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Mr. Teen has urged me to get a new pet insurance for Flint, the wheaten terrier. For those of you who have followed this blog since years ago, you've never really been properly introduced to Flint. We had to say goodbye to Sir Orange FlaggyTail as we left the US, and we still miss him dearly. So we were pet less for about a year and a half, before Flint came along. He is our first dog in a long line of cats. It's been an incredible experience, and although a dog ties you up in ways you never imagined (I don't mean that in a naughty sense, in case you wondered). Flint has been a gem. But let me tell you, pet insurance is e x p e n s i v e.

So when Mr. Teen found out that Tesco offered 40% off their insurance if ordered online, we sat down to investigate. A bit of google flimsy gave us Compare Pet Insurance This site gives you a ranked list of pet insurances for you to explore. Tesco is number one on the list, with five shiny, golden stars.

Now, Tesco isn't traditionally know for offering the best insurance service after you pay, so this impresses me. "Wow," I say, "Lots of people actually like Tesco's insurance?!" Maybe I've been a snob. Maybe Tesco isn't bad after all? Let's see. I click "Get a quote". Now you're sent off to Tesco's own site. Getting a quote involves giving away all your personal details, like address, age, marital status, email address, pet's name and number of lovers (just kidding) etc. After much ado, we were told that Flint, the wheaten terrier, could be covered for up to £4500  a year for a monthly fee of £18. That's almost half of what we've been paying. Although his other insurance is way better, we haven't used it ever so this is very tempting indeed!

But hang on a moment. Mum's a social media designer. So she wants to know what those stars marking the rating of this insurance back at "Compare Pet Insurance" were all about. Who exactly  rated Tesco's pet insurance....? This matters to me.

"Tesco" says Mr. Teen, before I even hit back on the browser. I want to know how he knows this. "They probably own the site" he jokes. So we poke around the site for a bit, but there is no explanation how this rating came about. It certainly wasn't from you or I. Because we've given no tools to rate anything on this site. So where, then, did Compare Pet Insurance get these ratings from?

www.compare-pet-insurance.com has been setup to allow insurance customers and potential customers to compare the many services currently available and to see offers listed for the various merchants and policies on our site.

www.compare-pet-insurance.com operates independently of all the insurance providers that are displayed on our site. This site is run in order to allow potential customers to compare companies, products and services.

Alrighty then. So we can compare, but not rate. Once again, where does these ratings come from, then?

Looks like fraud. Social media fraud. Obviously Compare Pet Insurance is not claiming to get their ratings from you and me, they're just conveniently avoiding telling visitors where they're getting their ratings from. By visually using stars to rank the services in the same way as social community sites will do, they're tricking customers into thinking that other consumers where already here and left their feedback. Is that fair? A dirty sales man's tactics? No, it's fraud. Social media fraud.

These kind if issues are going to be huge when brands fight for credibility in the future.
 
Friend: "Oh, did you see that site with the pet rankings insurance? I'm thinking of changing my cover to Tesco"
Me: "Yeah, saw that, it's FAKE. "

So, was Mr. Teen right?

A quick whois search show that compare pet insurance is registered to UK Web Media.
A quick google search show that the Tesco Insurance website is...

....run and operated by UK Web Media Ltd, and UK Web Media is a registered company in England & Wales

Shamefully independently run, if you ask me.  I'm sure Tesco/UK Web Media when asked can explain how the ranking on Compare Pet Insurances were calculated, but while we wait.. have a look at these real customer's experiences.

UX Intensive is being held in Denmark!

This intermediate-to-advanced workshop series examines the four key elements that contribute to a successful interactive experience: Design Strategy, Design Research, Interaction Design and Information Architecture. Workshops are led by Adaptive Path's team of experts, including: Dan Saffer, Chiara Fox, Brandon Schauer and Todd Wilkens

I'd gladly swop my holidays for this!

Drama 2.0

Some months ago, I discovered this little angry pot of a blog. I quite like this blog. But let me warn you before you click that link: it's steaming hot & angry.

