Social Data Mining: Misperceptions of the Mind

Demographic data mining is a recent enterprise in social networking on the internet and appears to be still in its infancy. Social web sites commonly ask the user to create a profile to help them find friends, that is the like-minded they wish to communicate with. The collected personal information is used to define the users' context of life and attempt to match it against that of other users. In my experience, the most widely-applied data mining strategies quarry only the simplest information, e.g. residence, school or employer, and only the most fundamental personal characteristics are examined. That is, age, gender and marital status are used to draw conclusions about the interests and preferences of the profiled.

In addition to providing matches for users, these data are used to steer advertisements to the users' web pages that inform on products and services they may be interested in. This seems only fair, because the service on the web site is provided free of charge. However, the conclusions drawn from the users' profile seem at times unrefined and presumptuous, painting a startling image of the average person.

I am 53, male and married. I provide these demographics in my profiles. On my page on one popular social network site, I recently found advertisements of services entitled "Dating for Seniors" and "Meet Married Women in your Neighborhood". Welcome to the real world? A look at my profile however suggests that I am not a likely consumer of these services. Such misguided targeting may only convince users to develop avartars, i.e. virtual cyberspace personalities, bearing little resemblance with their actual lives. Credibility suffers, while professional advertising agencies must be interested in finding true clients for their customers. Obviously, there is ample space for improvement. Until more suitable targeting has been developed, we must tolerate these inconveniences with a . They are minor compared with the great opportunities social sites offers.

Who Owns Your Site?

Recently, a friend of mine was pondering some existential questions about websites. She had started an own business selling customized arts and crafts over the internet. She found an appealing name for her site. She tells us on the site, how her real business grew from an unreal idea. The site offers to customers options to create the product they like to purchase. Sales have been taking off. The business shows all signs of success.

My friend is not a web expert and outsourced site development and administration.  Now, questions arise about the ownership of the site. The details of site registration have fundamental implications for ownership, particularly when the site name is synonymous with the brand and the businesses vitally depends on brand recognition. The person who registers the domain name of the site with the registrar may actually own that name. This person may also own the administrative privileges to add and delete data and permit other parties access to site administration. The administrator can potentially read the e-mails on the site.

For those who are not savvy in the use of the terminal command line, I found an easy way to obtain information about your site. Go to Broadband Report's whois browser application, type in your domain name, that is the site name without "www.",  and hit return. Check carefully that the entries match your expectations.

About the World Wide Web and Access for Everybody

The steam engine and iron rails transformed our lives profoundly 200 years ago. The USA would be a very different place today without the railroad. I believe that the personal computer and the internet will transform our lives in even a more comprehensive fashion than the railroad. Unprecedented in our history, these tools enable us to exchange information globally and interact with each other almost instantly. In open source computing, people work together who live in Minsk, Mumbai, Shanghai and San Francisco, as if they sat across the street from each other. The resulting synergism is unprecedented in our history. On this post's day, SOURCEFORGE.NET hosts 164,138 projects and has 1,744,123 registered users.

It is essential for our future that everyone has access to the internet. Particularly, people in developing countries must not be left behind, if we wish to lessen the gap between the rich and the poor nations. That is why I encourage everybody to participate in the One Laptop per Child initiative.

Nicholas Negroponte, Professor at M.I.T., launched this initiative in 2002 with the idea to create a laptop computer affordable to people with little means. This computer was conceived to cost about $100.- and work anywhere, providing access to knowledge about our world to youngsters even in the remotest areas. The product ended up costing twice as much as initially hoped.

However, there is a way to ease the financial burden. When you participate in this initiative until Dec. 31, you purchase for a bit more than $400.- one computer for yourself and another for a kid somewhere out there who has hardly ever seen a sleek gadget like this before. I bought one for my ten year-old son. Imagine two sets of eyes beaming with curiosity and excitement, one set here and a second set somewhere else, when the kids unpack this wonder machine! Join in!

Addenda

• On Nov. 17, 2008, XO laptops can be purchased here (Oct. 18, 2008).
• Amazon is sold out for now (Jan. 12, 2009).
• Brian Stelter reported today in his The New York Times article entitled "Can CNN, the Go-to Site, Get You to Stay?" that cnn.com garners on average 1.7 billion page views per month. The web is the future (01/17/09)!
  
I could not emphasize the relevance of free global exchange of ideas better than Dr. Goodall in this 2002 presentation (07/07/10):