I’m still in recovery mode after the wave of Apple-defenders inundated me with privacy-related comments over this past weekend, and I promise to continue the dialog – and admit where I may be wrong – once I feel I’ve properly grokked the story. The issue of privacy as it relates to the Intenet is rather a long piece of yarn, and I’m only a small part of the way toward unraveling this particular sweater. (And yes, I know there are plenty of privacy absolutists rolling their eyes at me right now, but if you don’t want to hear my views after some real reporting and thinking on the subject, just move along….). lf you want to peruse some of the recent stories on the subject I’ve been reading, you can start with the Signal post I just finished.

Meanwhile, I want to tell you a little story about advertising and tracking, which is at the heart of much of the current tempest.

While skiing last week at my home mountain of Mammoth (the only place in California with a decent snowpack), my family and I stayed at a Westin property. It’s a relatively new place, and pretty nice for Mammoth – which is more of  a “throw the kids in the station wagon and drive up” kind of resort. It’s not exactly Vail or Aspen – save for the skiing, which I dare say rivals any mountain in the US.

Anyway, I stayed at the Westin, as as such, I visited the Westin site many a time during my stay for various reasons (I also visited before I came, of course, to research stuff like whether it had a gym, restaurant menus, and the like).

Now, besides visiting the Westin site while at Mammoth, I also visited Amazon.com, because I was looking to buy a particular adapter for my SIM card. I’m eager to try out the new Nexus Galaxy, but the SIM in my iPhone is a different size, and to use it in the Nexus, I need an adapter.

I didn’t end up buying the adapter, because I got distracted, but I did visit Amazon’s page for the device.

Now, why am I telling you all this? Because after visiting those two sites (Westin and Amazon), I noticed the ads I was seeing as I cruised the web changed. A lot. In particular, on my own site, which is powered by the company I chair, FM:

The ad at the top is from Amazon, with a picture of the very thing I almost bought. Now, is that creepy, or is that useful?

The ad on the side is from Westin, offering me a free night or $500 credit if I book another Westin vacation. Again, creepy, or …potentially a benefit?

This is “tracking” at work, and while some of us find it creepy, I find it rather benign. Both those ads are very pertinent to *me*, and one (the Westin) might even save me a lot of money – I love the idea of getting a free night at a place I’ve already stayed at and enjoyed (and I am a Starwood member, and stay at a lot of other Westins, so heck, I might just use that offer sometime soon).

Regardless of those specifics, it’s hard to argue that these ads are *worse* than the undifferentiated slop that once filled up ad space across the web. And that’s pretty much the point of cookie-driven advertising – that it use our data to offer up marketing messages that are, in the end, better than if the advertisers didn’t have the data in the first place.

After all, Facebook and Google offer up exactly the same kind of ads on their owned and operated domains – ads that are relevant to you – based on data you provided to them (the search term, or your Facebook profile). Somehow that’s OK, but when it’s done across the open web – well, then it’s “creepy.”

The problem, I think, is that we generally don’t trust these third-party advertising networks – we think they are doing nefarious things with our data, somehow screwing us, tracking us like hunted animals, creating vast profiles that could fall into the wrong hands. And the ad industry needs to address this issue of trust.

If you look at both those ads, it turns out the industry is doing just that. Each of the ads have an “ad choices” logo you can click to find out what’s going on behind the ad. Here’s what I saw when I clicked on Amazon’s “privacy” link:

This page clearly explains why I’m seeing the ad, and offers me an explicit choice to opt out of seeing ads like this in the future. Seems fair to me.

Here’s what I see when I clicked on the “ad choices” logo for the Westin ad:

That’s a popover, telling me that my browsing activity (I assume my multiple visits to Westin.com) has informed the offer. It tells me that an ad network owned by Akamai is behind the tracking and trafficking of the ad. And it offers me more links, should I want to learn more. I clicked on the “More information & opt out options” link, and saw this from Evidon,which Akamai uses to power its opt out and other programs:

This page offers a prominent opt out for the companies who served me the ad. it even offers a link to Ghostery, a service which I’ve used in the past to track who’s dropping cookies and such on my browser.

