PassingNotes.com

How the Social internet simplifies source identification.

This is an article that I wrote for my regular column in Competitive Intelligence Magazine, published by the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP.org). It’s been reformatted here for online consumption. Oh, and it was written in draft form a little while back, so if you know of any great new sites to add to the list, please throw ‘em into the comments!

“I’m so happy ‘cause today I found my friends. They’re in my head.” – Nirvana

At the cold dawn of the modern internet era, back when Paris Hilton was only undressing Ken & Barbie dolls, ‘connecting online’ meant geeks were exchanging data on digital bulletin boards. As the internet matured, pornography took center stage and dominated the dial-up lines, prompting critics to consider it all a fad.

But as time passed, eye-opening internet businesses emerged to crack the foundations of industry – Amazon, eBay, and Craigslist to name a few. Around the time of Al Gore’s recount (2000), mind-boggling applications changed the way everything worked, from new distributed data models to nascent software-as-a-service platforms. Not surprisingly, pornography still crowded the highway

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okay, so i’ve got a new beef with wikipedia - the absolute and total lack of adult content warnings…so let me tell you this little story, it’s kind of funny…

my older son and i have developed (as of late) a bit of a mildly raunchy rapport, something his mom might not go for..i remember what it was like to be in 8th grade, to see the nude scene in the movie while sitting in the same room as my parents, squirming, adjusting, hoping that the glow of the screen wasn’t bright enough to show the red face sitting just a few feet away…didn’t want to go through that exercise with the fruit of my own loin, so yeah, i told him about the shenis…

at any rate, i’m reading this book - fucking brilliant btw - called ‘foreskin’s lament’ by shalom auslander…about half-way through he uses this random expression during a diatribe on circumcision, jokes about having to shave his son’s balls and give him a prince albert…never heard that one before….

…so my boy is on the machine with his friend and i shout out, ‘hey, do me a favor, hit elgoog and type in ‘prince albert‘…he does, and voila, the first result up links to wikipedia! wikipedia is, of course, a favorite research tool used by all junior high (and elementary) students, teachers even talk about it as a resource, how to cite articles if used…

but do me a favor, would ya’? take a look at the entry for prince albert that turned up as the first result on google…

does it bug you that there’s no adult content warning on that? does it bug you that the real prince albert turns up halfway down the results page after the wiki article? are you wondering just how cozy wikipedia and google have become?

exactly….

so naturally i hit wikipedia and did searches for all sorts of shit (nipple piercing, mutual masturbation, anal sex (which leads to tons of shit, no pun intended), blowjob - which led directly via link to autofellatio and so on and so on and ditty ditty so on)…

is it time for wikipedia to enlist their editors to mark content as adult?? anybody listening???

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a few months ago i talked about this article i was putting together for “competitive intelligence magazine” (from scip.org) about finding sources online - it finally went to print this month and will then go up on the scip site later, as well as on my own corporate site…

at the time, dozens of you requested copies (drafts/previews) and on a very positive note, scip has agreed to let me post it online at the same time as the print version as a guest editorial on profy.com

this is actually nice because it includes dozens of links and while displayed online, every link is ‘live’

…and as an added bonus, it’s now entered into profy.com’s ‘iphone’ contest - meaning that if you have any comments, questions or thoughts about the article then *please* feel free to post them directly at the article on profy because apparently that’s how they’re ‘calculating interest’ (soft science if i might say so myself, but whatever)…if i win, the plan is to swap the iphone (no interest) for a new ipod for my 8th grader (ipod touch is very cool stuff…)

so at any rate, the link to the article (full path) is:
http://www.profy.com/2007/09/26/how-the-social-internet-simplifies-source-identification/

or the tinyurl:
http://tinyurl.com/38ha8j

…for those of you who would like a copy in PDF format (for printing or whatever), just drop me a note at “dcarpe@gmail.com” - it will be up on clew.us in a couple of weeks as well under publications - as well as here on passingnotes.com…

thanks - and i hope you enjoy it! and again, i’m certainly happy to discuss and field questions about the dozens of resources covered here, though i welcome the opportunity to answer them within profy’s commenting system so that a) others can read them (tons of non-scip and non-aiip folks will be reading it) and b) it’ll improve my winning odds ;) (that last part is shameless, i know, bear with me…)

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well, back from summer fantasy land and immediately hooked into this little conspiracy theory that bubbled up a while ago on socnet, the listserv of insna - comment had to do with the nsa’s foray into sna back in the 70’s through promis (the “prosecutor’s information management system”)…promis was authored and created by inslaw inc, a software co run by bill and nancy hamilton who both (according to legend) worked for the nsa…”In March 1982, the Department of Justice awarded INSLAW Inc., a $10 million, 3-year contract to implement a version of PROMIS to which the government had already obtained a license in the 22 largest United States Attorneys Offices.” (from wikipedia) - if you go to archive.org and plug in this page, http://www.webcom.com/~pinknoiz/covert/inslaw.html, you will find all of the house proceedings and hearings summaries (page went offline in early 2005, ain’t that odd?)

…the story actually got a lot more outlandish before it was all over, “In 2001, the Washington Times and Fox News each quoted federal law enforcement and/or intelligence officials familiar with the debriefing of former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen as claiming that Hanssen had stolen for the Soviet KGB copies of PROMIS-derivative software used within the FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies to track the intelligence information they produce, and used by U.S. intelligence within banks to track financial transactions. These reports further stated that Osama bin Laden later bought Read the rest of this entry »

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hah…in mahalo’s dreams…what a stupid ass company…this is just a TEST post because i skipped all of august (very busy with iced coffee, work, a new dog, trip to maine etc)…curious to see if this backdates…

new post coming shortly.

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