, organising events, sharing memories. These are great, and important. But much of the most exciting potential of the web lies in exploring interests and communities and building identities outside the boundaries of our real' lives. For that area of the web to survive and thrive, we need a new, public social network where people aren't restricted. I don't know what the name should be, but I can think of a slogan Be yourself.

German authorities have recently expressed skepticism about cloud computing and the potential it has for breaking data protection laws.

According to the Information Law Group, there is no imminent danger of a European crackdown but legal experts are advising international companies to address the potential concerns in their planning and operations.

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The controversy stems from Dr. Thilo Weichert, head of the data protection commission in the northernmost German state of Schleswig-Holstein. Weichert is calling for the abolition of the Safe Harbor framework and doubts the ability of companies to protect the rights of Europeans, who enjoy some of the strongest personal privacy laws in the world.

According to the Information Law Group, the Safe Harbor Framework was "developed jointly by the European Commission and the US Department of Commerce, under which American companies can publicly certify compliance with a standard set of Safe Harbor Privacy Principles approved by the European Commission and enforced by American regulators, predominantly the Federal Trade Commission."

The concerns about data privacy are also felt across Europe. Most of the tension arise from how personal data is stored in the Untied States, where privacy laws are less comprehensive.

European law is fairly meticulous on the matter of data privacy. There are a number of ways that a customer needs to be notified about how their information is being processed. The belief is that on many occasions, customers are not informed at all when using SaaS services and cloud computing services. Still, there have been no formal complaints issued against cloud computing providers.

The concerns from Germany do come at a time when Europe is beginning to review data protection laws that have been on the books for the past 15 years. Comments have been submitted to the European Commission, which has decided to push back any ruling until mid-2011 due to the varying approaches European countries have been taking about data privacy enforcement. According to the Information Law Group, the commission also want to examine how best to apply the general principles of the law in an "increasingly global, networked, and distributed computing environment."

The law group advises companies to make sure they are compliant by "handling European employee data in centralized enterprise resource management systems or outsourced applications."

Outsourced applications could be any variety of services. But due to the general tone in Europe right now, companies need to make sure cloud computing providers can prove they are compliant. This can be difficult at times as providers are sometimes hesitant about disclosing locations or sub-contractors. If they can't, then it's time to start looking at other options.

Further, the Information Law Group says it's important that customers check to see if United States vendors, including cloud service providers, "are Safe Harbor certified, or alternatively use EU-approved standard contract clauses."

This issue shows again why transparency and standardized policies will be increasingly important to develop in the cloud computing market. European authorities have a reputation for strict data protection requirements. That's not going to change. It's a just a question what effect the law will have on the technology itself as privacy takes center stage.

It's futile in some repsects to demand that data be centralized to

A few days ago, I asked for help in tracking down some of the scientific support for Matt Richtel's claims about the bad effects of "digital overload" ("More factoid tracking", 9/1/2009). One of the more trackable factoids was the "study conducted at Stanford University, which showed that heavy multimedia users have trouble filtering out irrelevant information and trouble focusing on tasks". And sure enough, The Neurocritic quickly came up with a reference that fits: Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass, and Anthony Wagner, "Cognitive control in media multitaskers", PNAS, Published online before print 8/24/2009.

I believe that the full paper is freely available at the link given above (please let me know if this is wrong), and if you're interested in this topic, I urge you to read it. As in the case of the last paper by a Stanford psychologist that was discussed here, you should start by asking "Never mind the conclusions, what's the evidence?". And again, you may conclude that the descriptions of this research in the popular press and even in the original paper lead readers pretty far beyond the interpretations warranted by the research itself.

Here's the paper's abstract:

Chronic media multitasking is quickly becoming ubiquitous, although processing multiple incoming streams of information is considered a challenge for human cognition. A series of experiments addressed whether there are systematic differences in information processing styles between chronically heavy and light media multitaskers. A trait media multitasking index was developed to identify groups of heavy and light media multitaskers. These two groups were then compared along established cognitive control dimensions. Results showed that heavy media multitaskers are more susceptible to interference from irrelevant environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory. This led to the surprising result that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a test of task-switching ability, likely due to reduced ability to filter out interference from the irrelevant task set. These results demonstrate that media multitasking, a rapidly growing societal trend, is associated with a distinct approach to fundamental information processing.

