The all-seeing Wikipedia defines a panopticon as follows:
The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a "sentiment of an invisible omniscience".
Several weeks ago now, Google started rolling out their personalised search service, which for logged in users biases your Google search results listing according to your preferences.
At the time it was released, the service drew on users' search behaviour to tune personal results.
These preferences are built up over time as Google learns about you and your online behaviour however it can. Originally, personal results built upon the way users used Google, and the result links they clicked through. But now all your online behaviour can be taken into account if you so choose:
Web History helps deliver more personalized search results based on what you've searched for on Google and which sites you've visited.
Google's Web History service will collect - via the Google toolbar - a history of all the web pages you've visited so that you can easily search over the places you've been.
(And yes - the capitalisation of Web History is correct according to Gogole. Here's more info about Google Web History if you're interested... or scared....)
The usefulness of this is undeniable - how many times have you tried to relocate a page you visited last week, or last month?
This itch is one that prompted Joshua Schacter to scratch when he set up the delicious social bookmarking service; it's also one that's addressed directly within the Flock browser, which has an inbuilt page cache, index and search utility: Search Browser History in Flock.
I don't know whether the Web History service also indexes PDF files I've downloaded, though, which I could see being a useful feature. (In fact, I'd be happier letting the Goog search over the PDFs I've read, rather than tracking the sites I've visited.)
If you're that way inclined, you can publish your live browsing history via an RSS feed, although Google's not the only service to offer this, as for example demonstrated in this recent review of Cluztr on TechCrunch, which describes a clickstream collecting and publishing service in which "[e]very site you visit is recorded and posted live to the Cluztr site in a social bookmarking style format, but without the need for active involvement".
Although most of us would be uncomfortable with publicising everything we're doing in the way that justin.tv does, there does seem to be something in the air at the moment with respect to "look at what I'm doing" apps.
For example, I've started feeding the 'last played' info from last.fm into my IM status line, and could imagine wakoopa (reviewed here by Techcrunch (again!)) being exploited in the same way to show what desktop application I'm currently using.
I guess the next thing we'll be seeing are Twitter application plugins that accept a highlight-right_click-twitter_this input and let you tweet seemlessly... (Just so you know, I haven't got into Twitter - and don't intend to...)
Whilst Web History can be used to track out behaviour via the Goolge toolbar with our permission, I suspect that Google cookies can also be used in principle to track our web useage without our opt-in permission?
Google has multiple ways of getting these cookies onto our machines - via Google properties themselves, via web pages with Google Analytics installed, or Google Ads, or - soon - banner ads from the company presumably soon to be formerly known as DoubleClick: Google go for DoubleClick banners. They're also gearing up to track your eyeballs as you look at outdoor advertising, maybe?!
Maybe this is something that will become a user preference - "add to my Web History if you see me"? Presumaby it'll happen in an anonymised fashion anyway. to improve the Google search and ad-serving experience?
Paranoid - me? Nah... because I know it won't get as bad as punitive personal pricing where I have to pay more for goods the "system" knows I want...
Anyway - back to the point in question, which was - err...?! ;-)
Ah yes - collecting everything we do on the web, storing everything we see...
Like the MyLifeBits project from Microsoft - which looks at how we might organise a personal lifetime data store. That is, a store of everything we have seen, or read, or visited: a personal panopticopedia (from wp again: To the ancient Greeks, Paideia was "the process of educating man into his true form, the real and genuine human nature.").
If we limit the lifetime data collection to things we have seen and learned from, maybe we'll all end up with our own Panopticopedia... (via Google personal search, of course...)
"This is your web life."
Posted by ajh59 at May 14, 2007 11:13 AM