"The Drama 2.0" log is written by an expert on "anything", combined with an "impressive track record in the financial world", after landing a $5 million deal to write his own blog (why he needed the $5 mill to start writing with his amazing background is a mystery to me).

To me, he's part of the new type of blogger we've seen emerge in the last few years. While blogging was merely an academic or personal exercise in the past, it's now also the fortunate few's  luxury job. "Drama 2.0" writes:

When he's not busy making the world a better place for himself, Drama 2.0 enjoys Cuban cigars, fine dining, wine and liquor, yachting, fast cars and foreign women. Drama 2.0 currently spends most of his time in Punta del Este, Dubai and Prague
but is sometimes found in Monaco, Moscow and St. Kitts.

The luxury blogger loves drama. Gossip, fame and deconstruction. While they're jet setting about,  they share with us all the wrong doings of the world (some in a more intelligent way than others).

Drama 2.0. is after the wrong doings of the early web community. Maybe because of his strong financial background, it becomes extra obvious to him that there is a lack of monetization of today's web? So while he's leaving the following note to Tim O'Reilly:

"..next time you decide to cash in with another conference that piggybacks on an overhyped "industry," give it a generic name so that you save yourself the embarrassment of having to spew a bullshit rationale for a new focus when that "industry" declines. My suggestion for your next conference: Circle Jerk 2009. The motto: "Everybody gets a turn."

...it's worth noting perhaps, that thanks to the early community's "hyped up" web, Drama 2.0 is able to surf a $5 mill wave as a blogger?

Yes, everybody gets a turn. Clearly when looking at the bigger picture, the old boys added value somewhere after all.

Yesterday, I attended a group leader seminar at the university. It was quite excellent! I've got so much teaching experience that I knew most of it, but sometimes, you forget what you learn, or you don't think about it so deeply anymore. Attending seminars like this is great, it refreshes your memory. It would be great if all teaching institutions had a short "prep" seminar for their teaching staff before semester start - to remind everybody about the little simple things about teaching we forget so easily when we get too much into the subject - teaching is actually harder if the subject becomes the focus instead of the students.

I am trying to understand why the commenting feature on weblogs seems to be such a hot topic. Diane argues against them (permalinks please?). I am not sure if I really understand the problem or why some have such a phobia around them. Diane writes:

"Mike takes an interesting position on blog comments, one with which I substantially agree. What he doesn't talk about is how comments perniciously give the appearance of a "dialogue" but in fact are just another vehicle for one person, the commenter, to speak past another in the interest of, in his words, "a tiny spasm of assertion that fails to engage with any other perspective."

Mmm. Where to begin. The appearance of a "dialogue"... just another vehicle for one person... is the problem that people change the original topic, misunderstand the topic, disagrees... or a fear of the other person behind the comment?

Just as I am working on my Christmas wish list for Santa, I stumbled over this incredibly creative and fun movie making game - The Movies:

Imagine you could make any movie you wanted to. Imagine you could pluck someone from obscurity and make him or her the hottest star in Tinseltown. Imagine that you had control of an entire movie studio, competing with others to create a string of box office smashes. Imagine being able to use your judgement alone, deciding whether success lies with epic action pictures or lots of low budget, hammy 'B' movies.

Seems like a "Sims" type of experience, doesn't it? But what I love about this game is that you can actually create your own movies. There is a huge community page featuring the latest "releases" - some of them are actually quite clever. Just have a look at the horror movie Carpe Diem....

I'm sure everybody knows how excited I was about meeting some of my Flickr Friends this weekend by now, but the real reason for the San Francisco weekend was the annual Tinderbox Seminar held at the Hotel Rex. As always, it was great to meet with other Tinderbox users!

Unfortunately, I lost my voice before the weekend. After getting through my presentation, I didn't manage to say much. 4 days with no voice has been a little too interesting. It makes you feel like a completely different person when the sound you produce is hoarse, ugly and whiny. The receptionist at the hotel definitely treated me differently over the phone with this serial killer type of voice... "Was that YOU who called earlier...??" he asked when I showed up at the desk.