Now, I’m not arguing that this system is perfect, but it’s certainly quite a step forward from where we were a year ago.

And no, I didn’t opt out of anything. Not because I founded an Independent web advertising and content company (FM), but because frankly, I think the ads I’m getting are better as a result of this ecosystem. And I’m getting benefits I wouldn’t have had before (a free night at the Westin, a reminder to go get that SIM adapter I hadn’t yet bought). And, frankly, because this is all happening on the Independent web, insuring that small sites like mine get a chance to benefit from the same kind of value that Facebook and Google already have as “first party” websites – the value of my data. (More on this point in later posts, I am sure).

Now, if these companies end up doing evil, wrongheaded, or plain stupid things with my data, I’m going to be the first to opt out. And there’s plenty more we have to do to get this ecosystem right. But I thought it instructive to lay out how it’s working so far. And so far, I don’t find it anything but benign, if not actually useful. What do you think?

It sort of feels like “wayback week” for me here at Searchblog, as I get caught up on the week’s news after my vacation. Late last week the Obama administration announced “Consumer Data Privacy In A Networked World: A Framework for Protecting Privacy and Promoting Innovation in the Global Digital Economy.”

The document runs nearly 50 pages, but turns on a “Privacy Bill of Rights” – and when I read that phrase, it reminded me of a post I did four years ago: The Data Bill of Rights.

I thought I’d compare what I wrote with what the Obama administration is proposing.

First, the Administrations’ key points:

− Individual Control: Consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it.

− Transparency: Consumers have a right to easily understandable and accessible information about privacy and security practices.

− Respect for Context: Consumers have a right to expect that companies will collect, use, and disclose personal data in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data.

− Security: Consumers have a right to secure and responsible handling of personal data.

− Access and Accuracy: Consumers have a right to access and correct personal data in usable formats, in a manner that is appropriate to the sensitivity of the data and the risk of adverse consequences to consumers if the data is inaccurate.

− Focused Collection: Consumers have a right to reasonable limits on the personal data that companies collect and retain.

− Accountability: Consumers have a right to have personal data handled by companies with appropriate measures in place to assure they adhere to the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights.

And now my “Data Bill of Rights” from 2007:

- Data Portability. We can take copies of that data out of the company’s coffers and offer it to others or just keep copies for ourselves.

- Data Editing. We can request deletions, editing, clarifications of our data for accuracy and privacy.

- Data Anonymity. We can request that our data not be used, cognizant of the fact that that may mean services are unavailable to us.

- Data Use. We have rights to know how our data is being used inside a company.

- Data Value. The right to sell our data to the highest bidder.

- Data Permissions. The right to set permissions as to who might use/benefit from/have access to our data.

Comparing the two, it seems the Administration has not addressed the issue of what I call portability, at all, which I think is a bummer. Nor does it consider the idea of Value, which I think the market is going to address over time. It does address what I call editing, anonymity (what I should have called “opt out”), use, and permissions.

What the administration added that I did not have is “security” – the right to know your data is secure (I think I took that for granted), and “Focused Collection” and “Respect For Context,” which I agree with – don’t collect data for data’s sake, and we should have the right that data collected about us is being used in proper context.

Given how much this issue is in the news lately, as well as the overwhelming response to my post last Friday about Google and Apple, I’m getting as smart as I can on these issues.

Further coverage of the Administration’s move at RWW: Obama Administration Sides with Consumers in Online Privacy Debate and Paid Content Big Tech, Obama And The Politics Of Privacy as well as Ad Age, which is skeptical: Did The White House Just Thread The Needle On Privacy?

As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you’ve alloted for vacation. So while the whole Google/Microsoft/Apple privacy who-haa is going down this week, as are any number of other noteworthy news stories, I’m going to stay on the sidelines and focus on skiing with my family. Back at it, to the extent I can be at it while attending TED, next week.

There’s much to be said, for sure. But time only makes the saying of it that much better, I believe.

