You wont need all of that anymore. I have recently come across a website that allows anyone to hunt for personal information at a single click. The website hosts a free to use service which gives information about any person just on the basis of “firstname lastname” and results in presenting a whole load of information containing photographs, email addresses, youtube videos, biographies, books, blogs, news articles, IMs and even social networking profiles including Facebook, myspace, Twitter, Linkedin and many more… The search results are aggregated from a plethora of common and uncommon search engines, social networking sites, blogs, news channels, ecommerce websites, photo album websites such as Flickr and Picasa and hundreds of other websites that you wouldnt have even heard of.

The website is 123people.co.uk. This afternoon, I tried putting in my own name and I was shocked to see quite a lot of my own information being presented on a single page. I would recommend that you search yours and check if your information is being correctly displayed?

If the website shows your accurate information as results, don’t blame your parents and complain about your unique name. The results you see on 123people.co.uk are fruits of your activities that have created information on the web which is now aggregated for anyone to spy on you. If you see too much information being displayed and would like to get rid of it, think about changing privacy settings of websites that are contributing to your information being displayed.

Just to let to know, several web ecologists at WebCoherence are working on finding solutions to these problems of personal identity management on the web. If you are willing to participate and contribute in our solution finding exercise, please write to us at webcoherence [at] gmail [dot] com.

In the meanwhile, please do leave in your comments and suggestions based on your findings and experiences. This will help us in our research.

“But how?” – A discussion sparked between me and another Web Ecologist  – Railsbob. We were aiming to see if we could devise a way such that more people get to know about WebCoherence using Twitter’s platform and to setup an experiment around it. After going through a lot of Twitter updates Railsbob observed that users were using hashtags to communicate in a larger community. RailsBob suggested: ” If we use a relevant ‘#keyword’ as a  hashtag, we could possibly attract more users to our site via Twitter.”

“Interesting,” I exclaimed, “but where do we find the relevant hashtags?” “It is not like the #communia conference, which some of our colleagues attended. They had a ready-made shared keyword. We don’t.” Back to the drawing board!

RailsBob then suggested using the #hashtags database on www.hashtags.org to search for relevant Twitter #hashtags. Eureka! We now had a list of the most popular hashtags. We would use only those we found to be appropriate from among the most popular ones (namely listed at the top), and this would save hunting through the whole of what is a huge database. After all there was nothing to lose – the worst that could happen is that we remained unnoticed. As Web Ecologists, we were now ready to test the idea. We took top 5 hashtags from the database list and sent out tweets publicizing WebCoherence. We waited for 3 days to collect sufficient Google Analytics Reports and here is what we found.

The Results:
1. In less than 24 hours 12 more followers started following WebCoherence on Twitter! And in 3 days now the count has risen to 53 followers. A staggering growth of 430% in three days from an initial count of 10 followers.
2. Google analytics report shows 19 hits came to the website with the referring URL Twitter.com. The number of hits were quite less as compared to the number of followers who started following WebCoherence.org.
3. Interestingly, no comments were received from new followers.

This brings us more mysteries that need to be solved before we come to any further conclusions. We are now left with various questions:

Do users follow on Twitter just to increase their follow count?
How do users interact when they receive links to external websites on Twitter?
Why do users want to increase their follow count if they are not interested in reading Twitter messages?

We intend to reveal answers to these questions in our upcoming posts as we analyse results and make more observations, keep watching!

P.S.: If you have seen some odd behavior and if you wish to contribute by experimenting with WebCoherence, do get in touch with us by leaving comments to this post or by emailing us. Thanks in advance!

But this whole twitter-during-conference thing is an interesting phenomenon.  On one side, it’s rude – typing instead of listening, talking about the speaker as if they aren’t even there – and yet on the other side it creates a whole backchannel of information.  Sure, there are the usual idiots – you can’t fill a room with educated geeks, lawyers, and businessmen without finding some are actually 4-year olds once you give them anonymity – but it serves it’s own niche, and has it’s own culture.

