Curiouser and Curiouser! on paoga

Poacher turned gamekeeper

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 10:37:07 +0100

Poacher turned gamekeeper Jack Dunning is writing about individuals keeping hold of their identity.

After 35 years of selling your name and personal information in the junk mail industry, I have come to the conclusion that you should have 100% control over this most valuable of possessions. For the last ten years my research has told me this is right, and now I am ready to do something about it. This BLOG is my way of paying back.

The PAOGA approach (disclaimer: I work for PAOGA) is exactly this. Allow individuals the right to choose what they information they reveal about themselves and to whom they reveal it.

In a PAOGA compliant application there is a mechanism which an application uses (via a webservices API) to request sensitive personal information. Accompanying the request must be a reason for the release. PAOGA then does the work of contacting the individual and getting their approval, or otherwise (assuming we don't have a previous decision on file).

What Jack is talking about in his Clarification of the basic issues:

You will have complete control over how your name and private information are used in the marketplace.
You will be assigned a unique ID which will completely replace the Social Security number for purposes of identification.
You will be able to opt-in, not have to opt-out, in receiving any junk mail offers.
You will be able to literally eliminate all identity theft.
The JACKPOT: You will share in the proceeds of the sale of your name and personal data.

we are calling Permission based marketing (although I wouldn't claim that we can eliminate all identity theft). We should have something about this available on our website soon.

It's really desktop publishing innit..?

Wed, 21 Sep 2005 15:36:02 +0100

After going to Our Social World a couple of weeks ago my CEO, Graham, asked me to set-up a blog for him (he'd already asked me to go ahead and setup a company blog). He's an old hand in publishing and now adopting the new media pretty fast (today we talked Purple Cows). I predict Graham will podcast before I do ;-)

Genesis2.0

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:57:22 +0100

My blogging CEO Graham Sadd has written a great post about where our company, PAOGA, came from and why it's important to us. PAOGA has a big vision which can sometimes seem overwhelming when you are still taking the baby steps that are necessary to make it happen. But it's a vision about people and what's of value to people and, true to Graham's form, it starts with a glass wine in the garden!

Got to start somewhere

Sun, 16 Apr 2006 11:23:18 +0100

I spent a happy Wednesday afternoon at Euan's catching up with all that he's been doing since he left the BBC and telling him about what I do for PAOGA.

That Euan (who I talk to quite regularly) was completely unaware of what I do for a living is a good reminder to me that I've never starting blogged about my work here.

I aim to change all that and soon. PAOGA is involved in a very necessary and exciting revolution in the way people live and work online. We face a huge challenge which we will only overcome if people like you think what we are attempting is worthwhile.

I'm going to write some posts in the coming week to try to get across the PAOGA vision and why we think what we're doing is so important. In the process I'm going to try and describe what I'm doing and some of the stuff I've learned in doing it.

The Vancouver connection

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 15:24:10 +0100

Euan gave me a call a few days ago to say that the Grand Wirearch was back in town and would I like to meet them for a drink and a natter?

I met with Jon and Euan in a StarBucks at the bottom of the Kingsway along with Lloyd Davis (who I'd not seen since Our Social World), Andy Borrows, and a lady who I mistakenly took for Jon's partner which had me wrong-footed. I am ashamed to confess that I have also forgotten her name. (If you read this please accept my apologies and leave me a comment to say hello!)

Jon, Andy, and I ended up going for lunch together. It was a very pleasant affair. We strolled down into Covent Garden, found a quiet table on a side-street and pulled up a couple of beers. It was lovely to be out in the bright sun and having a good conversation with nice folk. That I talked too much is just a testament to how much I enjoyed it and how I don't do it often enough. (p.s. It's alright Andy, I won't tell anyone about the Spanish Euro's!)

