There’s only a few certainties in life. Death. Taxes. And the loss of stuff you’ve stored on your computer.

The loss is one thing. But the bit I really hate. Is the aftermath. When every time you think about looking for some photo or file. You get that vague feeling. That maybe it got lost in the great wipeout of 2007.

So. I know I should save myself the pain and use an automatic back up service. But I resist.

That’s because backup services just back up your stuff. And the more you stuff in there, the more inaccessible it all becomes. Until you’ve really got no idea what’s what. Until its as good as lost in some sort of amorphous blob. Out of sight and out of mind.

The only way around this is to organise your stuff beforehand. And that means gathering your stuff from all my machines. And devices. And from online locations such as Google Docs, Flickr, and YouTube.

And this means setting aside time. And getting organized. And implementing a filing strategy. One that you can commit to keeping going forward.

I don’t know about you. But if I was that kind of guy. I think I’d back up my own stuff. On a regular basis. Thanks very much.

That’s where PutPlace come in.

They backup your stuff for a charge. But they have an added service for free. And (just between you and me) its the service I’d be most happy to pay for.

The thing is Putplace backs up your stuff. And they also make a map of where all your stuff sits. Across devices like your computer and even sites like Youtube and Flickr. You scatter. They gather. They track where your stuff sits. And make a map of all your bits. And the map remains free for life. This makes it easy to know what I have and where to find it. And that’s the key thing. Because truth be toldthese days, If I can’t find something quickly. Then it might as well. Not exist.

Conor O’Neill, captured the rest of the offer nicely. As Backup 2.0

A new Irish backup utility that understands the things the others forget. Like that I have more than one PC, I have duplicated pictures and documents scattered everywhere, I have 384 kbs UP not 2Mbs, I never want to think about backup except when I need recovery and I want everything in the cloud.

They recently opened up to public beta so are looking for testers. You’ll get unlimited space (during beta). But best of all. You’ll get a really nice brid’s eye view of all your stuff. Probably for the first time in ages. And no doubt you’ll be reacquainted with some of that stuff you were sure you had lost in your own personal great wipeout of 2007.

Proud participant in the Tuesday Push.

Note on LouderVoice: If anyone else wants to do give their review of Putplace, just add two extra tags to your posts (”review” and “rating=N”), register your blog feed as a FlagTag feed on LouderVoice and they’ll collect everyone’s coverage.

More reviews of the service:
Mashable
Rafe Needleman of Webware with video interview.

ReadWriteWeb
Frank Bauer
Alexia Golez
David Kelly.

I’d love to think it rose to the energy levels fit for a scaremongering label but it just doesn’t stick for me. I was first of the panel to speak and my first words were a reminder that its important not to focus on the negative side and to remember there is much that is positive in online interaction.

I then said that “Whatever goes on the internet stays on the internet” Mostly because there’s a story in the paper everyday of people being surprised at some outcome of this reality. Even though it would seem naive for anyone to think otherwise, people continue to be shocked. Everyday.

Also Daniel’s keynote talk focused on stories that had humurous connotations as opposed to the many more numerous stories that have tragic endings.

Damien Mulley quickly opened the talk up to the audience and it was clear that this was the stuff that was on their collective minds. As I said in this post, talks on privacy have a habit of going round in circles with nobody getting much satisfaction.

Ask someone if they care about privacy by using that abstract term and they will shrug. Ask them how they feel about someone tracking their every move and they’ll admit that it makes them feel a little bit

uneasy. Ask them about…and they’ll ask wide-eyed ‘that doesn’t happen does it?’. Ask them would they consider changing their behaviour and they’ll shrug in a way that you can almost hear them thinking ‘it’ll never happen to me’ or ‘i can’t imagine why anyone would bother’ or ‘I’ve got nothing to hide’.

Unfortunately, the symposium never really got its teeth into the key issues surrounding privacy other that to marvel at how little of it there is online. But for those interested, this is the publication that first brought Daniel Solove to my attention as someone who HAS something interesting to say on the subject.