I mean think about it.   By participating in the #communia hashtag, I met, virtually, other twitter users who follow the same topics, and now have a greater source of noise – I mean information with which to use.  These conventions – hash tagging, tracking by subject, forming a backchannel community of shared knowledge to be referenced later – all came together through the designs of users, not admins in the ivory office of tweeting.  And further, it’s become pervasive enough that it has been recognized as socially acceptable, not rude, and papers exist on how to maximize the microblog backchannel!  This is despite the heckling!  Emergent phenomena indeed.

And to what effect does this have?  It depends on your point of view.  I’ll say that in the afternoon, when most attendees lost internet access, I found it much easier to concentrate on the speaker’s content and not what my fellow attendees were saying.  But, I also was not gaining the oft-cited value of what the other people felt was important – and what sucked -  through their comments and what they chose to broadcast to their personal twitterstream.

Indeed, if I really wanted to get technical I could go in and see what the different types of twitter ‘animals’ there are… or you could.

Studying these coherent phenomena is fascinating, and it’s trivially easy to setup a test – the internet works on its own, after all.  Part of this project’s function is to give you tips – areas we can test, scientifically, so that we have aggregate pictures of what really happens.  But that’s a subject for another time.

What I’d like to see out of this is a new breed. Those of us who recognize that the internet is a fascinating beast that can be watched, and sometimes poked and prodded (nicely.)  I’d like to coin the term “web ecologist” for this.  A quick google tells me that it’s not in use.  A web ecologist is someone who studies the net, runs experiments, and tweaks, to see what the net is actually doing.

This works best if we get a pack, a community.  Part-time web ecologists who get interested in whats going on, propose experiments, and participate in the community.  The sheer dynamics of our tests and actions can be part of the coherence of the web (ever hear of the ‘slashdot effect’? – more on that in my next post.)   It gives a nice name to what we’re doing here, but more importantly, it captures the spirit of what we’re measuring.  The internet is here, and all of our actions, individually and collectively, form part of it’s collective being.  So why not look into it?  Why not be a web ecologist?

Aim: To check the nature and amount of spam received when email addresses are left on the public world wide web.

Ingredients: Email addresses set up with popular ISPs (Google and Hotmail), and access to a public web page.

Method:

Step 1 : Create two email addresses, one each on Google and Hotmail using the techniques listed at the following link. (Experimenters might also choose to create one email address rather than two.)

http://webcoherence.org/2009/03/17/email-experiments-starting-simply/

Step 2 : Setup all emails from these email addresses so they will be forwarded to us, so that we can periodically analyze the emails received every week, and keep you updated with our results on the blog.

Google email address should be forwarded to: coherence.experiment1@googlemail.com


Hotmail email address should be forwarded to: coherence.experiment1@hotmail.co.uk

The steps to forward emails for Google and Hotmail can be found at the following link:

http://webcoherence.org/2009/03/23/email-experiments-setting-up-forwarding/

Step 3 : Post these newly created email addresses as comments to this post. This has the effect of making these email addresses available on the public World Wide Web.

Once you post the email addresses as comments to this post, we shall start monitoring our mailboxes for the spam emails that will be forwarded from these newly created email accounts and update the results on our blog.

Step 4 : Do not use these email addresses elsewhere, or for other experiments.

Observation:

We shall be posting our observations as we analyze spam emails from your accounts.

Expected Results:

Web Crawlers will pick up live email addresses, and use them to spam mailboxes.

Conclusion:

The conclusion will be posted after sufficient observations have been made over a period of time.

Note:

Experimenters and other audiences are encouraged to discuss this experiment using the comment box below.

Steps to setup forwarding on Google mail:

G1. Login to your newly created Google mail account for the experiment.

G2. Click on Settings Tab (on top right corner)


G3. Go to the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.


G4. Select “Forward a copy of incoming mail” to coherence.experiment1@googlemail.com

and select delete Google Mail’s copy.


G5. Save Changes.

Steps to setup forwarding on Hotmail:

H1. Login to your newly created Hotmail account for the experiment.