Over at the FM blog, I just posted the draft agenda for the first of five conferences I’ll be chairing as part of my day job at Federated Media. Signal San Francisco is a one-day event (March 21) focused on the theme of  integrating digital marketing across large platforms (what I’ve called “dependent web” properties) and the Independent Web. The two are deeply connected, as I’ve written here. As we explore that “interdependency,” we’ll also be talking about some of the most heated topics in media today: the role of mobile, the rise of brand-driven content, the impact of real-time bidded exchanges, and more.

Signal builds on the format I spent almost a decade crafting at the Web 2 Summit – the “high order bit,” or short, impactful presentation, as well as case studies and deeper-dive one-on-one interviews with industry leaders. Those include Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, Adam Bain, President of Revenue at Twitter, Neal Mohan, who leads Google’s ad products, and Ross Levinsohn, who runs Yahoo! Americas, among others.

Others represented include Instagram, AKQA, Babycenter, Intel, Tumblr, WordPress, ShareThis, Facebook, and many more. I hope you’ll consider registering (the earlybird expires next week), and joining me for what’s certain to be a great conversation.

Since I posted my call to action last week, nearly 600 folks have raised their hands and told me they’re reading this site via RSS. That’s pretty good, given my actual request was buried under 500 words of rambling conjecture, and my Disqus commenting system went down for portions of the first day. Not to mention, my RSS feed has grown by about 90% since the last time I posted the request, yet the number of comments (plus Tweets and other responses) was three times higher. It was the most comments I’ve ever gotten on any post, period.

So I think it’s fair to say the call was answered (we missed the overall number by about 85 votes, but there’s still time). For at least a very vocal minority of readers, RSS is still a critical tool. But, reading through the comments, it’s clear RSS has major issues, and that no one is really expecting those issues to get resolved. Most of you depend on Google Reader, and feel like the Google+ integration has been a step backward. And those of you who are publishers feel like Feedburner (also a Google product) is neglected and untrustworthy, and that there are simply no good monetization tools.

But a ton of you thanked me for making my feed full text, and I won’t be stopping that anytime soon. Thanks all, and if you haven’t left a comment on the original thread, please do! If we get to 664, I’ll feel somehow more complete!

About 14 months ago, I responded to myriad “RSS is Dead” stories by asking you, my RSS readers, if you were really reading. At that point, Google’s Feedburner service was telling me I had more than 200,000 subscribers, but it didn’t feel like the lights were on – I mean, that’s a lot of people, but my pageviews were low, and with RSS, it’s really hard to know if folks are reading you, because the engagement happens on the reader, not here on the site. (That’s always been the problem publishers have had with RSS – it’s impossible to monetize. I mean, think about it. Dick Costolo went to Twitter after he sold Feedburner to Google. Twitter! And this was *before* it had a business model. Apparently that was far easier to monetize than RSS).

Now, I made the decision long ago to let my “full feed” go into RSS, and hence, I don’t get to sell high-value ads to those of you who are RSS readers. (I figure the tradeoff is worth it – my main goal is to get you hooked on my addiction to parentheses, among other things.)

Anyway, to test my theory that my RSS feed was Potemkin in nature, I wrote a December, 2010 post asking RSS readers to click through and post a comment if they were, in fact, reading me via RSS. Overwhelmingly they responded “YES!” That post still ranks in the top ten of any post, ever, in terms of number of comments plus tweets – nearly 200.

Now, put another way this result was kind of pathetic – less than one in 1000 of my subscribers answered the call. Perhaps I should have concluded that you guys are either really lazy, secretly hate me, or in fact, really aren’t reading. Instead, I decided to conclude that for every one of you that took the time to comment or Tweet, hundreds of you were nodding along in agreement. See how writers convince themselves of their value?

Which is a long way to say, it’s time for our nearly-yearly checkup. And this time, I’m going to give you more data to work with, and a fresh challenge. (Or a pathetic entreaty, depending on your point of view.)