Note, by the way, that the authors (unlike Matt Richtel) carefully avoid any suggestion of causation, instead writing about "systematic differences in information processing styles" and "a distinct approach to fundamental information processing". This way of putting it is consistent with media multitasking causing cognitive disabilities (in this experiment's sample), or cognitive disabilities causing more media multitasking, or some third variable influencing both. But as we'll see, it's not completely clear that the claimed association (between media multitasking and certain information-processing deficits) even exists.

What's the evidence? It starts, of course, with that "trait media multitasking index". They administered a 20-minute online questionnaire to 262 Stanford undergraduates, presumably from the Psych Department's subject pool.

The questionnaire addressed 12 different media forms: print media, television, computer-based video (such as YouTube or online television episodes), music, nonmusic audio, video or computer games, telephone and mobile phone voice calls, instant messaging, SMS (text messaging), email, web surfing, and other computer-based applications (such as word processing). For each medium, respondents reported the total number of hours per week they spend using the medium. In addition, they filled out a media-multitasking matrix, indicating whether, while using this primary medium, they concurrently used each of the other media Most of the time, Some of the time, A little of the time, or Never. As text messaging could not accurately be described by hours of use, this medium was discarded from the analysis as a primary medium, although it still appeared as an option in the matrix (meaning respondents could still report text messaging while being engaged in other media).

They then created a "Media Multitasking Index" (MMI).

Step 1 was to translate verbal responses about concurrent media usage into numbers, on a scale from "Never" = 0 to "Most of the time" = 1.

Step 2 was to create the sum m_i of the numeric responses about concurrent media use for each of the 11 primary media. Thus a student who indicated that while web surfing (the 10th medium in the list), she listened to music "Most of the time", engaged in voice phone calls "Some of the time", checked email "Some of the time", engaged in IM conversations "Some of the time", and responded to SMS messages "Some of the time", would get m₁₀ = 1+0.67+0.67+0.67+0.67 = 3.68.

Step 3 created the individual's MMI as a weighted sum of the m_i values,

where h_i the number of hours per day that the student estimated she spent using primary medium i, and and h_total is the sum of all media hours. Note that multimedia hours are counted multiple times, so that a respondent's h_total may be larger than her number of waking hours. Unsurprisingly, therefore,

Media multitasking was correlated with total hours of media use, r (260) = 0.46, P < 0.001.

The authors observe that

The MMI produced a relatively normal distribution, with a mean of 4.38 and standard deviation of 1.52. This suggests that there is not a bimodal distribution of heavy multitaskers and nonmultitaskers. Nonetheless, we can identify individuals who very frequently use multiple media and those who tend to limit their use of multiple media. []

Based on the questionnaire, those students with an MMI less than one standard deviation below the mean (LMMs) or an MMI greater than one standard deviation above the mean (HMMs) were invited to participate. The invitation yielded 22 LMMs and 19 HMMs who gave informed consent and participated in the study for course credit.

(In fact, the number actually participating in the various subexperiments varied, down to 15 "Low Media Multitaskers" (LMMs) and 15 "High Media Multitaskers" (HMMs).)

Before going on to the behavioral experiments and their results, it's worth saying a few things about this Media Multitasking Index. First, high MMI values may correspond to many different patterns of life experience. You might be someone who has music coming into at least one earbud during many other life activities, media-related or otherwise; you might be someone who likes to keep a baseball or basketball game going in the background while studying or websurfing; you might be someone who's often talking on the phone or IMing friends while surfing the web. Each of these patterns could contribute the same amount to the MMI, but it's plausible that their psychological causes and effects (and their associations with other relevant lifestyle variables) are quite different.

