society – Page 3

Mint CEO Patzer: “I personally don’t think Mint … should even be covering this particular topic” – Fortune Tech

I grumbled a bit to myself when I saw the Mint infographic on the “Economic Impact of Immigration”, but didn’t bother to take it any further. I’m happy to read that Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, saw the problem and has taken steps to correct it. Fortune Tech reprinted his email in their coverage:

I’ve been traveling and found out about the “Economic Impact of Immigration” article this morning. As soon as I read it, I had it pulled. While my editor ensures the article was fact checked, I personally question two sources of such facts. More, even if the facts or statistics to check out, they were presented in a biased, editorialized, and non-objective way.

I personally don’t think Mint, who’s dedicated to personal finance, should even be covering this particular topic. If that were in our domain, and one were covering “illegal immigration”, I should hope that we’d cover both sides of the topic. In no instance should the ethnicity or nationality matter in such a discussion. That’s simply wrong.

The post is down, I’ve put my editor on warning, and issued the following apology:

At MintLife, our mission is to give users and visitors the financial information they need to save and do more with their money. Topics range from personal finance advice, to analysis of macroeconomic trends and the fiscal impacts of news of the day. We publish content from a variety of contributors and sources, and the opinions expressed don’t necessarily reflect those of Mint.com or of Intuit. It’s true that the tone is often provocative, seeking to engage readers in dialogue around important topics, but the recent blog post “The Economic Impact of Immigration” went too far, cited polarized sources and did not receive the editorial judgment and oversight it deserved. We regret it. Our intention was not to further the agenda of any of the sources from which data was pulled, and the post has been removed.

Excerpt from: Mint CEO Patzer: “I personally don’t think Mint … should even be covering this particular topic” – Fortune Tech

I hope someone covers the misleading data in more detail. If anyone sees something comprehensive, I’d love it if you’d let me know.

Great products start with meaning

Great quote from Jeff Bezos on the connection between great products and meaning:

I strongly believe that missionaries make better products. They care more. For a missionary, it’s not just about the business. There has to be a business, and the business has to make sense, but that’s not why you do it. You do it because you have something meaningful that motivates you.

Excerpt from: Jeff Bezos’s mission: Compelling small publishers to think big – Fortune Tech

Bringing you the news

Importance of “filters” has been over-stated. As my friend John Pederson puts it:

Managing your own filter is critical. The other kind of filter that lets things in vs. preventing things from coming in.

[From Dean Shareski on attention.]

A filter is a screen that keeps things out. My information problem isn’t solved by keeping things out. What I need is to bring the right things to me, and that’s different.

What I want is not a filter, but good editors that bring me the news that I need to see. These editors could be a staff of professionals, but there’s also a role for technology in bringing my news to me.

There are already several services that try to do this, but none of them is really as easy, ubiquitous, and natural as I would like them to be. WIll someone solve it?

Jobs calls for organ donors…

The Wall Street Journal has video of Steve Jobs’ opening remarks at the Apple event last week. It was his first official public appearance since going on medical leave several months ago, during which he had a liver transplant.

It’s good to see such an open and human appeal from a prominent figure. I applaud Steve for this and wish him the best for his continuing recovery.

The Public Flow

These conversations happen in the pub, in the bleachers of our kids soccer games, and just about everwhere. We’re all having public conversations all the time, where the only privacy is that of proximity – you really don’t know who that is sitting at the next table, and usually you really don’t care. Now many of those conversations have moved to Twitter, or Facebook, or your blog. Some of those are open conversations that are easily found, searched, and aggregated and some aren’t.

I’ve been wandering recently, in my thoughts, around and through something I’m calling “The Public Flow.”

It started as a vague concept, triggered by conversations about “The Flow” – the moving stream of information that’s always there, described by Stowe Boyd, Kevin Marks and others. Doc Searls calls it “The Live Web.” But some of that flow is obscured, private, shared among friends and our web contacts or inside walled garden systems. I think what’s most interesting is the portion of The Flow that’s happening out in public – The Public Flow.

People have always spoken in public about their lives and what’s happening around them. Most of it has always happened outside formal community forums such as the Town Council. These conversations happen in the pub, in the bleachers of our kids soccer games, and just about everwhere. We’re all having public conversations all the time, where the only privacy is that of proximity – you really don’t know who that is sitting at the next table, and usually you really don’t care. Now many of those conversations have moved to Twitter, or Facebook, or someday on Google Wave. Some of those are open conversations that are easily found, searched, and aggregated and some aren’t.