Ok, so here’s what has happened in 14 months: My RSS feed has almost doubled – it now sports nearly 400,000 subscribers, which is g*dd*am impressive, no? I mean, who has FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND people who’ve raised their hands and asked to join your club? I’ve WON, no? Time for gold-plated teeth or somesh*t, right?

Well, no.

While it’s true that nearly 400,000 of you have elected to follow my RSS feed, the grim truth is more aptly told by what Google’s Feedburner service calls my “Reach.” By their definition, reach means “the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.”

And that number, as you can see, is pathetic. I mean, “click,” I can understand. Why click when you can read the full article in your reader? But “view”?! Wait, lemme do some math here….OK, one in 594 of you RSS readers are even reading my stuff. That’s better than the one in 1000 who answered the call last time, but wow, it’s way worse than I thought. Just *reading* doesn’t require you click through, or tweet something, or leave a comment.

Either RSS is pretty moribund, or, I must say, I am deeply offended.

What I really want to know is this: Am I normal? Is it normal for sites like mine to have .0017 percent of its RSS readers actually, well, be readers?

Or is the latest in a very long series of posts (a decade now, trust me) really right this time  - RSS is well and truly dead?

Here’s my test for you. If I get more comments and tweets on this post than I have “reach” by Google Feedburner status, well, that’s enough for me to pronounce RSS Alive and Well (by my own metric of nodding along, of course). If it’s less than 664, I’m sorry, RSS is Well And Truly Dead. And it’s all your fault.

(PS, that doesn’t mean I’ll stop using it. Ever. Insert Old Man Joke Here.)

(image) As promised, here are all my predictions in one place. I’ve written a brief overview of each as well.

Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media

Twitter will become a force as a media company, not just a platform for others’ media. To do so, it will improve its #Discover feature and roll out something like Flipboard.

Predictions 2012: #2 – Twitter As Free Radical, Swiss Bank, Arms Merchant…And Google Five Years Ago

Every major player on the Internet will have to do a deal with Twitter, and Twitter will emerge as a Swiss like, open, neutral player in the battle for the consumer web.

Predictions 2012 #3: The Facebook Ad Network

Facebook will launch a web-wide competitor to AdSense. I’m already worried they’ll do it in early 2013 and make a fool of me….

Predictions 2012 #4: Google’s Challenging Year

Despite doing well overall, Google will fumble one big play this year. As I say in the post, it’s how they recover that matters.

Predictions 2012 #5: A Big Year for M&A

2012 may well be the biggest year of all for Internet M&A. Expect some really big deals, and a ton of small ones this year.

Predictions 2012 #6: “The Corporation” Becomes A Central Societal Question Mark

We’ll all start to question what role the corporation plays in our society and culture. It’s time for this dialog.

Predictions 2012 #7: Shooting From The Hip

In which I cover ten or so other rapid fire predictions, like Facebook making a billion-dollar acquisition, Xbox/Kinnect taking off on the web, Android coming to heel, and more.

(image) One of the things that pops out of the “Big Five” chart I just posted, at least if you stare at it a bit, are the places where each company needs to get strong, quickly. Apple is weak in social and one dimensional in ad solutions. Microsoft needs to improve its device products, build out its entertainment distribution muscle, and keep improving search share. Google wants to get better in productivity software, social, and payments. Amazon needs help in devices, social, and OS. Facebook has work to do in many areas, including devices, search, payment, and voice.

When the five largest companies in our space have a lot of needs, they tend to pull out the wallet and go shopping. Sometimes they buy their way into partnerships, but often, they simply buy.

Hence my  fifth prediction for 2012: Expect Internet M&A to heat up, big time. It’s not just going to be the Big Five who drive this trend, it’ll be a whole mess of players looking to consolidate power and press into the double-digit growth market that is the Internet (and by Internet, I also mean mobile and enterprise, of course). Yahoo’s new CEO Scott Thompson knows how to buy companies and has a data focus, for example. That could mean competition to purchase marketing, ad tech, and data companies like Blue Kai, Quantcast, or MarketShare. MediaBank is on a tear and will be on the lookout for similar kinds of companies. IBM has a deep interest in the marketing tech world, expect Big Blue to make some big moves as well. And Twitter will certainly be flexing its muscles, now that it’s bulked up with nearly a billion in fresh capital.

