Spock and the New New Transparency

I've taken a cursory tour around Spock and in general it seems like there is not much there there (bemused note: how hard can their search engine really be trying if it can't even find my blog - which has my first and last name in the title? Google finds it, as does Wink, etc.). Nevertheless, the idea of a people search that trolls the web and aggregates what it finds into a single profile page is a noteworthy development for digital identity - it signals the era of new new transparency.

New new transparency means dealing with the open the flow of people data where discretion is an afterthought . Whereas ClaimID allowed you to selectively link to various bits of your identity that are scattered around the web (i.e. new transparency), Spock automates the retrieval of those bits - if your age is published on LinkedIn, MySpace, a random online bio, or any other number of sources that Spock sorts and surfaces - then it will be front and center on Spock. With the advent of tools like Spock, the identity discussions around maintaining multiple personas for different audiences and freeing data from silo's go right out the window. 

One thing Spock does is create a list of "Favorites" - these are people it snags from external sites such as your LinkedIn contacts. In my case it pulled a bunch of names from a personal email account I use for things like scheduling play dates with other parents from my sons pre-school - seeing some of these folks MySpace pages was an eye opener. Also, a "person" named Burger shows up as one of my favorites. The entry links to a MySpace page for "My Search for the Best Burgers in America" - that's just an oddity. So there are definitely hiccups, it is likely that the Spock search functionality is stumbling over some of the challenges of munging all of the data on the web and trying to sort out what's a person and what's not - for example, turns out not all MySpace pages are people.

Once you come across a person in Spock you can add Tags and URLs to their profile. If a community develops and there is alot of tagging activity in Spock, this will become a feature ripe for snark. Mark Wahl mentioned  his idea for a similar people tagging concept to me at a cocktail party at the recent Burton Catalyst show - and for a smart ass like myself the concept is intriguing - I looked around the party and mentally assigned a couple of tags.

I've gone ahead and tagged my own Spock profile with the terms "Really, Fearless, Brilliant, Ambidextrous, Tall, Charming" - some of these tags are more accurate than others - I will leave it to the Spock community to sort that out.

I'm guessing the age of New New Transparency will drive many of us mere mortals to adapt similar PR skills. When it comes to digital identity, we're all neighbors on the same street now and how well you maintain your front lawn matters.  Can you see a personal identity landscaping industry taking shape? I'm calling it MyPR - actually, no I'm not, because that domain name is taken, but you get the idea.

Services like Spock will make the conversations around privacy and user discretion and multiple perosna's irrelevant. Most people will feel uncomfortable with the age of New New Transparency, but it is indeed here and we may as well embrace it:

Google: http://www.google.com/search?q=Chris+Ceppi
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ceppi
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ceppi/
Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/chris.ceppi
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=cceppi
Brightcove: http://www.brightcove.com/channel.jsp?channel=474416554
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=594491803

Ps. Spock's "search engine" does not turn up any of those links...

Comments

[weaverluke]

Very interesting points, Chris. The convergence of our various personas certainly seems to be proceeding apace, wherever one looks.

[Andrey Golub]

Chris,

nice article, I was then checking your profile today and it looks quite good- all those links are there and in general it all seems to be OK!

I believe it's the community that has done the job, since Spock is a Search Engine 2.0 so it was logical to expect that the information not found in the beginning by Spock Robots, will be added later by community (or by profile owner). btw I added some tags to your profile- it's not OK to have such a great professional profile and be out of cool tags on Spock! I hope you'll agree with my suggestions.

Kind Regards,
Andrey Golub- a Spock Evangelist, Milan/Italy
http://www.spock.com/Andrey-Golub