Since this column started last year, I’ve written a lot about two communities that really interest me. One, code4lib (http://code4lib.org) is a community I’ve been a part of since its inception, before we had a conference, before we had an internet relay chart (IRC) channel, and before we had a quarterly journal. Another, Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a community I’ve tried to avoid, despite sticking in a few tepid toes. I don’t want to participate in Facebook for reasons I wrote about a few months back. One of these reasons is that my participation in the Facebook community and all of the seemingly personal connections of that participation are fodder for profit-making activities by Facebook itself and its business partners, salesmen, and marketing agencies alike. That Facebook turned on a service called Beacon that blatantly exploited user activities in service to this objective (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beacon_(Facebook)) shortly after my column about this ran is coincidental. I wasn’t trying to predict that it would happen, I just wanted to highlight that this is what these online communities are ultimately for when they’re run by people with a primary motive of making a profit.
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