If I had to name a few companies I expect to be in play amongst the Big Five, they would be:

Instagram. This searing hot proof-of-iPhone app is not only a strong social play, it’s a massive image and data goldmine to boot. I could imagine a bidding war for Instagram between Apple (which really needs a social win), Twitter (which could really use a strong photo play), Facebook (which might buy it to keep it out of Apple or Google’s hands), and Google (who would see it as a way to sex up Google+ and Picasa). Of course Yahoo would vie for Instagram as well, but I’m not sure it could win.

Pinterest. It’s social. It’s media. It’s data. Is it a mayfly? Perhaps, but I think it’ll be in play in 2012.

Square. Everyone loves small business, and everyone loves payments. Visa already owns a stake, but that won’t stop Dorsey from landing where he feels the fit is best. That might be Amazon.

Evernote. If any of the Big Five are looking to bolster their productivity suite, Evernote might pique their interest.

These are just off the top of my head, and I’m not a VC (or a daily tech reporter for that matter), so I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. Suffice to say, I predict 2012 is going to be a banner year for tech and Internet M&A. Who do you think will be swept up, and why?

Related:

Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media

Predictions 2012: #2 – Twitter As Free Radical, Swiss Bank, Arms Merchant…And Google Five Years Ago

Predictions 2012 #3: The Facebook Ad Network

Predictions 2012 #4: Google’s Challenging Year

Predictions 2011

2011: How I Did

Predictions 2010

2010: How I Did

2009 Predictions

2009 How I Did

2008 Predictions

2008 How I Did

2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did

2006 Predictions

2006 How I Did

2005 Predictions

2005 How I Did

2004 Predictions

2004 How I Did

By some Mayan accounts, 2012 is not going to be a good year for any of us. But in this prediction, I’m going to focus on one company that will have a pretty crazy year: Google.

Now, I’m not predicting the company will lose revenue or profits in its core business of search, but rather that Larry Page’s first full year as CEO will be challenging, due in part to decisions made (or not made) back in 2011, and in part to the inherent complications of the businesses where Google now plants its flag.

I’ve got candidates for what those decisions were (Google+ real names’ policy, buying all of Motorola Mobility, not elegantly stewarding Android, muddying the search waters by favoring its own properties), but I think they all boil down to one core thing: Google has often brought products to market before they were fully ready, then played catch up with the competition against a roiling tide of conflicted partners, grandstanding policy makers, and confused consumers. It all adds up to a massive challenge that I think will come to a head in 2012.

Witness Android: the platform needs a strong and steady product-driven hand behind it, but seems at the mercy of handset makers and carriers. There’s hope in the Galaxy Nexus, but that phone is way ahead of the Android pack, and I’m not sure the ecosystem behind Android is going to follow Google’s lead here. Not to mention the goat rodeo that is the patent mess in mobile – an enervating and expensive battle that is always one court order away from throwing a wrench in Google’s plans. In short, Android is a wonderful counterpunch to Apple’s iOS, but it’s also a massive cat-herding challenge.

Or ChromeOS/Book/Apps: Google’s basically taking on the entire netbook marketplace here (Macbook Air and Windows in particular), but is the company really ready to play the game that its competitors have owned for decades? Sure, you can change the rules (Google’s really selling a cloud-based approach to work, rather than a PC-based one), but you can be right on theory and wrong in practice: hardware and the enterprise don’t move as fast as the web in terms of adoption. The company’s strategy of partnering (with leader Samsung, in this case) is elegant, but not at scale. At the same time, Google is taking on Microsoft in cloud software, and while it’s got some impressive wins under its belt, this is not a market native to Google’s strengths. In short, it will be a massive challenge to manage this business to scale and succcess in 2012.

