I just posted this at the Social Signal blog. It’s the opening presentation I didn’t end up delivering at the 2006 Nonprofit Technology Conference. Here’s an excerpt:
Think about Web 2.0 – the loose collection of new technologies like blogs, news feeds and the like – and one of the key things that jumps to mind is aggregation. These new technologies allow us to take raw information from disparate sources, and mix and match and mash-up until a whole new picture emerges.
Funny thing: there’s another field where that’s important, where people combine information from different sources to create a new synthesized perspective on a person, issue, organization or event.
It’s called OSINT – open-source intelligence. That term has nothing to do with Linux or the GPL. It’s the practice by intelligence agencies of collecting and analyzing information from publicly available sources.
[….]The more information we ask people to share through community web sites – the more we invite them to tell us – the more exposed they are.
Head over there to see the rest of it.
