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.

Another topic that fascinates me is how rumours spread over the Internet. On April 1^st 2003, All Fools Day, someone at CNN thought it a good joke to post a spurious story about the assassination of Bill Gates in Los Angeles. It spread around the world like wildfire, and caused the South Korean stock market to drop $3 billion.

What was the hot topic among the Chinese students on my 2007/2008 lecture course? Demonstrations for/against the Olympic Torch? No! China and Tibet? No! It was the web-spread rumours about the Edison Chen sex scandal.

Edison who? For those of you who, like me, have never heard of him, Chen is a famous singer/actor from Hong Kong. He is now infamous for using his celebrity to entice a string of beautiful actresses into his bed. The cad also photographed his conquests, and stored them on his laptop.

Obviously, the steamy scenes were too much for his PC, which soon also demanded ‘servicing.’ He carefully deleted the incriminating files before taking the laptop to a local computer store – but not securely enough. Edison didn’t know of the numerous products on the market that can recover deleted files. He should have asked at that same friendly neighbourhood computer store!!

Here is a warning for every celebrity – prurient shop assistants can’t resist having a look at your files – both undeleted and deleted. That is what happened in Chen’s case. The sordid images found themselves out onto the net, and soon everyone in China had seen the pictures. Wildfire is an understatement.

The subsequent furore forced Edison to announce his ‘retirement’ from the entertainment business. The actresses’ careers were ruined, their families shamed, one even attempted suicide – there were even rumours that Triads were threatening Chen’s life.

Isn’t it amazing what Information Systems professors at the LSE can learn about the Internet in China from their students!

Mike Morgan has just received a cease-and-desist notice from the mighty Goldman Sachs; GoDaddy has locked his domain names.

‘Mike who?’ I can hear you ask. I didn’t know about him either until an article appeared in the Daily Telegraph telling of how he had set up a blog with the intention of dishing the dirt on Goldman Sachs. Naturally, I checked his blog, along with many thousands of others who had never heard of him either.

Why would Goldman’s even bother? How could a Goliath like Goldman’s fall into the trap of this tit-for-tat nonsense with a David investment advisor from Florida – a nobody? It’s not as if Morgan was an insider who knows where the bodies are buried. He is just one of a long line of malcontents with a pathological hatred of ‘Goldmine Sachs’, J.P. Morgan, and the rest. The web is full of rage and hatred focussed on Wall Street .

It’s most peculiar. If they’d left him alone Morgan’s sites would have slid back into oblivion. But now he’s hot news. This is a classic example of the coherence that Web Ecologists love to study. A Blog is dribbling along, until suddenly a press story singles it out for particular attention. In e-mails, other blogs, and in the self-referential popular press, the word spreads outward, and the hit rate of Morgan’s blog rockets skyward. A law suit is oxygen for blogs hungry for publicity.

And even if Goldman’s lawyers manage to close him down, he can pop up elsewhere. Others will join in. Just Google ‘Mike Morgan Goldman Sachs’ and you’ll find them. It’ll be interesting whether there’s a critical mass here, or whether it will flare out, and just fade away. I’ll be following the story with interest.

All good research material for Web Ecologists.

And as usual the legal eagles will be raking in the cash. It’s as I’ve always said: “The Internet is a job creation scheme for lawyers!”

The Daily Mail headline screams out “Girls at Risk.” Apparently young girls are being incited by friends to post provocative pictures of themselves on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace etc., … because it’s cool! What are these silly adolescents thinking? They are putting themselves at immediate risk from predatory paedophiles. But they also have a much more long-term problem. Once the photos are out there, they can never be called back. What will these girls say when sometime in the future prospective mothers-in-law check up on their Web history?

Never put anything on a computer (on Facebook or in e-mails) that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see – because they will see it. The ‘cool’ guy who shares his innermost secrets online, or his risqué photographs, or his humorous anecdotes; or who vents his spleen about ex-colleagues and ex-employers, or brags about drug taking or other illegal, antisocial or inappropriate behaviour, is … an idiot with tunnel vision. His material will be seen, not only by like- minded people, each with a ‘fun’ sense of humour, but also by others with malice aforethought.

Potential employers are scanning the web to check out job applicants. According to CareerBuilder.com, a large US online job- finder site, HR departments are using search engines in their due diligence checks, uncovering incriminating evidence posted on social networks. Disloyal comments about past employers, or the release of their confidential material, the use of inappropriate screen names, sloppy or lewd vocabulary, even a poor writing style, can all lead to that rejection slip.

I know of one young lad who was offered an interview for a place on an MBA course. The university Googled him, only to discover that some years earlier he had posted a blog on how to subvert the local telco charging system. The offer was immediately withdrawn.

Be sure, on the Internet your sins will find you out.

When we set up the Web Coherence blog the idea was not only to observe coherent behaviour on the Internet, but also to propose the creation of new creatures.

We start with the mix of the internet and the mobile phone camera – a powerful combination. In the case of the ‘dog poop’ girl, we saw how a communal sense of indignation sparked a witch-hunt. Think what could happen if people were actually paid to report antisocial behaviour?

Suppose we add a Geographical Positioning System to the mobile phone – this technology is already available, and will soon be a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. Now suppose the longitude and latitude can be superimposed on any digital photograph along with a tamper proof time signal. Add on a checksum and digital certificate that guarantees the image has not been tampered with by the likes of Photoshop, and finally pass laws that allow such images to be submitted as evidence in a court of law.

Certified images (or videos) can be e-mailed immediately to the authorities by the same phone that took the picture. Now suppose the photographer is paid 20% of every fine levied as the result of his evidence – we have the birth of a new job: the ‘digital bounty hunter.’ The state could pay these rewards directly and anonymously into the telephone account, and have the mobile phone payment system changed allowing credit on an account to be withdrawn at post-offices.