Or Google+: Google is justifiably proud of how quickly this service has scaled (reportedly to more than 60mm unique users a month, in just six months), but questions remain as to the service’s staying power. If you are Google, and you integrate your new service into everything you own and operate (Android, Docs, Search, YouTube, Picasa, etc), it’s not going to be difficult to get a ton of folks to try the service out. I’m pretty sure that Googlers made their “social bonus” last year, given the good initial numbers, but again, it’s going to be a real challenge to turn those initial visits into long term active users who forsake Twitter and/or Facebook.

Or GoogleTV (and by some extension, YouTube): Probably the poster child for “not market ready,” GoogleTV now has very high expectations for 2012, thanks to Chairman Schmidt’s recent comments. But while the company can cut deals to integrate GTV into every new digital set on earth – and through its Motorola purchase, into every Motorola box to boot – it can’t force the kitty-with-a-ball-of-yarn ecosystem of cable companies and Hollywood to get out of the way of making a great consumer product (and Hollywood is still hoping to win its legal battles with YouTube). Again: A massive challenge, one that I doubt anyone (including Apple) will figure out to great success in 2012.

Or even Google core search: Google’s bread and butter is a massive profit and revenue engine, and I don’t expect that to change in 2012. However, it’s slowly losing share to new modes of discovery like Twitter and Facebook, and Google  has struggled with how to incorporate those signals into its search service. It can’t come to terms with either of the two major social services over data usage (and presumably money), meaning it’s losing ground in relevance, freshness, and depth. Then there’s the shift to mobile and apps: the world of apps is not easily crawled (and like Facebook, Apple is not eager to let Google do so), meaning an entire new digital frontier is lost to Google’s spiders (I lament this for other reasons as well, but more on that later). And then there’s the need to promote core Google properties, from Places to Google+ to Finance to YouTube to…well, you get the picture. Even though the company claims no bias in its results, the fact is that its partners aren’t buying it anymore (Yelp comes to mind). Lastly, there’s Bing, which isn’t going to stop trying to steal share. Back in the glory days of Web 2, the Web was the only game, and Google was everyone’s dashboard to it. Again, it will be a major challenge to keep Google’s core search business ahead of the game – because the major underlying rules are changing.

I could go on (I haven’t even delved into privacy, intellectual property, and international policy issues, or competition in the ad stack from Facebook and others), but I think I’ve made the point: Google has entered a phase in its corporate life where its future rests on bringing elegant products into markets that are goat rodeos on good days, and snake pits on bad ones. Telecom, entertainment, social, search, advertising? Yikes. “Challenging” seems like a euphemism.

On the other hand, if any company has the resources, the talent, and the willpower to execute in so many challenging markets at once, it’s got to be Google. But this is a prediction post, so let me end with one: Given all Google is trying to do, it will have a major fumble in 2012, one that beats anything the company has done in its long (and mostly fumble-free) history. But hey, every good team fumbles, it’s how you recover that matters.  If I had to chose a shortlist for the ball dropping, it’d include Motorola, GoogleTV, and yes, even Google+, which given its high expectations might be set up for disappointment. We’ll see if I’m right a year from now.

Related:

Predictions 2012: #1 – On Twitter and Media

Predictions 2012: #2 – Twitter As Free Radical, Swiss Bank, Arms Merchant…And Google Five Years Ago

Predictions 2012 #3: The Facebook Ad Network

Predictions 2011

2011: How I Did

Predictions 2010

2010: How I Did

2009 Predictions

2009 How I Did

2008 Predictions

2008 How I Did

2007 Predictions

2007 How I Did

2006 Predictions

2006 How I Did

2005 Predictions

2005 How I Did

2004 Predictions

2004 How I Did

I’ve done this a few times in the past, and this year I’m feeling the need to review all I wrote in 2011, and highlight the best posts (at least, by my own measure). Even though my writing in the past year withered to an average of two or three posts a week, I still managed to get some meaningful ideas out there, and I intend to redouble my efforts in 2012. Herewith, my list of favorites from the past year, in order of appearance:

Predictions 2011 The first substantive post of 2011, by my own reckoning last month, I did pretty well.

What Everyone Seems to Miss In Facebook’s Private or Public Debate… I make the point that a company with this much data should be accountable to the public.

