Dear DoD, the Web Itself is Social

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Tim O'Reilly" <tim () oreilly com>
Date: August 17, 2009 2:23:02 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Dear DoD, the Web Itself is Social

Dave Recordon has a really good take on why the DoD considering  
banning social media is a non-starter:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/08/the-web-itself-is-social.html

A few weeks ago, Noah Shachtman of Wired's Danger Room blog wrote  
about how the, "U.S. military is strongly considering a near-total ban  
on Twitter, Facebook, and all other social networking sites throughout  
the Department of Defense." According to Wired, the DoD believes that  
social networks, "make it way too easy for people with bad intentions  
to push malicious code to unsuspecting users."

<snip>

While it would be possible for the DoD to block specific social  
networks by denying troops access to domains such as facebook.com,  
myspace.com, twitter.com, among hundreds of others around the World,  
as Stowe Boyd said on the Department of Defense's Web 2.0 Guidance  
Forum, "Web 2.0 is fundamentally social, treating the individual at  
the center of the universe as opposed to groups or organizations, and  
then basing communication and information paths on social  
relationships between individuals."

It's my belief that even if the DoD tried to block all access to  
social networking sites it would be a never ending and ultimately  
unsuccessful battle as social is becoming a core component of the web  
itself.

<snip>

From infrastructure technologies like OpenID and OpenSocial, to  
widgets like ShareThis and Friend Connect, to The New York Times  
itself and your phone, features and interactions that you once only  
found on social networks are becoming ubiquitous. While it may be  
convenient for the DoD's IT department to think about social  
networking as a list of URLs that they can block from any network, the  
reality is that social networking is becoming a core piece of the web  
itself.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim O'Reilly, Founder & CEO O'Reilly Media
1005 Gravenstein Highway North, Sebastopol, CA 95472
tim () oreilly com, http://radar.oreilly.com, http://twitter.com/timoreilly








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