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Digital Planet: 21/12/2010

Factual: Science & Nature

21/12/2010

BBC World Service - Digital Planet, 21/12/2010

Do we reveal more about ourselves than we realise when we upload photos to the web?

Does sharing photos online compromise our privacy? Social networking overload; The 'cultural genome' created by millions of digitised books; Social graphs for businesses

When we post photos to social networking sites like Facebook and Flickr our intention is usually to share them with friends – but are we revealing more than we realise? Jon Kleinberg, Professor in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University, explains how sharing seemingly small amounts of personal information online can lead to significant losses in privacy.


Digital Planet's Jonathan Kent wonders if we are in danger of social media overload. Having taken himself off Facebook, he goes out in the real world to ask if we are too dominated by our online lives.


Google has digitised an incredible 12% of all the books ever published: far more reading than would be possible for any human being.  But using computers to analyse part of this data, researchers have begun to observe cultural patterns played out over hundreds of years, to do with our language, memory, and fame. They describe the level of detail offered by this enormous linguistic corpus as a 'cultural genome'.  Dr Jean-Baptiste Michel from the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard talks to Gareth Mitchell about this new area of study they call 'culturomics'.


The vast amounts of information we put online about who we hang out with and how we live our lives is dream stuff for organisations who want to sell to us.  At the recent event 'Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford', Alpesh Doshi from Fintricity explained how businesses can make better sense of these valuable but complex networks.

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21/12/2010

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