The thing is there’s a load of old rubbish talked about privacy. Its nobody fault really. Its just that people often find they are talking at cross purposes. The problem is that we all think we know what privacy is. That is until we are asked to define it. It then it turns out that nobody can. And that everyone has a half-baked opinion.

The situation always reminds me of the story of the blind men and the elephant

Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by feeling different parts of the elephant’s body. The blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the elephant is like a solid pipe. Discussions begin but each man is so sure that his own experience is definitive that the discussion goes nowhere or devolves into an argument of almost religious proportions.

A wise man steps forward and explains to them: All of you are right. The reason every one of you is telling it differently is because each one of you touched the different part of the elephant. So, actually the elephant has all the features you mentioned.

In discussions on Privacy, Daniel J. Solove is your wise man. He has stepped back and taken on the task of defining what privacy is and why it is important. Its a huge task. A task of heroic proportions. But he has succeeded in creating the definitive work on the subject.

So what happened at the talk?

Well. I got to meet and speak on a panel with man who performed that heroic task. But to my chagrin he chose not to talk about it!

Instead he chose to cover topics in the book he published late last year (and now available for free download) “The Future of Reputation”. The collections of stories he has collated in this book are very entertaining and illustrative of the modern reality in which social information can whizz around the world in ways we have difficulty comprehending and continue to be surprised by. It was a great talk.

It looks like I’ll just have to wait another while until he tours his latest, hot off the press, ground breaking book Understanding Privacy“.

There was a huge turnout. Especially impressive at 10am on a workday, the morning after the Darklight folks had had their launch party. Daithí Mac Sithigh of lexferenda has posted a pretty comprehensive review here.

Daithi was one of the many perceptive and well-informed experts sitting in the audience. I know this because he managed to take the raw material of what I actually said. And translate it into the ideas that I was trying to articulate.

I had another go at it here in this post “Is Facebook this generation’s Amity Island? (The Setting for Jaws)

Another smart guy in the audience was Bill McDaniel a guy who later talked on the “Future of the Internet” panel. The truth is that there entire audience was bristling with intelligence and my only real regret is that the format of a panel separated from the expert audience is not always the best way to bring forth the ideas in the room.

The diverse panel itself was chaired by digital rights expert Caroline Campbell and also featured journalist Jim Carroll, Hotline.ie director Cormac Callanan and the irrepressible Damien Mulley blogging tour de force and man of many titles including professional shit stirrer and media whore.

“Amity Island had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. It was the perfect feeding ground.”

As we all know. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook draw predators of their own.

“The police chief of Amity Island tries to protect beachgoers from a great white shark by closing the beach. Tourism is the town’s major source of income. The town council must decide whether it is better to protect the livelihoods of their townsfolk. Or the actual lives of a very small percentage of those visiting tourists. The decision to close the beach is overruled. ”

Tired of waiting for the social networks to do anything to protect users that might compromise their business, New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s bill Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) was introduced in February 2008.

“As the attacks continued, the police chief enlists the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter.”

Bebo has been keen to push its credentials in online safety, including the high-profile appointment of Rachel O’Connell, a forensic psychologist, and her work on a number of industry and government councils.

Perverted-Justice volunteers put profiles on social networking sites as decoys order to collect incriminating evidence against the predators.

“We’re going to need a bigger boat”

The sheer scale and complexity of social networks makes it impossible for policing activity to have much of an impact on the problem overall.

The dramas of Amity Island and Social networks both pivot on a conflict of interest. Amity Island and social networks depend on public confidence to ensure profitability. In the absence of any real solutions to defend against predators, their businesses depends on their ability to play down the risks. Policing initiatives and warnings to be careful will never solve the actual problem. But they can help lull users into a sense of security that is good for the business. The real effect of policing initiatives and warnings is to confuse the issue of who is responsible when trouble arises.

To cut through the confusion again we only have to ask. Is the individual to blame for attracting the predator? When predators are known to be active, is it okay to promote destinations such as Amity Island or Facebook as safe?