H2. Click on Options on the right hand side of the page. Drill Down to “More Options” link.

H3. Click on the Third Option “Forward Emails to another email account”.

H4. Select “Forward your email to another e-mail account” and enter the email address as coherence.experiment1@hotmail.co.uk


H5. Click on Save.

Here we show you how to set up a brand new (and free) e-mail address for some of the more popular hosts. Since you will be setting up a number of different e-mail accounts and you want to avoid confusion, you must keep a journal of each login name, e-mail address, when it was created, all associated security information, and on which experiments you are using it etc.

Steps to setup a Google Mail email account.

1. Go to web page: www.gmail.com

2. Click on ‘Sign up for Google Mail’

3. Type in any ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’, ‘Desired Login Name’ – since you don’t have to use your real name, just type in something that differentiates this e-mail address consistently among all the others you have created. Use something like ‘experiment294’. The Login name should be between 6 and 30 characters. Click the ‘check availability’ button to see whether or not it is being used by someone else – if it is then try a new login name. Your e-mail address will then be created as experiment294@gmail.com.

This is necessary because you shouldn’t have any consistent/coherent procedure for inventing the e-mail names themselves, as this could be predictable by spammers and could distort the number of spam e-mails coming your way.

4. Choose a password – it must be greater than 8 characters, and it is best to contain alphabetic and numeric characters. Make it quite complicated, and use the same one for each new e-mail you produce: for example ‘12bnXS1jKg’.

5. Re-enter the same password to check that it is correct.

6. Make a note of the First Name, Last Name, Desired Login Name, and password in your journal.

7. Tick the box if you want the computer you’re using to remember the password.

8. You can the procedure both with and without Web History enabled, and see if it makes any difference to the spam you receive.

9. Choose a security question, say ‘your first phone number.’ Enter any numerical 12-digit sequence ‘121343565787’, and use the same security question and answer with each e-mail you are creating. Note this in your journal.

10. Leave the secondary e-mail address blank.

11. Click on the country where you are located.

12. Complete the CAPTCHA Challenge Word verification by reading the distorted words in the panel and type them into the space provided.

13. Click I accept, and your e-mail account will be created.

Steps to setup a Hotmail (Microsoft) email account.

1. Go to web page: www.hotmail.com

2. Click on ‘Sign up’.

3. Type in ‘Windows Live ID’ and select ‘Hotmail.com’ as the domain name. Use something like ‘experiment224’ which differentiates this e-mail address consistently among all the others you have created. This is necessary because you shouldn’t have any consistent/coherent procedure for inventing the e-mail names themselves, as this could be predictable by spammers and could distort the number of spam e-mails coming your way.

The Windows Live ID should be between 6 and 30 characters. Click the ‘check availability’ button to see whether or not it is being used by someone else – if it is then try a new Windows Live ID. Your e-mail address will then be created as experiment224@hotmail.com.

4. Choose a password – it must be greater than 8 characters, and it is best to contain alphabetic and numeric characters. Make it quite complicated, and use the same one for each new e-mail you produce: for example ‘12bnXS1jKg’.

5. Re-enter the same password to check that it is correct.

6. Enter any ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’ – since you don’t have to use your real name, just type in something.

7. Do not fill your alternate email address, instead select a security question.

8. Choose a security question, say ‘your mother’s birth place’. Enter name of any city.

9. Make a note of the First Name, Last Name, Windows Live ID, password, security question and answer in your journal.

10. Select the country, state and a random postcode where you are located.

11. Select your gender.

12. Enter a random birth year between 1950 to 1990.

13. Complete the CAPTCHA Challenge Word verification by reading the distorted words in the panel and type them into the space provided.

14. Click I accept, and your e-mail account will be created.

Steps to setup a Yahoo! Mail account.

1. Go to web page: http://mail.yahoo.com

2. Click on ‘Sign up’.

3. Type in any ‘First Name’, ‘Last Name’, ‘Gender’, ‘Birthdate’, ‘Location’ and ‘Postcode’ – since you don’t have to use your real name and other details, just type in something.