Tinderbox users are always interesting people. One of my highlights of this seminar came at lunch, when Frank Tansey made a comment on having worn shoes of two different colors to one of his first jobs. In true Carrie style, I couldn't help but wonder if it had been hard to meet his wife with shoes like that. The answer was an interesting story which lead to a very philosophical discussion about life between Frank, Merlin, Will and I. That's when I snapped this photo of Frank and Merlin.

More Tinderbox Weekend photos here.

In one of the comments to Jill's post on selling our souls to Microsoft, someone who appropriately label themselves "a number in the line", i1277 asks:

"Yeah, and why is it that the Google Maps for Norway suck so much?"

Yes, WHY is that? Well, I think I know.

You see, Norwegians are kind of non specific about many things. If their toe hurts, they'll say: "My foot hurts". If they have a problem with the software on the computer, they'll say just that: "My computer doesn't work."

This has become a life style for us Norwegians! We're holistic and proud of it. We see and think in big pictures: the smaller details will always work themselves out, somehow. This extends to geography, naturally. Growing up on Askøy, this little island outside Bergen, I never ever lived on a street with a name.

Instead, we lived in zip codes. "5305" Florvag, 5307 Ask, 5310 Hauglandshella. That's it! Your name, your zip code. Sometimes, you'd add a "stativ" number - a dedicated spot on the main road where collection of postboxes were grouped together for the benefit of Mr. PostMan who had better things to do than running around finding houses with no numbers. But even without a "stativ" number, you'd get mail.

Some years after I left Norway in 2000, my parents address suddenly got a tad more specific: The Little Hill. This was only just, since they do indeed live on a little hill. Not only that, their house is built on a little hill, on top of the hill!

Mr. & Mrs. Mum & Dad

Little Hill

5310 Hauglandshella

But wait, there is more. Norwegians will surrender to common standards, when pushed. Last week, my mum told me that they now have not only a a street name, but also a number!

Growing up in Norway is likely the reason why I remember every turn and land post after one trip to a destination - I rely completely on my inner navigation system to get somewhere. I can tell you about every store, interesting house or turn on the streets I've been to. Sometimes, I can even tell where streets will connect even if I haven't been through those intersections. But ask me for directions that include street names and numbers - I won't have a clue.

It will probably take the Norwegian mapmakers years to plot all the new streets and numbers onto the maps of Norway. Now, you too know why Google maps for Norway suck.

Jill writes about wishing to delete here entire blog and become unGoogleable. She points to an article by Wired describing how some people hide from google:

These unGoogleables don't post online, blog, publish or build web pages using their own names. They're careful about revealing information to businesses, belong to few organizations that can leak personal data, and never submit online résumés -- all common ways that Google captures your data.

"Gotta be an early adopter, ya know. And unGoogleability might be the next bit thing" says Jill.

Having a public voice comes with a price. Once, a single dad who happened to have kids at the same school as Mr. Teen, googled my name and suddenly tried to chat me up via my email inbox. One time in a bar, I guessed who someone's favorite composer was, and since then the person thought we were destined. Soon I had comments in my blog.

Being unGoogleable might seem like the solution to problems like this and other kinds, but perhaps Jill is wrong. The next big thing, I think, is changing how we handle information. I think we'll see more and more technology that will aim to protect sensitive data, technology that will change the way people access information. Instead of you having no online presence at all, people who want to find out about you will need permissions to access your data. At this time, the key to this are communities.

You can already saw the beginning of this in Friendster, Orkut etc - where you may set the way people see your profiles - making information available for friends, friends of friends, everyone. Flickr takes this one step further and will allow people to make private groups between each other regardless of status (friend, contact).