No more traffic wardens – we’re all Stasi now! Smoking in a non-smoking designated area, using a mobile phone while driving, jay-walking, vandalism, littering, and a hundred and one other crimes and misdemeanours could be policed and punished in this way. 

Every honest citizen becomes criminalised, with society itself as the prison, and each prisoner doubling up as a guard. The state doesn’t need to pay salaries to the jailers, it’s all pay-by-results spying. At last, the ultimate efficient panopticon.

Many real-world behaviours have found their way onto the Web. People with various addictive personality traits are being drawn to the Web like moths to a flame. A 15-year-old Swedish boy collapsed with epileptic seizures after a marathon 15-hour World of Warcraft session. Back in 2004, a 36-hour stint with the same package drove a 13-year-old Chinese lad to jump to his death. In 2005, a 28-year-old South Korean man actually died as a result of after playing Starcraft for 50 hours non-stop.

Internet addiction has been cited in divorce cases. The number of on-line gamblers is exhibiting exponential growth. And then there are the auction addicts. Some people just don’t know when to stop. They don’t understand the golden rule of auctions: check out the interesting lots; decide those that you want to bid on; set your maximum proposed bid, and NEVER exceed it; ensure your total spend for the whole sale falls below a maximum you can afford. 

Andrew Tyler, a 13-year-old New Jersey, thought it was all a game. Back in 1999 he placed 14 bids worth a total of US$3.1 million on e-Bay using his parent’s password: five were successful. Luckily he didn’t win the Van Gogh painting, but his bid of $24,500 for a red 1971 Corvette convertible was successful, as was $900,000 for an 1860s bed that once belonged to Sir John Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister (the previous best bid was $12,000).

There was one problem: Andrew’s weekly pocket money was $15. When the sellers of the bed contacted his parents to fix delivery, and asking for the $900,000, his mother, who answered the call, was rumoured to have started hyperventilating and collapsed. Thankfully, she didn’t have to pay because of Andrew’s age, but needless to say the owners of the bed were really p****d off with e-Bay. Andrew’s parents then banned him from the Web. 

Let us know if you have any similar stories of addictive behaviour.

I’ve just come out of a Internet conference session where most of the delegates were proselytizing the merits of maximizing the amount of public information disseminated for free on the Web. They see a Brave New World,  with the Internet overflowing with data sets. By magic, Britain would be the centre of a spontaneous combustion of new enterprises. I can hear them now: information is good, more information is better, and computerized information is best. But nothing is that simple.  

I say this for two reasons. First, sometimes with data, less is more! Who knows what form of litigation is lurking around the corner if some awkward data is hiding in the volume. Some things it’s best not to know! I always confront the so-called ‘wisdom’ of more is best by telling those who collect information like a squirrel does nuts, to find out the blood type of their mother’s husband, and then to compare it with their own. For about a quarter of the population this is likely to produce a very unwelcome surprise. “It’s a wise man that knows his father.” 

And secondly, with data, whether gleaned from the web or in general, quality is far more important than quantity. Remember, when a man has a watch he knows the time. If he has two watches he isn’t so sure!

There are two phenomena that I find particularly fascinating, namely money (don’t we all), and addictive behaviour (my last book was a biography of a drunk). Imagine my surprise when I recently found these two topic coming seamlessly together on the web in China.

Addictive behaviour is displayed by many web users, particularly in respect of gaming, social networking and on-line gambling. With Yidong Liu (a colleague visiting from China), I was studying the problem in Chinese children. We soon came across some reputable research that showed well over one in eight children exhibiting so-called Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD)! 

So concerned are the Chinese government that they have been forced to act. The seven major games manufacturers in China have incorporated government-sponsored software in all of their games that prevents children playing any one of their games for more than three hours in any eight-hour period. Surely, even nine-hours game playing per day is too much. However, not satisfied, children have responded by swapping between multiple game identities every three hours, or they simply move on to a different game whenever they are closed down. One small-scale investigation of just 273 students at the East China University in Shanghai identified a clear correlation between IAD and poor examination performance: 80% of drop-outs were blamed on IAD. 

On leaving school, having spent hours daily staring at screens, they have e-learned that this behaviour is normal. Then young men (it is usually men) enter ‘dead-end’ jobs, staring at yet more screens. In China, so called ‘gold farms’ are springing up, where they spend upwards of 12 hours a day in sweat-shops playing on-line PC games like World of Warcraft to earn WoW gold by slaying virtual monsters. This ‘gold’ is then sold on for real dollars and euros to cash-rich Western players who want to progress through the game without putting in the same amount of time and effort.

The appetite in China for PC games is enormous. To quote Richard Ji, an analyst from Morgan Stanley: “They have what I call the largest virtual park in China. And in China, the No.1 priority for Internet users is entertainment; in the U.S., it’s information. That’s why Google is dominant in the U.S., but Tencent rules China”. Q-coins, the on-line currency of ‘Tencent’, allows access, via their website QQ.com, to numerous on-line games across China, in particular the QQgame. 

Every registered player is given a QQ-number, and with this Q-coins may be purchased using RMB Yuan. By June 2006, 549 million users were registered, with 220 million using their QQnumber at least once a week. Q-coins are used quite legitimately to buy the game-coins for use in other games. Winnings may be legally exchanged back into Q-coins, but NOT into RMB Yuan – the official Chinese currency. However, secondary markets for Q-coins have appeared, and a black Market in this on-line currency is thriving. 

The Central Bank of China has even warned that Q-coins have the potential to become disruptive to the official currency!