Rue du Cherche-Midi, originally uploaded by alexloyal.

“La Maga había aparecido una tarde en la rue du Cherche-Midi, cuando subía a mi pieza de la rue de la Tombe Issoire traía siempre una flor, una tarjeta Klee o Miró, y si no tenía dinero elegía una hoja de plátano en el parque.”

Dear Leal,

I sent you an important email below as an attachment.Please view my attach email below and reply.

Regards,

Bernard Frank.

…but to name the file attached (screen shot above) and include it within the context of the letter. Obviously they forgot to change the font.

But still, dedicated, custom spamming. Impressive.

Doing a little IP trace magic on an IP within the email headers (82.128.35.51) tells me it originated in Nigera.

Sad, no fortune for me.

I deleted and reported it obviously.

Maravilloso.

Uno de los foristas en la página de City TV menciona que la obra de Moreno puede estar basada en los videos de Keith Loutit.

(Pese a que su contenido a veces es cuestionable, no cabe duda que el portal online de El Tiempo es uno de los sitios más innovadores y avanzados en tecnología web de Colombia y Latinoamérica.)

AWE.SOME.

It’s a giant three-dimensional billboard for Goody’s Kodak, which sits atop an abandoned building that used to house the photograph development business on Ponce De Leon ave. The sign itself is in bad shape, having deteriorated continuously through the years. I don’t know how long it’s been there, but it certainly has a quaint look. I expect the building, sign and all, to be raided soon and a condo tower to be built in its place – such is the trend in the city. Or at least it was, who knows how long will the economy keep hungry developers at bay.

The interesting thing is that it’s so much part of the landscape that I think the neighborhood takes it for granted and I don’t know of any effort to preserve it.

First an admittance: I didn’t know who Josh Harris was until yesterday. For better or worse I was oblivious to his existance and his uhm, visionary contributions to the world of social media.

He’s the subject We Live in Public, a documentary by Ondi Timoner, which screened at Sundace this year and will see a limited release in the next few weeks. Should you also need to look him up, I suggest reading his Wikipedia entry, then read Wired’s preview of Timoner’s documentary, and then listen to this segment about the film on WNYC’s On The Media (which is how I found out about the whole thing).

In her interview with Brooke Gladstone, Timoner says she realized Harris’ “We Live in Public” experiment was a precursor of sorts to the decidedly open lives most of us live in the age of status updates and 140-character answers to the question:”What are you donig now?”

She’s right. What’s becoming more apparent as Facebook continues to sign people up is the inevitability of losing control of what revelations can be made from the information we volunteer.

A group of MIT students, for instance, concluded an experiment in which they were able to predict, with mathematical accuracy the sexual orientation of men based on the information made available on their Facebook accounts.

And just yesterday, as I spoke with a relatively I hadn’t seen in months, he told me he’d seen a Facebook update in which I said something about New York, he couldn’t recall. And frankly, though I was in New York a few weeks ago, I couldn’t specifically remember which status update he was referring to.

Meaning he had some vague idea about me which could or could not be accurate based on his reading of the information I was broadcasting (what conclusions he drew from that, etc), and I myself wasn’t too cognaizant of what the hell I was putting out there.

What is apparent is how unprepared people really are to broadcast their lives to an audience of dozens (much less hundreds or thousands), and now that science can be executed to reach conclusions based on data that’s *already* out there, the concern can no longer be at the privacy-settings level of these social tools. The cat is out of the bag.

The implications are more profound now considering many of us rely on web-based tools for our calendars, work documents, email conversations, and more and more, our interpersonal communication, ie, relationships.

When the machine can effectively construct your identity for you, determining pieces of information about yourself not even you were fully aware of yet, and reveal that to the public before it does to you, the game’s over.

Photo by purplemattfish

Here’s an interesting contrast and a mixed message at the very least.