Given this likely diversity of HMM experience (and we'll see later that the HMM group tends to have more variable performance on the behavioral tests), the rather small number of subjects is a reason for concern. Given that the study aimed to understand the effects of interactions among 12 different forms of "media", it's troubling that there were only 15-19 "High Media Multitaskers" tested, and that we don't know what sorts of media multitasking they actually reported engaging in. (And while we're focusing on this issue, it's worth noting that the pool of survey responders with MMIs at least one sd above or below the mean should have been (2/3)*262 175, raising as usual the possibility that the transition from 175 possibiltiies to 19+22=41 volunteers might have introduced some sort of selection bias.)

This is Yet Another Reason to publish raw data there's no reason that the authors couldn't have published (in a convenient digital form) all their media-use matrices, keyed to the performance of individual subjects on the various behavioral tests. This might make it possible to consider various alternative theories about which aspects of the media-use responses explained how much of the observed differences in performance (to the extent that the small number of subjects permits).

But this brings up a second and much more important issue with the MMI: it's entirely based on self-report. It's well known that self-reported measures of life patterns are not very reliable. Specifically, according to Bradley Greenberg et al., "Comparing survey and diary measures of Internet and traditional media use", Communication Reports 18(1):18, 2005:

Between the survey and diary methods, correlations range from .20 for listening to music off-line to .58 for email sent. Internet estimates are correlated .39 and television time estimates are correlated .35.

In general, subjects tend to over-report such activities in survey responses by about 25% overall, in the just-cited study. But more important, the divergences between facts and self-reports are subject to several forms of recall bias, as a result of which conclusions based on self-reported data always need to be interpreted with great caution.

Let me give a personal example that may be relevant to this case. If you were to ask me to estimate how many stair-steps I encounter per day, the answer I give today would be significantly higher than the answer I would have given before August 3, when I tore some ligaments in my left knee. For someone on crutches, with one leg unable to bear weight, stairs are a lot more salient than they are for someone who can bound up and down them without any problems or concerns. There are a surprising number of stairways around Penn's campus that I never really noticed before, even though I go up and down them almost every day.

So it wouldn't be surprising to find that people with certain physical handicaps tend to give a higher estimate of the number of stairsteps they encounter in daily life, just because climbing stairs is more salient and thus more memorable to them. If we use such self-reported estimates as the basis for an epidemiological study of the effect of chronic stair-climbing on physical agility, we risk being led astray.

Similarly, it's plausible that people who "have trouble filtering out irrelevant information and trouble focusing on tasks" might find the distractions of everyday multitasking more salient and thus more memorable, and therefore might tend to give somewhat higher estimates of how much of such multitasking they engage in. So given noisy estimates of media multitasking, and even a modest salience effect of this kind, the set of subjects with high MMIs may be significantly enriched in individuals who are more distractable or otherwise cognitively less able to deal with the demands of such multitasking.

I'm not going to discuss all of this paper's experimental results in detail, but I'd like to point out three things that seem to apply across all of them: the differences between the LMM and HMM groups are rare (that is, they appear only in a fraction of the experimental conditions where they might have been found), modest in effect size, and associated with higher variance in the HMM sample.

Thus consider their "Filter Task", where "participants viewed two consecutive exposures of an array of rectangles and had to indicate whether or not a target (red) rectangle had changed orientation from the first exposure to the second, while ignoring distractor (blue) rectangles":

Fig. 1. The filter task. (A) A sample trial with a 2-target, 6-distractor array. (B) HMM and LMM filter task performance as a function of the number of distractors (two targets). Error bars, SEM.

The only statistically significant difference between the LMM and HMM groups appears in the 6-distractor case, where there is a difference of about 0.3 (1.4 to 1.7) in the performance measure K. K is a somewhat complex measure, described in Edward Vogel et al., "Neural measures reveal individual differences in controlling access to working memory", Nature 438:500503, 2005:

We computed visual memory capacity with a standard formula that essentially assumes that if an observer can hold in memory K items from an array of S items, then the item that changed should be one of the items being held in memory on K/S trials, leading to correct performance on K/S of the trials on which an item changed. To correct for guessing, this procedure also takes into account the false alarm rate.

In the crucial six-distractor case, the standard error for the HMM group was about 0.15 items, which corresponds to a standard deviation of about 0.15*sqrt(19) = 0.65, or more than twice the difference in the groups' mean values. The standard error for the LMM group was about a third of that. We don't have the raw data to check, but this is consistent with a pattern in which the lower performance of the HMM group was driven mainly by a few individuals with especially low scores, who are in the HMM group not because they actually engage a lot media multitasking, but because they are "multitasking handicapped" and so overestimate their consumption.

