The fudemental flaws

There are good ideas. There are bad ideas. Any campaign that involves Facebook likes, Twitter followers or the Internet as an advertising medium falls firmly into the latter of the two. While it was unknown at the time, the gold of ad revenue is only found in context of the platform. If your platform is the go to index for content on the internet, you have rich veins of ad revenue ready for you to mine because people are intentionally looking for unknown content and only want the best content to enter their mind space. If your platform, in contrast to Google, is a social networking website or dependent on the opinions of a few online, you will be wasting your time and money on a resource that can be bought for next to nothing and has been demonstrated to have no correlation to one's market share. The Pepsi Refresh Project is a prime example.

Is Klout worth it?

The idea of Klout affecting our ability to find jobs seems like a natural way for HR workers to sift through job applicants quickly, but it can also be a waste of time for both sides to focus on Klout scores. If you are gaming the system and elevating your score, because you perceive a high score as a direct factor in advancement, then HR workers are going to deceive themselves into hiring people on shallow qualifications. HR workers who use Klout score as a factor in hiring someone also end up wasting the time of interviewees who may not be so focused on what their score is, but instead focus on what they do best. In both cases, a company looking to hire a good analyst, engineer or strategist end up hiring Paris Hilton, a person who knows how to market herself better than presidents. No offense to Hilton; she is highly intelligent and knows what public relations is all about, but I wouldn't hire her to write company policy or manage a department. At the same time though, Klout scores is an indicator for how important your opinion is and its analysis can come with surprising insights, which is what is important to look at when one wants to highlight your Klout score; for what reasons do you have that score? A quick glance at that number will only tell you someone tweeted a lot about something and someone is listening. It could be a person who is applying for a position as a communications strategist is a fan about Red Bull and sky diving. It will not say this person is influential about physics, chemistry or corporate communication or give an assessment of the value of the articles, if any, this person has written, which is often a more accurate indicator of this persons value to any given company.

Is gaming Klout worth it? Not if you do not have the substance to back up the score.

Hitler Chic

Adolf Hitler...
A truly hated and despised man.
A historical figure.
A fashion statement....
Wait, what the hell?
Yeah. Hitler is now a fashion statement in Bangkok. Hitler t-shirts. Hitler logos. Hitler Ronald McDonald. Thailand didn't go through Adolf Hitler's WW2. They saw Japan's war instead, so cultural sensitivity is, for a very good reason, lacking. But does this excuse Thailand's youths from turning such a hated man into an icon?

Cheap technology and the high price paid for it

This post isn't about exploiting cheap labor in India.

Or conflict metals in Africa.

But it is a post about the human cost of technology.

Technology has made it easy for us to network and cooperate in ways we never have before. Facebook is one hell of a social network and twitter helped mobilize the Occupy movement. Camera equipped drones keep an eye on both the protesters and the police and cell phones make it easy to relay important messages, which is where we find the down side of cheap technology.

The Mexican drug war is a long standing battle between many parts. Zetas is ruthless and gets away with it, threatening to kill any one who criticizes them on the internet. I had an image of Zetas as low tech, using cell phones and pagers to make deals and organize. When I heard about Anonymous entering the war, I thought 'Fuck Yeah, social technology to the rescue!' Well, I was wrong. Zetas turns out to be tech savvy, operating its own high tech encrypted radio network extending over all of Mexico and parts of South America. So the fat cats are planning their deals over the air waves, using expensive hard to get technology in order to secure themselves from police surveillance. Except, the fat cats are using the internet, the low level thugs use it as an early warning recon system and the technology is so cheap, installing the equipment, complete with solar panels, on a large scale is no problem. Replacing it is a simple matter too. The technology is widely available the police cannot keep up. Some have suggested an arms race, importing and deploying U.S. jamming technology, but this will only work until Zetas acquires new cheap technology to counter the U.S. jammers.

The human cost of cheap technology in Mexico is found among the graves of Zeta's and the cartels victims. The ease at which these gangs have organized to evade the police can be attributed to their understanding of communication technology and there is nothing we can do to stop them without stopping progress in general. It isn't the technology killing the innocent, it is the person who employs technology to kill.