Leweb3 panel

I moderated a session at Leweb3 this morning, and had a blast creating conversation between Jaewoong Lee (Daum, Lycos), Dan Rose (Facebook), Michel Jaccard (BCCC) and Chris Alden (Six Apart) on “the dark side” of web 2.0. Behind this catchy title was a will to discuss the issues these new tools are creating in society, and talk about how the big guys are handling them.

We discussed three topics: Identity and online discussion, Privacy and advertising, and User generated content before taking questions from the public.

Identity and online discussion

• Many things are at the same level of our casual conversations in places like bars or between friends
• Increased identity did increase the “quality” of the conversation.
• Reputation a key factor also
• Online discussion is basically a reflection of human conversation, with the good and the bad appearing in the online world.
• Facebook did not see a big change after opening up their community to the public (the system was at first reserved for students of prestigious schools)
• In Korea, government installed a centralized identity system which did nothing to solve the problem of online bullying because of strong privacy issues and identity theft.
• Users are responsible for what they say and can be prosecuted for it, but usually it’s the one hosting in the content who gets the trouble because it is easier to attack them.

Privacy and advertising

• There is a tension between the need to know information about users (to advertise to them effectively) and respect of privacy. Big debate these days over the Beacon initiative.
• Dan Rose: we did two mistakes handling Beacon. We did not listen to our users, and didn’t communicate well what it was about. Now the system respects users needs and privacy.
• Future of advertising is certainly in social networks where I can recommend products to my friends. I noted that Facebook and Six Apart are basically taking us back to the Tupperware model, where after becoming micro-publishers we now all become micro-advertisers, advocating products to our friends.
• Users should be able to opt-in advertising, not be forced to opt-out.

User generated content

• Me: “90% of user generated is crap, but 99% of what’s on TV is crap. So is Internet content better?”
• Jaewoong Lee: user generated content is crap, but it is not the right way to look at it. Content is always relevant to someone.
• Web 2.0 did not lower the quality of information
• Facebook has no spam (in the traditional sense of the world, after the panel I got comments about how Facebook created social spam, where I get tons of updates on things I don’t care about), this is becauseyou only get information from people you trust.