I'll end with their "two- and three-back" task, a version of a classic short-term memory experiment:

[P]articipants were presented a series of individual letters in the middle of the screen. Each letter was presented for 500 ms, followed by a white screen for 3,000 ms. Upon presentation of a letter, participants were to indicate whether or not the present letter was a target, meaning that it matched the letter presented two (for the two-back task) or three (for the three-back task) trials ago.

Before seeing the data, you might expect that the HMM group would be more likely to forget the correct letter in all conditions, and even more likely to do so in the three-back condition compared to the two-back condition. But what happened was this:

There was no significant difference in the hit rate for the 2-back or 3-back conditions, or in the false alarm rate for the 2-back condition. The only difference was in the false alarm rate for the 3-back condition. Again, the difference was modest in terms of effect size: about 4.8% vs. 3.2%, or a difference of about 1.6% in false alarm rate in the 3-back condition, where the HMM group has a standard error of about 0.7, or a standard deviation of 0.7*sqrt(15) = 2.7, corresponding to an effect size of about d=0.6.

The authors also performed a more complicated piece of data analysis:

This [pattern of performance] indicates that the HMMs were more susceptible to interference from items that seemed familiar, and that this problem increased as working memory load increased (from the two- to the three-back task). This problem also became more acute for HMMs as the task progressed, because proactive interference from irrelevant letters accumulated across the experiment. Specifically, a general linear model of the likelihood of a false alarm in the three-back task revealed: (a) no main effect of HMM/LMM status nor of time, but (b) a significant HMM/LMM status*time interaction, such that the number of false alarms increased over time more rapidly for HMMs, B = 0.081, P < 0.001. These data demonstrate that HMMs are not only less capable of filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment, but also are less capable of filtering out irrelevant representations in memory.

This seems plausible. But it leaves entirely open the question of causation. Are the members of the HMM group "less capable of filtering out irrelevant stimuli from their environment [ and] less capable of filtering out irrelevant representations in memory" because their brains have been damaged by media multitasking? Or are they in the HMM group, not because they actually do more media multitasking, but because they're less able to deal with it and therefore more likely to remember and report it? Or, perhaps, are they more tolerant of media multitasking because they just don't care as much about the details of what happened where and when?

This paper also leaves open the question of what sorts of media multitasking are really in play here, and what other variables might be associated with MMI differences. The authors did consider the problem of associated variables:

[A] new group of 110 participants filled out the MMI questionnaire as well as their SAT scores, gender, the Need for Cognition index questionnaire, the Big Five Trait Taxonomy (including measures of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness), and a creativity task derived from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The data from participants with an MMI one standard deviation or more above and below the mean (16 HMMs and 17 LMMs) were compared.

They found no significant differences but again, it's a very small sample, and differences that would be rejected in this test as plausibly due to sampling error might still have been large enough to affect the experimental results in the earlier sample.

If we had access to the raw media matrix and the associated experimental scores, we might find (say) that their HMM group happened to include a subgroup whose MMI is high because they (report that they) listen to music during all other life activities, and who tend to smoke pot more often than their peers. Alternatively, Ophir et al.'s 15-19 HMM students might happen to include a substantial mix of driven over-achievers who network obsessively while studying and web-surfing, and are also among the substantial percentage of Stanford undergraduates who take Ritalin or Adderall in order to improve their academic performance and decrease the need for sleep.

From a certain point of view, all of this criticism is unfair. You can always think of alternative models to fit and new controls to run, to check and perhaps to challenge the conclusions of any study. And compared to some attempts to enlist science in discussions of social policy, Matt Richtel's (implict) reference to this paper rates very highly: the research is actually on the topic, and supports the desired conclusion.