By the way, Jaws, the movie and book was inspired by this true story of the Jersey Shore attacks of 1916:

Facebook’s been talking about their breakthrough in privacy controls for quite some time. They have an elite team working on it and they are highly motivated to resolve the issue. Its pure business logic. A sense of privacy encourages the free expression and authenticity needed for Facebook to become more effective at targeting ads.

So I suppose it was inevitable. And Zuckerberg has been filing patents to beat the band.

Here’s most of the excerpt from Slashdot:

…but take a gander at the Facebook founder’s patent application for Dynamically Generating a Privacy Summary to get an idea of what’s in the works. After you check boxes on a form to indicate that ‘Everyone from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard’ can see your profile, Zuckerberg’s ‘invention’ will miraculously display: ‘People from San Francisco, CA, Social Network Provider, and Harvard can see your profile.’ How dare Rolling Stone question his inventiveness!”

Ahem. Not exactly the earth shattering advance we’ve been primed to expect. All kidding aside. I imagine its really only a matter of time.

There’s got to be loads of fun news worthy little services here. I mean a Californian’s identity is so strongly tied to their vehicle. There’s got to be a way to leverage this even further. Twitterfone could become a really cool new channel for mediating new forms of social expression between drivers.

Say you get ‘cut off’ in the highway by the driver of a private vehicle. They don’t have a “800-HOW’S-MY-DRIVING” sticker on their bumper. You could show your appreciation by honking you horn but what good does that really do? Alternatively you could use twitterfone and call out a ‘#bad driver’ tag followed by their license plate number. Such twitterfone tweets could be collected, collated and remixed in all sorts of interesting and socially useful ways.

Or say you are stopped in traffic. You keep catching the eye of someone. And there’s clearly a mutual attraction. You might want to twitterfone #tag their license plates and just put some light appreciative message out there and see if they take up on it.

There’s got to be loads of fun and interesting things that you could do.

If you position yourself to own the future of trust, you are well placed to put yourself at the heart of all commerce.

That’s why this recent patent application interests me. It taps back into the natural form of social trust. That is, the trust rating that is natrually socially assigned within a community as opposed to the trust rating assigned by some institution. And uses that as a more reliable rating of creditworthiness.

Sociofinancial systems and methods

Lenders (including peers, financial institutions, merchants, and the like) in the more developed areas the world typically use a credit score as a measure of an individual’s or entity’s creditworthiness. Roughly speaking, a credit score categorizes or assigns a probability to the likelihood that an individual or entity will honor a debt.

Credit scores were developed to accommodate merchants and banks that needed to extend credit to individuals and entities that were not personally known to them.

Credit scores are a relatively recent phenomenon in the history of credit. For centuries if not millennia before the emergence of credit scores, lending decisions were made on the basis of trust relationships and codes of conduct between individuals or groups within communities. In many offline communities, and especially in offline communities that are in less developed areas of the world, this is still the predominant form of lending.

Recently, online communities such as Facebook have emerged. A major function of online communities is to capture and encode relationships between people, groups of people, entities, groups of entities, and so on. Based upon these relationships, it is possible for members of the online community to share applications and content with one another. Also, in some cases it is possible for computing applications to access these encoded relationships and use them for some purpose.

There exists a need to capture and encode financial trust relationships in online communities, and to enable borrowing, lending, repayment, collections, and related actions based upon such relationships.

The company is based in Dublin. Has so far raised €2.5m in private equity finance and has 10 employees. The substantial brains behind the information engine at the heart of the service belong to one Scott Tattersall. A man who knows a thing or two about neural networks. And how to automate the collection of all the detailed information you need to power up your online trading strategy. He’s also a guy that helped me out once or twice in a crisis.

Microsoft has taken a 15% stake in Zignals and are helping to launch the service. Sign up for the beta today.

Extensive coverage of the launch Venture Beat, Silicon Republic, The Independent, RTE,

Congratulations Scott.