• Friday Update: SOPA, Flash, Storify, Bezos, FMFGT, privacy, TV & transmedia

Here's my weekly review of this week's links and tweets about the news, issues & trends I’m tracking. It's #NGIF (Nick’s Great Information Friday).

Future of TV

I learned a lot from my participation in Future Media Fest, a conference convened in Atlanta by Georgia Tech, where I spoke on a panel on the future of television with folks from Cisco, Intel and Motorola.  Video of some panels, including mine, will be archived sometime next week. I’ll post when that happens. Meanwhile, check out the live tweets from the conference at #FMFGT

Some of my thoughts on the future of television were posted in a presentation “Tracking Tomorrow’s Television Today” to the TV Academy Faculty Seminar.

Related and relevant are two videos from a recent GigaOm conference, one from VC Mark Suster and  this one from visionary exec Robert Tercek.

The buzz over UK-based TV companion app Zeebox continues with the news that the company will build companion apps for Channel 4.

Privacy

Privacy is an issue that radiates throughout the web. My post, “The Virtual Self” examines the Hobson’s Choice between convenience and privacy on the web. (The piece was also posted on The Wrap this week, as well:)

Check out a useful Business Insider report on just exactly what Facebook gathers as you browse the web, and a Mashable report on the launch of a new company, appropriately called “Personal”, which seeks to be the data vault for your private information.  

While at #fmfgt, I encountered Social Fortress, an Atlanta start-up that offers a next-gen encryption platform. Available only for the enterprise right now, co-founder Adam Ghetti told me the consumer version will become available in Q1, 2012. 

Transmedia: Storytelling, Story Tools

My piece about the Story World Conference was posted at Tribeca Future of Film site. Earlier this month Tribeca hosted a panel on Transmedia for Documentaries at the New School, the video for which can be viewed here:

Bravo TV's digital chief Lisa Hsia weighed in with how Transmedia Storytelling is Changing TV on Mashable. Young adult author Michael Grant’s new transmedia property BZRK is getting a big marketing push from publisher Egmont  

More and more attention is turning to various platforms and toolsets, for instance this post about the new interface and features for Storify on Read Write Web, and another report detailing how “Storify comes into its own” as an aggregation tool for the coverage of Occupy Wall Street movement. I asked Twitter’s Director of Global Brand Strategy Joel Lunenfeld about Storify and other tools that leverage the Twitter API to present coherent stories, and his answer was unexpected and fascinating, basically that Twitter will be introducing new functionality in this area at an undisclosed date in the future. He would not tell me more, but I’ll keep you posted.

You may want to check out this report on a new tool for “online performance” called UpStage, from New Zealand. 

Flash Forward (not)

The web is still alive with chatter over Adobe’s announcement that it will no longer support Flash as a mobile development platform. Check out this roundup of comments from developers, produced by FWA (Favorite Website Awards).  

Bezos rising

Have you noticed the flood of words about the rise of Amazon chief Jeff Bezos as king of the web, esp. since Steve Job's death and the introduction of the Kindle Fire. Here's the best of the lot from WIRED.

#SOPA frenzy

Congressional hearings began over the “Stop Online Piracy Act” backed by the main trade groups representing copyright holders, and opposed by the Internet big-boys. Here is the case against.

And a report from showbiz journal The Wrap suggesting that the legislation goes too far, even for Hollywood’s allies.

AHA moments

Finally: You must check out "The Blu", a new site that allows users to explore the ocean online in an environment created by CG producers around the world. It's gorgeous, addictive and an unusual form of User-Generated Content.

My fave tweet quote this week: from coverage of the Future of Entertainment conference at MIT:  "That we don't have a venture capital model for creativity is one of the strangest things in contemporary culture." @grant27 #FoE5

• Your Virtual Self: Who Owns it and What’s it Worth?

Each one of us generates vast amounts of data – email, phone calls, social networking, photos, text messages, videos, browsing, purchasing and more.

Our data create a new form of identity, what you might call a Virtual Self – a concept that will determine the future of the web.

This virtual identity, and all of the bits of data that comprise it, has become an incredibly valuable form of currency – it’s the way the web exchanges value.

Companies aggregate your data in order to deliver advertising, commerce, content, and services to you – worth billions of dollars.

But who owns this data? Who owns your Virtual Self?

Right now, the identity wars are dominated by Facebook, Twitter, and Google – firms that have become what Mashable calls “large-scale consumer identity providers (a.k.a. IdP’s).”

“There’s a great burden placed on identity providers to police the media companies that connect with their users,” Robyn Peterson writes in a recent post. “There’s also a great burden on media companies to fulfill and not violate the trust of their end-users, and to behave appropriately.”

Right now, we’re all complicit in the creation of this Virtual Self -- we use our Facebook or Twitter account to sign in to other websites, which in turn use the components of your identity to construct their content.

We do it willingly. In exchange for data about our friends, locations, interests, behavior, and preferences, we get content served to us that seems eerily relevant -- courtesy of the companies whose algorithms process the bits of our virtual identities.

Of course we’ve seen flare-ups over privacy and identity, but they haven’t changed the trend for consumers to share our Virtual Self, which is getting pretty comprehensive.

Own Your Own Data

“It represents our actions, interests, intentions, communications, relationships, locations, behaviors, and creative and consumptive efforts,” according to The Locker Project, a non-profit start-up unveiled last week as part of a set of initiatives aimed at allowing people to have “ownership over their personal data and clear control over how it’s protected and shared.”

I love their slogan: “Data is Life. Own Yours.”

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