My friend Laura Fitton, aka Pistachio spoke about Twitter at Google back in April. In discussing the organic flow of information on Twitter, she made this point:

When you go out and do focus group research and explicit market research, people freeze up a little bit and don’t quite get the right natural answer about how they really feel about a product, how they really experience a problem that a product might solve, how they really interact with information. But when someone bothers to tweet about it, that’s a very natural, authentic thing, so the quality of data and the volume of data flowing through it are potentially extremely valuable, and I think we’re just beginning to see good search tools…

What will happen as we develop better tools for understanding and participating in this Public Flow? How will life change? How will business change? How will our communities change?

How will it change us?

Follow, Un-follow, and “What’s Twitter for, anyway?”

Yesterday I did an @-reply to Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer):

@Scobleizer, for me twitter is for getting interesting insights and ideas. I’m sure not going to get them from those who follow me! (ducks)

Robert had tweeted his blog post on a change of follow habits, You are SO unfollowed! in which he said:

On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter. The reaction so far has been quite interesting. More than 7,000 accounts have unfollowed me back.

Twitter is such a useful ecosystem for ideas and news, why would you want to limit it to only those who want to listen to what you say?

I follow people I find interesting. Some of them follow me, some don’t. Either way, it’s ok. If @gruber, @mkapor or @timoreilly were to follow me, I’d be flattered. But it certainly doesn’t bother me if they don’t. I actually prefer to presume that most of the folks who follow me do so because they find me interesting.

Some of those 7,000 who un-followed @Scobleizer were bots or other sorts of spamming machines. That’s another reason to just follow twitter accounts that you find valuable – my direct messages in twitter don’t suck since everyone I follow is interesting to me. Scoble’s original post does a nice job of enumerating the reasons his change of habit has improved his Twitter experience.

I do wonder what’s next for Twitter. It’s useful and fun, but it’s also still changing and growing. Clients and tools like Seesmic Desktop, CoTweet, and FriendFeed are all changing the way we use Twitter. What’s next, I don’t know. But I’m enjoying the conversation.

Fabulous Auction to Benefit Square Peg Foundation

Our fabulous volunteers put together this amazing auction to benefit Square Peg Foundation. They’ve done a amazing job and we’ve received great support from the community. Here’s are just a few of my favorite items:

2000 Chateau Pichon Longueville Comtesse De Lande – Grand Cru Classe Pauillac (Bordeaux) wine (Double Magnum 3L)
Masterminds of Programming – Conversations with the Creators of Major Programming Languages (Autographed)
Soccer Clinic w. Houston Dynamo Coach Tim Hanley
A Trip for Two to Washington D.C. for Four Days & Three Nights at the Grand Hyatt Washington

Thanks again to our volunteers for doing such a great job setting up this auction and attracing such generous support!

The Search for Meaning… from the Square Peg Blog

Arianna Huffington was the morning Keynote Speaker at the Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp for Non-Profit, Saturday in Berkeley, CA. I was looking forward to her speech. I enjoy Arianna on KCRW’s Left, Right, and Center and usually agree with her editorials in The Huffington Post. I knew it would be a good speech – an inspiring and thought-provoking speech. it was a lot more.

[More at Square Peg Blog]

Hanging at the intersection of Where and I.D.

I spent the day hanging out at WhereCamp09, enjoying the geekdom and learning about great new projects. These folks are really doing amazing stuff.

But it surprised me how little the geo-geeks have done to embrace the social web.

The folks hanging at WhereCamp definitely need to be plugging in to the ID/Privacy/InfoCard/VRM effort. Too much of the cool stuff they are talking about is just creepy without robust controls on private data.

It’s also clear that the Identity folks need to somehow do better at getting the word out about their solutions to some of these problems.

I don’t know if this missing connection is a bigger problem for the WhereCamp folks or for the IIW folks. Is it a symptom of myopia for the mappping crowd, or lack of visibility for the identity nerds? Which effort is hurt worse when they are slow to cross-pollinate their ideas?

Stereotypes…

Stereotyping is easy for all of us. Our brains are categorizing machines, shoving every thing we see and do into tidy little boxes within boxes. A stereotype that conjures fear is even more powerful, because nothing gets our attention faster than danger – this also is built-in our wiring.

So it’s great to see more diverse presentation of Muslims in the media.

For an excellent point-of-view on this, check out Time’s Mona Eltahawy on video,

[From Latest Videos from TIME.com]