Jon filled me in on Qumana which I looked at some time ago but seems to have come along again at an interesting time. I especially like the way that the author can embed direct advertising into a post and the integration with Lektora is exactly the kind of reading & posting environment I have been looking for since I stopped using Radio's aggregator. I've been building towards it in Squib but when Lektora goes cross-platform like Quamana I will certainly consider integrating them instead of building.

Over the course of the day I gave my PAOGA travelator pitch a few times. The major theme is about giving individuals convenience with control. This theme seems to resonate with people. Last year when we were trying to be very B2B we talked about "management" but I like control better. Individuals want control over their lives and that, in a digital sense, is what PAOGA is all about.

The parlour state of outlining on Windows

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:10:19 +0100

At the moment I am knee-deep (expecting to be waist-deep by tea time) in writing my product management plan for 2006/7. Of course I am writing it in the excellent OmniOutliner Professional where I am making use of the notes, to-do's, styling, and attachments.

Now I want to let Graham (CEO), Peter (CTO), and Chris (Business Development Director) see them and make changes. Okay so Omni doesn't handle change tracking like Word but I could live with that.

What I can't live with is the fact that I have no way of sharing this document with them without, it seems, converting it into some dreadful legacy format like RTF! I guess I can use HTML if I sacrifice their ability to change anything (if I only I were that good!)

I tried installing Dave Winer's OPML.exe editor on Grahams machine and sharing my outline as OPML. I have no question that Dave understands outlining but OPML.exe is a dreadfully sober experience coming from Omni. Opening my outline (saved as an OPML document) I can see the outline, sure, but I lose the notes, styling, attached documents. In short I lose everything but the structure.

Apparently it's time to ramp up my campaign of switching Graham to Mac.

What does advertising have to do with Identity?

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 22:55:58 +0100

I'm really starting to love Don Dodge's Next Big Thing blog. I've referred to 3 or 4 of his posts on our internal Teampage about Software as a Service (SaaS), investment, and now Google & Yahoo's problems with advertising.

Advertising, truly context sensitive advertising, is very closely related to identity. To give you an advert that really reflects your interests (you know that insanely rare kind of advert that you were actually glad you saw) requires considerable knowledge about you and your interests. The kind of knowledge that only you have. The kind of knowledge that you really don't want to give to marketers for fear of how they'll abuse it and you!

At PAOGA we are centred around the idea of giving every individual convenience with control for their online life. This flows from our 3 core values:

Trust - we have to earn this by always doing the right thing
Control - this is what we give you
Convenience - the reason why

Convenience is the goal, letting you make better use of your total identity and giving you the control you need to do this within your own, individual, comfort zone.

For some people that comfort zone might be "no advertising at all please" but for others they will be happy to see offers that really do relate to their life and how they live it. What they need is a safe way to share information about themselves such that their privacy and tolerances are not violated.

No clickstream, no purchase history, no reputation

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 00:04:00 +0100

David Weinberger makes the point that Nielson ratings on the web don't make sense. The data is too sensitive, too intrusive, so only the utterly boring would ever be happy to share it en masse. Especially in these paranoia inducing times.

A few services set themselves up to record click streams. I tried one and quickly abandoned it. Even though they tried to allow me to control when I was recording it was just too intrusive. And where was the data going? Into their servers. I wonder how those services are doing today?

I doubt PAOGA would ever try to launch such a service although we might partner to act as the data store for one. Here the key would be that the user's click stream data goes into their vault, but they have complete control over when it comes out and where it goes. Your clickstream then becomes another aspect of your online life but under your control.

This is very much the way I am thinking about things like Amazon purchase history. It's reallly beginning to bug me how Amazon own my purchase history. They can use it, but I can't. Why the hell is that? Why can't I take it to another service to get recommendations? And what about my eBay reputation. Shouldn't that be mine to broker in other contexts? The list goes on.

What I need is a way to collect all this information about my multiple beings and then parcel it out to those whom I trust, on a need to know basis. This is one of the goals PAOGA is working towards.