A magnificent night from the balcony

September 21, 2009 | Filed Under Travel, Video | Leave a Comment 

I made this using my D90 and Sofortbild to control the timing. Exposure had to be manual which is why you see lighting changes. Click through to see the higher res version.

The problem with anonymity online

September 3, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

So today I joined a live interview video/chat room of a local business person. The content was generally useful but what was amazing to me was just how much annoying spam was created by users joining the chat room. I don’t know how they found it but it was ironic to me that here I was, watching a webcast talking about “Community and Marketing 2.0″ and at the same time its users were actively destroying the room by acting like a-holes making crude comments. Two things I got out of this:

a) people can be a-holes when they think no one is watching them.When all anyone knows about you is a random username then people become characters experimenting with different personalities. That’s the problem with anonymity online. Maybe these people are pretty normal citizens in everyday life, but in the chat room there were tons of degrading and sexual comments being made to a person they didn’t even know. It was a virtual crime in my opinion – just like harassment is.

And b) a live chat room needs to have moderation decentralized and handed over to the community if it’s going to really be a “live community event”. A single administrator can’t keep up with deleting comments, banning users, finding good comments, and staying engaged with the person being interviewed. It just doesn’t work. Why not hand over control to the community itself? Let other people thumbs up/thumbs down other users. If the majority is really there to engage then the spam users will be voted out quickly. Otherwise, let the administrator quickly assign other users as administrators. The point here is where is the balance between decentralizing authority and making communities self policing vs. retaining traditional old-school mentalities of centralized control watching over a community?