Amid ongoing debates over the hazards of excessive digital exposure through such Web 2.0 social networking platforms as Facebook and Twitter, a new book by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger extols the virtues of forgetfulness.

Since the emergence of digital technology and global networks, forgetting has become an exception, Mayer-Schonberger writes in “Delete”.

“Forgetting plays a central role in human decision-making,” he argues. “It lets us act in time, cognizant of, but not shackled by, past events.”

Mayer-Schonberger shared his theory on how to fight back against the digital panopticon with Reuters before giving a lecture at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London.

-Connie Bensen is Director of Community Strategy and Architecture at Alterian, working cross functionally to provide strategy and best practice in social media. The opinions expressed are her own.-

It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners, terrestrial TV took 13 years, the internet took four years… In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users. We are in the midst of a digital revolution that is shaping the way we communicate and these social media technologies are continuing to grow a pace in 2009. Now more than four out of five online users are active in either creating, participating in, or reading some form of social content at least once a month.

While young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of social applications, the most rapid growth is occurring among consumers 35 and older. Consumer behaviour has always had an effect on the way we do business and this is no different as social media enters the business realm full swing.

It’s not about selling something anymore; that might be the end result, but to get there, you need to work on the relationship. To get it right it is about listening to what your consumers want. Social media is defined as user generated content and has empowered the everyday consumer so marketing departments no longer control distribution and disposition of information about their company, brand, and products – the consumer does.

Your brand’s message matters but more important is the message the consumers are sending about you. Customers are turning more towards digital influencers, bloggers and peers than company “ads” for product information so negative opinions online can be hugely damaging. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, and Twitter have demonstrated the speed with which a company’s reputation can be drastically affected by an unhappy consumer.

Open and real-time dialogue can offer endless opportunities for brands but must also to be approached with a level of caution. For example, there needs to be clear guidelines agreed between personal views and the views of a company for those employees responsible for online interaction. This is to ensure a level of personalisation is achieved, showing the human side of a company, without compromising brand values.

So social media success is about listening, engaging, and measuring. Where are consumers discussing it online? Who are the key influencers? What is being talked about? What is the mood; is it positive or negative? These are the questions businesses need to ask before they act.

No one can predict exactly how social media will evolve but the certain thing remains that it will - digital engagement is the future and old forms of engagement are dead. If you aren’t listening to the noise in the online world you are going to miss it and miss out.

-- Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

Do once-hot Internet start-ups who miss a date with destiny ever truly get a second chance? History says no, even for once-great names like Netscape, AOL and MySpace.

Skype hopes to be the exception. On Tuesday, a group led by top Internet financiers in Silicon Valley and Europe agreed to pay eBay $1.9 billion in cash for a 65 percent stake in the one-time web calling sensation.

The deal values Skype at a face-saving $2.75 billion, well above the $1.7 billion at which it has been valued on the ecommerce giant's books. Ebay also stands to keep a 35 per cent stake in the company.

But that overlooks the humiliating $1.4 billion eBay has written off on the original deal. Four years ago, eBay promised to pay up to $4.3 billion for Skype, but it later scaled back the total payout. All told, it makes Skype one of the biggest value destroyers of any Internet merger since the last days of the dot.com era.

EBay's justification for the Skype deal in 2005 was how its chat and calling services could serve as an online customer service platform connecting consumers directly into eBay merchants. That never happened.

Instead, product innovation slowed and business setbacks, such as a corporate ban on Skype's network-hogging software inside companies, were allowed to fester, rather than becoming new business opportunities.

Pressure to justify the inflated acquisition price by wringing merger synergies out of the deal also proved a distraction. Into the void stepped newer Internet phenomena such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, all of which Skype might have displaced.

To be sure, 15 million users sign on every day to Skype for Web-based chats, phone conversations or video phone calls. Skype has registered nearly 500 million users worldwide since its founding in 2002.

Financially, it is still growing at levels that Web companies like Twitter can only dream about. Revenues of $551 million last year look on track to rise to $700 million in 2009, and the company has a goal of hitting $1 billion within two years. It has been profitable for several years, though Skype will not say by how much.

Yet it will take more than this to justify the valuation put on it by its new owners that says Skype is worth more than four times expected 2009 revenue. This looks difficult as long as its primary business remains undercutting established telephone companies on international calls when those rates are rapidly heading towards zero.