The InterDependent Web In which I expand on my concepts of the Dependent and Independent Web.

File Under: Metaservices, The Rise Of  In this piece I outline a vision for an app world that works,well, like the web should work. One of the top tweeted stories of the year.

Google, Social, and Facebook: One Ring Does Not Rule Them All I forgot I wrote this, but given how Google subsequently dropped Twitter and forced Google+ to the top of its results, re-reading it makes me sad. I wish Google would take my advice.

Do We Trust The Government With The Internet? Surprisingly, I argue that we should.

The Rise of Digital Plumage In which I talk about my concept of instrumenting our digital identities with as much care as we instrument our physical bodies.

The Internet Interest Bubble I’ve been always in the camp of “we’re not in another bubble,” but in this piece, I argue we do have perhaps too much interest in the whole story, at least, too much interest in rather shallow parts of the story.

KSJO 92.3 – Good Product, Bad Marketing. A Case Study One of my favorite anecdotes of the year.

Pandora’s Facebook Box Musings on my desire to use some other service to rethink my Facebook profile.

A Report Card on Web 2 and the App Economy It wasn’t a good score.

Why Color Matters: Augmented Reality And Nuanced Social Graphs May Finally Come of Age Got a ton of comments, but I was wrong about Color. I stand by the principles of the post, however.

A Funny Coincidence, or a Glimpse of the Future? A coincidental glimpse of the future, alas.

Plato On Facebook Change always augurs complaint.

Set The Data Free, And Value Will Follow ”Every major (and even every minor) player realizes that “data is the next Intel inside,” and has, for the most part, taken a hoarder’s approach to the stuff.”

Web 2 Map: The Data Layer – Visualizing the Big Players in the Internet Economy A reminder of how much work I did each year getting Web 2 together.

We (Will) Live In A Small Big Town In which I dream of a world where corporations are listening, but not lurking.

What We Hath Wrought: The Book It becomes real, at least, to me!

The World Is An Internet Startup Now One of the most shared pieces I wrote last year.

Time For A New Software Economy As opposed to an app economy.

Google+: If, And, Then….Implications for Twitter and Tumblr Initial reactions to the new service.

“The Information” by James Gleick I read and reviewed a fair number of books this past year, but this one stands out.

Looky Here, It’s Me, In an Ad, On Facebook! Is This Legal? Allowed? Who Knows?! Turns out, it was not allowed. But now Facebook allows it on their own ad network (more on that soon).

Twitter and the Ultimate Algorithm: Signal Over Noise (With Major Business Model Implications) Not surprisingly, one of the most tweeted stories of the year.

We Need An Identity Re-Aggregator (That We Control) This was one of my major issues of the year. It ain’t going away.

The Future of Twitter Ads I found myself writing more and more about Twitter as the year went on.

Facebook As Storyteller On Timeline and industry journalism.

Google = Google+ One of the most shared stories of the year on all counts. In which I argue that Google+ is way more than a new social network. It’s a play for the soul of Google, its brand.

I Wish “Tapestry” Existed It’s too hard to innovate in the area of metaservices for apps.

Only Connect: Facebook, From The Eyes of an Old Newbie Highly read piece on my re-entry to Facebook. I should write a followup on my experience so far.

Government By Numbers: Some Interesting Insights Tons of data on government as a percentage of GDP, etc.

Brands as Publishers One of my chestnuts.

You Are The Platform Summary of one of the most important themes to emerge from the Web 2 Summit last year.

The Problem and the Opportunity Of Mobile Advertising A story of where we are and where we might go.

The World In One Generation: Population Trends This blew up on StumbleUpon. Go figure.

“We need some angry nerds” SOPA rears its head.

The Internet Big Five Part of my book work (as are others above, come to think of it), and increasingly part of this site going forward.

On This Whole “Web Is Dead” Meme It’s not dead.

2011 Predictions: How Did I Do? Not bad.

Well, there ya go. A fair number of “favorite posts” for what was a pretty light year of writing. Looking forward to 2012….