I’m in the midst of writing a number of books, on a plethora of subjects. Labours of love. I haven’t quite decided the order in which I shall complete them, or for that matter when I shall complete them. For some it may even be an if rather than a when.

I’ve yet to decide quite how to publish them. My inclination is to go for a variation of the now-classic free digital download/$25 hardback/$150 limited edition. But I haven’t decided.

As I said, the books are labours of love, I get immense enjoyment just tinkering with them. The one I am keenest to complete will probably have no market. It is an unusual genre. Science fiction management manga. I am so enjoying writing it. And thinking of how I would want it illustrated.

But leaving that one aside, I’ve tended to drip-feed the content of the rest into the market in many forms: sometimes as a blog post; sometimes as a long dinner conversation with the kind of friends one has long dinners with; and sometimes as talks I give to a variety of audiences.

One such talk is Thought For Food, looking at food and information as if they were one. Dave Morin suggested the title in 2005 when I first broached the topic with him, two decades after I started delving into the subject matter.

It so happened that I spoke about it while at a TED Salon in Austin this March, as part of SXSW. And the curators-that-be at TED decided to give it some more airplay.

So here it is, ladies and gentlemen, my first (and probably last) online TED talk. All 8 minutes of it. Let me know what you think.

I’ve been a fan of Facebook pretty much since its inception, as soon as they let dinosaurs like me in. Continued to be a fan as Facebook grew, count a number of people there amongst my friends. [And no, I do not own any stock there].

There’s lots about Facebook I like.

When some people moved over to Google+, I did what most others did. Treated Google+ like a gym. Joined. Went there occasionally. And not much else.

I’ve marvelled at how Facebook makes a misstep, learns from it, adjusts and adapts in superfast time. I’ve waxed lyrical about how enterprises could learn from Facebook.

I’ve been frustrated by shenanigans to do with Friendfeed and with Instagram, especially when things haven’t quite worked the way I expected them to work. I’ve been discomfited by the way my blog content suddenly “lived” in more than one place, with comments and conversations fragmenting. Little niggles here and there. But not enough to worry me.

You could say I’ve been a Facebook fanboy.

And then yesterday I learnt something that made me go Hmmm.

This.

Hmmm.

Here’s the story. Some days ago, I happened across some delightful reviews of a product in Amazon, a whole new genre of writing that I’ve been aware of for some years, but only followed seriously since Three Wolf Moon. I enjoyed reading what was written in the reviews of what appeared to be a very expensive audio cable. And, as you would expect, I shared it with my friends. In Facebook. And Twitter. And even Google+.

And that was that.

Until yesterday.

Yesterday, a friend of mine, someone I’ve known for thirty years, got in touch and pointed out that my act of sharing was now part of a “sponsored” something or the other, as shown above.

And that makes me go Hmmm.

There’s something I really don’t like about it.

When I share things, I share because I feel like sharing. Not promoted or sponsored or anything like that. Nobody pays me to write what I write, or to share what I share. Occasionally I write something that touches on Salesforce.com, where I work. Work is part of my life, so why ever not? And whenever there is any risk of people misconstruing what I write, I make sure the relationship is made very clear. I write about work the way I write about music or about food or about anything else that forms part of my life.

I am not paid to share. And what I share I share because I feel like sharing it.

So when I see my name appear under the headline “Sponsored” it does not sit well with me.

Now, all of a sudden, I have to think about what’s happening in a different light. Where and how did I give Facebook the right to use something I shared and embed it in a sponsored link? Perhaps I did, buried deep in the terms and conditions. In this content I don’t care if I made my comment publicly (I did), what matters to me is that there is a perception that I was sponsored to say something. And that I am not happy about.

I have other questions now. Who else saw the sponsored link? Was it just made visible to my friends? Why was my act-of-sharing considered worth embedding in a sponsored link? Was it my perceived “influence”? I’m not exactly an A-lister. There are many more such questions.

The most intriguing one for me is “why”?

Did someone pay for that sponsored link? Why on earth would they pay? What I’d shared was really satire, complete and absolute corruption of the review process in Amazon, but a corruption I admire and enjoy. Nobody is going to pay thousands of dollars for an audio cable after reading what I’ve said. It’s not that type of review, it’s not that type of product. For all I know the product may not even be for sale.

I have this faint and lingering thought that the whole thing is some sort of Kevin Slavin algorithms-gone-mad situation. That nobody actually paid for the sponsored link (there was nothing to gain), that somewhere deep inside the denizens of Facebook people are experimenting with new revenue streams that allow advertisers to pick recommendations up from shared activity streams and use them as they see fit. That the requisite permision structures are still being built. That somehow something “escaped” into the blue yonder.

Am I being too charitable? You tell me.

I don’t have any answers. I’m still not “against” Facebook, I’m not that kind of guy.

What I do have is this feeling of Hmmm. And a wish to know more about what really happened before I decide to do something about it.

 

 

Turned out that the question I set was too easy. So here’s a bonus. From which cult film is this still taken?:

It’s not that easy any more, finding questions that can’t be Googled or Tineyed or Shazammed. Getting harder by the day.

How can I be sure that a photograph hadn’t been indexed yet? Well, one way to be sure is to know the provenance of the object. Who took it. When and where. And where it has lain dormant since.

Here’s one such photograph. I took it. And it’s been uploaded nowhere. And I have removed most signs of things/people who could give you a hint as to who the person is. There is still a residual hint in that I have met this person. And he is someone I respect greatly. Greatly.

So who is he? Whom am I with here below, with the background excised? Usual rules, first to get it right gets into the annual league table.

Sorry, I’d been travelling, and the question I’d wanted to set for this week proved unsettable (TinEye had an answer). I therefore had to wait till I was back at home and rested before composing the next question.

And here it is:

What are these?