Community Mobilization

Blending Virtual Goods and Offline Payments

Kwedit is a new system that allows kids over the age of 13 to make virtual goods purchases on credit. The system allows the teens to pay back their Kwedit bill by mailing in cash, paying at retail partners such as 7-Eleven, or asking friends and family to pay their Kwedit bill through a social network called 'Pass the Duck'.

I like the idea about teaching kids about credit so they learn the positives and perils. What concerns me is that the system will become a gateway to furthering our consumerism culture. More concerning is that Kwedit could be teaching kids that it is ok to ask someone else to pay your bill for you - to 'Pass the Duck'.  If the system is being run with a sociological longitudinal test embedded in then I hope that data from Kwedit will prove its value in the long term, and help young adults use credit wisely and responsibly. Stephen Colbert shares my concerns.

Preserving All Tweets for All Times - Library of Congress

It appears that the Library of Congress is going to begin preserving Tweets permanently. It seems that every public tweet is going to be recorded - forever. In the world of electronic media there is no doubt that compression on disk space has to do with the ease of this endeavor compared to trying to archive every book or every magazine - but I have to question the wisdom and then the methodology.

Signal:Noise. It is this signal to noise ratio that makes me question the wisdom or archiving the entire Twitter database. There is just so much banal banter and frivolous chatter. That is the point of Twitter. It is what it is. The question is do we honestly need a perpetual record of hyper-superficial musings about cat litter and the status of our own hair?

At the same time I would hate to be the person having to determine what gets archived and what does not. What has value and does not. It almost seems simpler to archive the whole thing than to create rules and attempt to delineate what has value currently and for future generations. I appreciate the effort of the Library and bid them luck.