IBM Is (Still) the Patent King in the U.S. [Video] | Fast Company

Kinda of a fluffy piece about patent trends. Of course anyone who's been employed at IBM knows IBM has always made patents serious business. I wish the article went more into trends in patenting especially with the rise of patent trolling. A couple tid-bits:

In second place in patent growth was Samsung, with 4,551--up 26% on 2009. And while Apple's patent tally only jumped up by 563 new patents, this represents a growth of 94% over the previous year...

IBM's figure last year is 20% higher than in 2009. While that's less than the overall growth of the patent archive--there were 31% more patents added in 2010 versus 2009--it isn't a bad sign for IBM at all, since the 31% growth in patent awards is the largest on record for the USPTO.

IBM Is (Still) the Patent King in the U.S. [Video] | Fast Company

Online impersonation banned starting in New Year - Santa Cruz Sentinel

An interesting California precedent. Let's see how it ultimately plays out...

Falsely sourced e-mails, tweets and Web posts have become ubiquitous online, and it's not uncommon for someone to create a Facebook or MySpace account in someone else's name. If this is done to 'harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud,' according to Senate Bill 1411, it will be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.

Online impersonation banned starting in New Year - Santa Cruz Sentinel

iPad media apps: Stealthed hobbits thwart Google's flaming Eye • The Register

Really interesting article about how the nascent tablet media applications market prevents web crawling hoarders from knowing what we are reading.

Imagine a Facebook app, a LinkedIn app, and a web world of fleeing newspaper sites as they transform into newspaper tablet apps and vanish from the Google radar. Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search sites and news aggregation sites will get the equivalent of macular degeneration; their web field of view will constrict more and more, affecting their revenue and business models from the media indexing point of view.

So this could be the start of a balkanization of web media and advertising (at very least) with premium information space going to the tablet-based apps. Really interesting times...and maybe a glimmer of hope for the 4th Estate.

iPad media apps: Stealthed hobbits thwart Google's flaming Eye • The Register

The Revolution Will Not Be Twitterized

I may be a really late in piping in about this Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker, Small Change (Oct 12, 2010). I actually started writing this post and then forgot to finish it. I also decided not to say much at the time it was published to avoid the blogisphere kerfuffle about whether or not Mr. Gladwell dissed social networking sacred cows. Now that some time has passed I want to say that I feel the criticism was unwarranted and that Mr. Gladwell actually did some good in his attempt to set the record straight on the difference between activism and networking.

Yes, Mr. Gladwell comes on strong with the "we seem to have forgotten what activism is" argument. Still the article does a fine job of pinpointing the real value of social networks. That social networks are loose links and are great at creating communities. But if you want to bring that community to action then you need stronger links with clear direction, purpose and leadership, something social networks aren't built to do.

This goes back to an argument I've used many times, decide what you want to do first, then pick the technology that will support it. In other words, communication can be loose or specific, and some ways of communicating are more effective at bringing a group to action over others. The fact that there are new forms of communication does not exclude other forms. The article quotes historian Robert Darnton:

"The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.”

In my mind this is really accurate and it sets up Mr. Gladwells premise: That there are many forms of communication that hold importance for what it can do for us. Confusing the ability to network more effectively with activism is doing both activism and social networks a disservice. Both have great value in this world but they are not the same thing.

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker

BBC News - How ID card database will be destroyed

Meanwhile, back in the States we're handing out our personal information (address, date of birth, credit card info to match our official IDs) to every airline we book a flight on. Who knows how many files, machines, databases that info lands in.

This BBC article demonstrates the difference in attitudes toward privacy in the England versus here in the US. When it comes to destroying personal data the government takes personal data destruction seriously. As one document explains what the British government needs to do to destroy personal information it collected for an ID card system that is now discontinued:

It reads like a toxic waste disposal log, as any machine that has ever come into contact with the personal details contained on the database is either cleansed of its contents or fed into the shredder.

I was talking with a friend form England the other day about this situation. In England there is no assumption of privacy - given all the cameras and surveillance going on there - but they demand (legally) that collected information be treated as private and must be destroyed when it is no longer needed. In the US it's more the opposite. We assume privacy (undeservedly) and feel that if we aren't overtly being watched then the information isn't being collected. Yet we do not demand that the information be treated as private and who knows how it is managed or where it ends up.

BBC News - How ID card database will be destroyed