But in my opinion, it doesn't support it nearly strongly enough. What's at stake here is a set of major choices about social policy and personal lifestyle. If it's really true that modern digital multitasking causes significant cognitive disability and even brain damage, as Matt Richtel claims, then many very serious social and individual changes are urgently needed. Before starting down this path, we need better evidence that there's a real connection between cognitive disability and media multitasking (as opposed to self-reports of media multitasking). We need some evidence that the connection exists in representative samples of the population, not just a couple of dozen Stanford undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology. And we need some evidence that this connection, if it exists, has a causal component in the multitasking-to-disability direction.

What does all this have to do with language? Well, most of the types of "media" at issue here involve speech or text. This is also an interesting example of the rhetorical trope "studies show that ". And it's part of my on-going investigation of the interpretation of generic plurals. Of course, all of these connections are minor compared to the possibility that digital media are ruining our brains.

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:P

Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit advocacy group and vocal Google critic, has been a promoting a video that lampoons Google's privacy practices by depicting an animated Eric Schmidt preying on unsuspecting children.

In the video, Eric performs full body scans on the children using a tool called 'Google Analytics', the actual name of Google's web analytics tool.

That's an odd choice for Consumer Watchdog, whose website, like many others, including our own, collects information on how users browse it using... wait for it... Google Analytics.

Consumer Watchdog's privacy policy admits that it uses tracking cookies to monitor its readers behavior, but insists that it does not "sell, share, trade, rent, distribute, or otherwise disclose personal information provided by End Users to any third party without an End User's express consent, except as provided in the End User Terms and Conditions, or as required by law."

Google Analytics works via tracking code placed in a website's source by the publisher which collects information and sends it to Google, which displays that data to the publisher in useful charts and tables. In other words, Consumer Watchdog collects information about your click-behavior -- certainly something Consumer Watchdog considers private information in other contexts -- and sends it to a third-party: Google, just about the least trustworthy third-party on the planet in the group's estimation.

Apparently someone at Consumer Watchdog realized that there was something off about this, because on Inside Google, the group's site dedicated to Google-bashing, it doesn't use Google Analytics. Instead, it tracks readers with Piwik.

And what is Piwik?

According to its official website, "Piwik aims to be an open source alternative to Google Analytics."

Well, that's a relief.

Of course, we don't think there is anything nefarious about this. It's incredibly useful for a website to understand how users are reading it. But some people think sending this sort of data to third-parties without explicit consent is very wicked.

Like, for instance, Consumer Watchdog.

When I was ready to transition from computer programmer to project manager, my employer, Xerox Corporation, sent me to its huge training center in Leesburg, Virginia. Over two weeks, the people there taught me some of the skills I needed in order to succeed in my new role: managing projects, motivating people, complying with employment regulations, and preparing status reports and presentations. The company also encouraged me to complete an MBA, on a part-time basis, at New York University. It gave me lots of time off and paid for the tuition.

Tech companies in the internet era offer their employees some great perks. But do you think that Facebook, Groupon, or Zynga provide budding professionals with any serious management training? Not at all. Given the way tech companies grow and the HR challenges they face, management training and career development are more important than ever. But few have the timethey are too busy surviving.

Professors Robert Fulmer and Byron Hanson of Duke University's Corporate Education group researched the management practices of 23 leading high-tech firms. Corporate executives in an overwhelming majority, 89 percent, believed that leadership development was becoming increasingly important for their companies; 58 percent ranked this as a high corporate priority. Yet less than one-fourth of the managers interviewed had a clear roadmap for how they could develop themselves, and more than half didn't even know who in their organization was responsible for the development of leaders. The conclusion of the researchers wasn't surprising: many high-tech companies are young, so their systems and procedures for grooming leaders aren't well developed or firmly established.

Maybe this is why so many tech companies suffer from morale problems, missed deadlines, customer-support disasters, and high turnover. And this may be one of the reasons why so many tech startups who succeed in selling their vision and raising millions in financing are just a flash in the pan.

One of the interesting findings in the Fulmer and Hanson research was that more than 70 percent of the tech executives interviewed said that leadership development in technology-driven firms is different than in other industries. The researchers believed, just as I do, that these tech executives were dead wrong. The lessons that leading companies like Proctor and Gamble and General Electric have learned about management development and training apply as much, if not more, to tech companies.

