While they don't ask upfront for money, they make a commendable effort of actually keeping people away from those files by asking people to email them with a stated research goal. Casually interested normal folks need not apply.
It doesn't help either that their text files are in PDF instead of a format that can actually be programmatically processed.
It certainly would be useful to do some sort of programmatic analysis of speeches mapped over time. Sentiment analysis. Repeated phrases. Cross-reference with others' phrases to see who's saying the same things at the same times.
Oh well. I guess you can print it out really nicely. And it's "portable"!
Interesting, a invitation for scrutiny with concern for privacy.. and on other hand, disallowing people to anonymously get public information collected by them. Interesting!
Do you realize that 'people are collecting X founder's profile' is essentially nothing highly significant in and of itself in this day and age (much thanks to Zuckerberg&co, ironically enough)? -- because this information is out there anyway and will always be there, anyone who's interested can cull that information with considerably little effort with some clever scraping scripts. What's offered with this initiative in particular is the convenience of not having to do that from scratch, instead letting you get straight to the searchin' of juicy bits.
But it is still quite "creepy" to see someone making that effort to collect all your public appearance and put into a profile, shared on HN when you wake up (although you have to send in an email stating your goal).
And this is normally a job the public relation firm has to do.
This is not creepy, this is an academic pursuit of rounding up information of one individual who is incidentally spearheading big change of privacy in a society. This is one of the things that happens to you when you become a public figure. Is a 'biography' creepy? History researchers do this themselves when they're writing history, when they're writing biographies -- some work is made easier for them with this kind of stuff.
I think Zuckerberg's doings are a lot creepier than this when you really get down to it.
So many orgs and individuals are doing similar data mining under the "collect now, analyze later" strategy. The fact that some of the data is made open-ish is not scary at all.
"The Zuckerberg Files is an open-access public archive" ... "Scholars wishing to gain access to the full archive should email access@zuckerbergfiles.org with their name, affiliation, and a brief description of the research project or purpose for which the materials will be put."
I'm not really sure I understand their argument for restricting access. I'm not into the academic environment (and this might be one of the reasons) but this at first looked something targeted at a wider audience than "scholars".
Also, their quote mentions copyrighted work. A) is this material copyrighted? B) would be legal to open access - with passwords - to a "organized database of copyrighted material"?
I had the same reaction: to me they were contradicting themselves in no more than two sentences. Then I read on and followed links: http://zuckerbergfiles.org/?page_id=41
So this is indeed a copyright issue. Like all copyright issues, bittorrent is the answer.
Am I the only one that thinks this should absolutely be put up in some open-source version-control-based way? If it's public, it's public. If I have to email you and you get to decide whether or not I'm a scholar, doesn't that defeat the purpose of making something available for learning, sharing, and accountability? Should I really have to have a research project or composed purpose to view "open" things?
>By gaining a better understanding of how Facebook’s founder and CEO conceives of his own company’s role in the policy and ethical debates surrounding social networking [...]
Sure, knowing how the CEO thinks is a good judge to know where Facebook is going, but it's a bit odd to think that Zuckerberg doesn't take note of what the Board say.
Why aren't they logging what Sandberg, Thiel and Graham say/do?
Well, nearly every public speech from members of Congress and the executive office and the judicial branch is recorded, with some notable exceptions like national security, but even then, eventually that information enters the public record by law.
The problem is that much of it is difficult to collate. http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php is a good start for the Congressional record online, but presidential records and judicial records often end up all over the place.
Ideally the LOC would provide a better online toolkit for this stuff, but you know, good enough for government work.
Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies. And, even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.
Sites like this will become oboslete... One day "www.lmgtfy.com?q=all public utterances of Mark Zuckerberg" will trigger something a little more interesting than Page Rank...
"The dominance of social networking sites, such as Facebook, in contemporary life" ... I find it funny when people make such dramatic statements about facebook. I've reduced my usage to once per week and feel no dominance. I can just as easily log off completely.
To everyone complaining about the password-protected login, there is something you need to understand: this is about copyright, not the library being fake-open. This repository apparently consists of copyrighted works, and by the Fair Use provisions of US Copyright, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee have collected these works together even though they presumably do not have rights to all the works.
You, too, could pull all these works together without arranging the rights, and you could probably make a fair use argument for it. However, I guess they're saying that they aren't going to re-transmit the archive in bulk. It is insinuated that it might run astray of fair use to do so.
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadIt doesn't help either that their text files are in PDF instead of a format that can actually be programmatically processed.
Oh well. I guess you can print it out really nicely. And it's "portable"!
I wait for this to be hosted somewhere else ;/
But it is still quite "creepy" to see someone making that effort to collect all your public appearance and put into a profile, shared on HN when you wake up (although you have to send in an email stating your goal).
And this is normally a job the public relation firm has to do.
I think Zuckerberg's doings are a lot creepier than this when you really get down to it.
Not only that but he's the CEO of a transnational corporation: their public pronouncements are always examined for any sort of securities edge.
Open-ish.
Aka closed :)
But it's in a box. And it's up there. And you have to wait for someone to bring a ladder.
Also, their quote mentions copyrighted work. A) is this material copyrighted? B) would be legal to open access - with passwords - to a "organized database of copyrighted material"?
So this is indeed a copyright issue. Like all copyright issues, bittorrent is the answer.
The real answer is changing the laws; torrents are a work-around for the currently broken system, at best.
Yeah, it sure is tragic that there are technologies that exist that allow us to bypass things like this.
Self undermining, that is.
Sure, knowing how the CEO thinks is a good judge to know where Facebook is going, but it's a bit odd to think that Zuckerberg doesn't take note of what the Board say.
Why aren't they logging what Sandberg, Thiel and Graham say/do?
The problem is that much of it is difficult to collate. http://thomas.loc.gov/home/thomas.php is a good start for the Congressional record online, but presidential records and judicial records often end up all over the place.
Ideally the LOC would provide a better online toolkit for this stuff, but you know, good enough for government work.
Evon Latrail is the author of a children's book "When Mommy Went to Heaven". She wrote/recorded a few songs; "Lord Bless My Enemies. And, even has a song entitled, "Can't You See (Abortion Is Murder). She went Pro-life after having a abortion! Really???? Now here is a photo of her posing in chocolate as a "Swamp Girl". The word Hypocrite is floating around somewhere. This story has made front page news in the local paper. Go to Google or YouTube and search, Evon Latrail.
You, too, could pull all these works together without arranging the rights, and you could probably make a fair use argument for it. However, I guess they're saying that they aren't going to re-transmit the archive in bulk. It is insinuated that it might run astray of fair use to do so.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Fuxkinhug
I'd bet the same kind of scene would work really well with "Zuckerberg."