4. Type in ‘Yahoo! ID and email’ and select ‘yahoo.com’ as the domain name. Select a Yahoo! ID that differentiates this e-mail address consistently among all the others you have created. Use something like ‘experiment394’. The Yahoo! ID should be between 6 and 30 characters. Click the ‘Check’ button to see whether or not it is being used by someone else – if it is then try a new Yahoo! ID. Your e-mail address will then be created as experiment394@yahoo.com.

This is necessary because you shouldn’t have any consistent/coherent procedure for inventing the e-mail names themselves, as this could be predictable by spammers and could distort the number of spam e-mails coming your way.

5. Choose a password – it must be greater than 8 characters, and it is best to contain alphabetic and numeric characters. Make it quite complicated, and use the same one for each new e-mail you produce: for example ‘12bnXS1jKg’.

6. Re-enter the same password to check that it is correct.

7. Make a note of the First Name, Last Name, Yahoo ID, and password in your journal.

8. Leave the Alternate email address field blank.

9. Choose a security question, say ‘your main frequent flier number.’ Enter any numerical 12-digit sequence ‘121343565787’, and use the same security question and answer with each e-mail you are creating. Note this in your journal.

10. Complete the CAPTCHA Challenge Word verification by reading the distorted words in the panel and type them into the space provided.

11. Click the ‘Do you Agree?’ Checkbox, and then press ‘Create My account’ button and your e-mail account will be created.

I started collecting spam, studying it! Of course I make sure to use (free) e-mail accounts extraneous to my normal Internet existence to avoid disruption. Thanks to Google, Yahoo, Hotmail that’s easy. Now I intend to send e-mails consisting of one word (‘holiday,’ or ‘car,’ or ‘restaurant,’ or ‘loan’), using one unique e-mail account for each experiment (and not using that account for anything else), and wait to see what pops up – then drawing charts of the rate of incoming spam.

Some of the accounts I’ve set up are left unused by me, so I can attract in and have a control experiment of the type of spam e-mails that are out there in the white noise. Having run one experiment with Gmail for nearly a year I can report that only two welcoming e-mails have arrived, and those within two days of setting up the account. So much for the ‘urban myth’ of e-mail providers precipitating spam! You should try it out for yourself – be a scientist and don’t take my word for it.

I’ve just challenged the students on my course Global Consequences of IT (GCIT) at LSE to see who can attract the most spam – the winner gets a free lunch at a local Thai restaurant. I’m interested in the various strategies they can devise to maximize spam attraction.

Try this out for yourself. Set up your own laboratory, and learn to love spam! The Internet is truly a wondrous ecosystem composed of the most fabulous creatures – spam is just one. It’s fascinating getting to grips with their Natural History.

This all came about following a discussion over a Starbuck’s latte on these and other Internet myths, which I was having with one the GCIT students, Heemanshu Jain. We’d just come from a seminar at LSE given by the founder of a successful Social Network. The entrepreneur had described how serendipity had played a large part in his success; a survey undertaken among his smallish network had been picked up by the international press during the ‘Silly Season,’ and the membership consequently exploded.

That got us to thinking about how ideas percolating on the web generating relatively little attention can suddenly become coherent and reach a critical mass, exploding into the general consciousness. Heeman and I bounced a number of ideas around – everything from why Google, Facebook, Amazon and e-Bay should become successful, and why similar sites should fail, to the ubiquity of spam. We were only too aware of the coherent urban myths out there that have absolutely no basis in fact. Hence we decided to undertake some simple experiments, starting with the humble spam.

We soon saw the sheer scale of the problem, and recognised the potential of setting up a blog (under the name WebCoherence) to invite fellow travelers with a similar fascination in how the web works, and how various web phenomena become coherent, to join in the experimentation.

We’ve still to work out the practicalities, but if we can interest a large enough number of people, then we can focus ‘The Human Computer’ at the issue, and find out some very valuable statistical information about the reality of how the web operates.

 Come and join us!