These systems are just early pre-cursors to what is to come. It may be easy to dismiss them as chatty, hidden "dating" tools or popularity contests - for what else do they offer? The next generation will give us a new wave of content management and social software systems, building on these ideas, offering people ways to connect, collaborate and build new relationships by offering their subscribers a genuine, sincere experience. In these systems, permissions will no longer be tied to degrees of friendships (friends of friends, friends, family) because the relationships we have are much more complex than this. For instance, Jill is my friend, but I might not want to share the same information Jill has access to with my friend Peter. Instead of degrees of friendships, we'll see systems with permissions that are tied to identities rather than groups, and content tagged for this purpose. This is so much more complex, and very hard to do. But it will happen, and what this will do to blogging remains to see.

In the meantime, we'll just have to use common sense and watch what we say or write, online as we do in real life.

For a while, I've been addicted to Deleteme. Deleteme started out as a inventive game on Flickr - when you add your best picture to the pool, you will receive comments from your fellow members. The goal of the game is to get your picture into the prestigious group vault: 10 saveme's and you're in - 10 deleteme's means your pic is GONE. This honor is bestowed upon you in the form of a combination of tagging and commenting on your photos.

But wait.. how did this happen? Didn't Flickr give us tags so that we would be able to search each other's photos..? Did Flickr management have any idea that what they really gave us was semantic chaos..?

Tags are used for everything. At Flickr, people use tags for signatures (tagging pictures with their own names) or they use key words in an inventive "google ad words sense" - guessing words that might receive high hits (sex, nude, future new girlfriend) and therefore lead to higher view rates on your photos.

The Deleteme group doesn't care about this form of tagging. Only two tags count: Save and Delete. Everybody jumps at the opportunity to pick on each other photos - sometimes in the most brutal and humiliating ways. I cannot tell you how many times I've chosen to take off my 10 delete tags and accompanying comments so that my mum won't have to cry when she suddenly visits my stream and to protect any other innocent visitor who might not get the point of this game.

I have to admit it took me a long time before I was brave enough to let them just be. By then, I had finally gotten two pictures into the safe (which obviously helped me feel much better about myself) ... A fellow Flickrite (Big Vern?) noticed that I deleted my awful delete tags, and advised me to leave the comments as "visible scars". "Be proud!!" he said in a discussion thread.

The facinating thing is that people vote not only for the quality of your picture: if you ever left a bad comment on somebody's lousy photo, you've asked for trouble. It is sort of against the rules to delete pictures as revenge, but in Deleteme, rules are increasingly hard to enforce, and delete comments are encouraged anyways, so...

But if your picture doesn't always win when it is good - how does it win?

A common survival tactic is to be nice to people on your side of the water, yet merciless, brutal and cruel to the rest of the world. This means that if you post your photo after 6:00 pm, the Europeans will already be sound asleep while your friends (whom you've gained a lot of goodwill from by leaving sweet little comments on their photos) will help you save your precious contributions. Psychology and Stragegy combined: When the Europeans rise and shine, it's too late - they've lost their chance to delete your work.

With a community like this however, inevitably you'll have an obligatory Civil War where strong personalities clash together in verbal wars. That's when the powerful admins decide to use their banning powers: Suddenly, you're out. Unwanted. A thorn in the admins eyes - your visa in Deleteme land has expired.

This happened to the mighty Thomas Hawk. He gathered the other rejects and thus, a new Deleteme tribe was born: Deleteme Uncensored

Uncensored. Now, there is a message! The main difference between these two groups is that while Deleteme Classic is all about commenting on the photos, Deleteme Uncensored is all about the message boards. At Uncensored, the photos often turn stale in the pool before they get deleted or saved - while everybody chats and enjoy each other company (or not!) in the threads. At Classic - the group attacs your photo and that's that. And thus, there is no formal group memory, like the threads at Uncensored provide.

I am mentioning all this just because I find the social activities, hierarchy and strong personalities in these groups dazzlingly fascinating. Be warned, the trolls are here and sometimes ruin the fun with juvenile verb usage and stupendous behavior. Yet, in some ways they also contribute.

Everything can happen at Flickr. For instance: The latest group fun is now to send each other postcards via snail mail(!). Don't ask me how we got from Digital Photography to Postcards in the mail .