Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time To Reclaim Our Privacy | Epicenter | Wired.com

Are we beginning to see the emergence of a social and critical movement attacking the hegemony of social media, allowing us to take back our identities, return privacy into our own hands in the process returning real meaning to the word " friend" . Maybe not, but his article from Wired is thought provoking. Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed. Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family and maybe play a few stupid games that let you pretend you were a mafia don or a homesteader. It became a very useful way to connect with your friends, long-lost friends and family members. Even if you didn’t really want to keep up with them. Soon everybody

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Why Crowd-wisdom fails businesses

In his book The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki popularized the notion that, under the right conditions, canvassing the aggregate opinions of many people could be more efficient than relying on the expertise of a few. Jeff Howe applied this approach to decision-making using the buzzword ‘crowdsourcing’ in a Wired article in October 2006. Crowdsourcing assumes that customers know best what they want and need. Hence, more heads are better than one. We discuss why crowdsourcing may fail in a few important situations that concern social media.

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Is This the Future of Advertising?

It hasn't caught on yet in the U.S., but a global ad campaign for Unilever's army of laundry detergents -- sold in Asia as Omo, in France as Skip, and by other names around the planet -- hailing that "Dirt is Good," is considered by experts to be a perfect example of a new path for marketing in the 21st century. The marketing push merges memorable images of children splashing in mud with a customer-engaging social message -- "every child has a right to play and explore." Some claim the ad helped push Singapore to increase recess time at its academics-heavy, stress-inducing schools. The early success of Unilever's advertising strategy is exactly the type of information that company marketing executives and ad agencies need to discuss as they struggle to develop new ideas to handle the cataclysmic changes in technology and communications -- from Tivo to Twitter

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