This means that if you're a fresh grad joining a hot new tech startup, you shouldn't expect your managers to train and groom you, or the company to provide you with time off to complete an MBA. You're on your own. If you are working at some of the more established companies, such as IBM and HPwhich do have excellent management-development practicestake full advantage of them. You need to learn all you can.

Many people are born with an innate sense of vision; they readily learn new technologies and master them. Some are very good at communicating and inspiring others. But you can't be born with the skills needed to plan projects, adhere to EEOC guidelines, and prepare budgets and manage finances, or to know the intricacies of business and intellectual property law. All this has to be learned. Some skills can be developed on the job, but this is usually through trial and error.

I usually recommend that engineering students who want to become managers and CEOs complete a fifth year of education. There are one-year long engineering management programs which cover such subjects as marketing, finance, intellectual property, business law, and managementsimilar to the key courses in an MBA program; plus tech-oriented subjects like innovation management, operations management, and entrepreneurship. One such program (and there are many) is the Duke Masters of Engineering Management program, at which I teach.

For experienced tech workers in Silicon Valley, Berkeley and Stanford both have excellent executive MBA programs. Berkeley Haas School dean, Rich Lyons told me over dinner, last month, of his plans to make his school the premier training ground for Silicon Valley executives. Boston's Babson College is also launching a program in San Francisco.

But not everyone needs to spend two years doing an MBA. Berkeley's college of engineering is creating a much shorter program targeted at Silicon Valley techies with leadership potential. Under the aegis of Fung Institute Chief Scientist and Director of UC Berkeley's Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, Ikhlaq Sidhu, the school is developing a professional program in Engineering Leadership. This will meet one evening a week for six months and teach subjects like product management, entrepreneurial thinking, leadership and finance. It will also teach team building, business management, and motivation.

The new Berkeley program is highly selective however. It will only accept 25 candidates in 2011, based on recommendations from senior executives in the valley. Sidhu says that he hopes to address the symptoms of engineering without leadershipwhich include organizational indecision about new products and services; unresolved conflict between product management and engineering; and superficial technology strategies. Berkeley will likely expand this program significantly over time and add many others. After all there is a great need.

Editor's note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa and find his research at www.wadhwa.com .

Over the last year or so, location-based services that integrate tightly with mobile phones have been one of main themes watched by the venture world, and for good reason. As we continue moving forward in a world influenced less by mass media and more by our interactions with new technology (social networks, smart phones, etc), it only makes sense that these platforms will become the primary channels for distributing new information, products and services.

If you look closely at some new emerging startups, you'll begin to get an idea of where this is all headed.

Shopkick, which recently debuted partnerships with Best Buy, Macy's and others, is a new service that automatically rewards users just for walking into stores. The service installs sensors in various locations that alerts their system when you walk into a particular store, which then can offer you special deals from the store you're at.

Another spin on location apps is connecting users to time-sensitive deals offered by local merchants based on the user's location. TappLocal and PhoneTell are two startups aiming to tackle this, but in different ways. TappLocal (which is in private beta) serves local business ads inside other mobile applications that already have millions of users. TappLocal tracks their location, then alerts them with time-sensitive deals based on where they are. PhoneTell also aims to connect users to special deals based on location, but is more of a 411 for smart phones, with a bunch of extra goodies outside of locating deals through hyper-local search.

The app serves as a super smart phone directory, allowing users to search for relevant businesses based on their location (including by category, such as pizza slice, which would yield results of the closest pizza place that serves by the slice, is currently open and has strong activity on services like Yelp and Foursquare). PhoneTell also offers some handy features like uncovering hard-to-find customer service phone numbers, advanced caller id and one-touch text messaging to let callers know why you are unavailable and when they should expect a call back.

Another interesting take on this space is GroupTabs, a recently-launched service that offers Groupon-style special offers when a group of people check in to a local venue.

It's clear that this space is going somewhere. It will be interesting to see how all of these apps fare against more established location-based apps should they decide to go after this market. My money is on the apps that can accomplish strong user retention by providing easy integration with a consumer's daily activities and a lot more value than checking in somewhere.

Have thoughts? Leave a comment below.

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