The reality is that -- outside of deals with renegade mobile operator 3 -- Skype is considered a pariah by most of the world's telephone operators. They hate how Skype's free, or nearly free, calling services undercut prices for their own calling plans.

Despite these hurdles, Skype must find its way into the center of the growing convergence between phones and computers. To succeed, it must mount a challenge to the new communication market leaders -- Apple and Google, and even companies such as Twitter.

Only then will Skype be able to claim it has defied the odds and become the company to beat once again.

Technology market research firm Gartner Inc has published the 2009 "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies," its effort to chart out what's hot or not at the cutting edge of hi-tech jargon. It's just one of an annual phalanx of reports that handicap some 1,650 technologies or trends in 79 different categories for how likely the terms are to make it into mainstream corporate parlance.

Jackie Fenn, the report's lead analyst and author of the 2008 book "Mastering the Hype Cycle," delivers the main verdict:

Technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2009 include cloud computing, e-books (such as from Amazon and Sony) and internet TV (for example, Hulu), while social software and microblogging sites (such as Twitter) have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among corporate users.

Click to enlarge

What's most interesting in the report, now in its 14th year, is what the corporate research firm says is a long way off from the mainstream.

It will take up to five years for many of today's trendy technologies to become mainstream, including Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds, and a true corporate mouthful, service-oriented architecture (SOA).

Funny how long hype cycles take to pay out. Three years ago, in its 2006 Hype Cycle Report, Gartner predicted Web 2.0 would go mainstream within just two years.

More than five years out, which means nearly dead in terms of industry attention, are technologies such as the once hot radio-frequency ID (RFID) concept, along with mobile robots and human augmentation and some absurdly high concepts like context-delivery architectures.

The second chart, on the right, describes Gartner's methodology. It's all very imprecise, but a game worth playing.

Images: Gartner (August 2009)

Emerging Technology Hype Cycle archives
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

-Padraig Reidy is news editor at Index on Censorship. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Mainstream consumer media is, it is agreed, in trouble. The idea of paying for one or two newspapers a day is now confined, it seems, to quaintly old-fashioned types who boast of their ignorance of the Internet, or business who actually need the information in the pages of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Wire services’ content is processed so fast by subscribers that one can barely spot the time difference. Local newspapers are seeing their stock in trade diminished. When one’s entire life is catalogued on Facebook and Flickr, there’s little thrill in having your picture in the local paper, or indeed huge necessity in publishing births, deaths and marriages. And why place a classified ad in a newspaper, when we have eBay and Gumtree?

The solution? Some, such as “Wired” magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, would suggest simply giving things away. Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” is available for free from the web until 1 August, while the hardback edition will be sold, at a price, in shops and on Amazon.

The idea, Anderson tells the Los Angeles Times is that some of those who download for free will also buy the book, if they are sufficiently impressed, of course. It’s a principle that has already been seen at work in the music world, where Radiohead released ‘In Rainbows’ freely on the web, and later released the album to shops, without any noticeable decline in sales.

But can this model work for news, long term? Books and songs are thing we accumulate, collect and return to. Professionals, academics and institutions aside, very few people retain newspaper articles in any way. Yesterday’s news tends to be precisely that, condemned, at best, to the recycling bin. Online, trends tend to move so fast that one could seriously question Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ theory.

Old news articles’ major purpose now seems to be for cutting and pasting into online arguments on forums and messageboards, useful for those engaged in debate, but perhaps not so much for anyone wishing to create revenue from content.

Some have put forward the idea that governments could fund local and national media to a much greater extent. But while the continued high reputation of the BBC shows that state ownership is not necessarily a bad thing, but in the UK there are already fears that local government funded media, such as freesheets and online TV stations, all too quickly become nothing more than propaganda for the leading party in the council chamber.

And internationally, while government-funded media may be relatively trustworthy in liberal democracies, there are far too many examples of state-run media in less free countries about the capability of reporters to stray from the party line, and governments have proved adept at manipulating media, even to the point of slowing Internet connections — the 21st century equivalent of smashing the printing presses.

Independent media needs independent funding. But how will this be done, in the age of free? Is it too late to ask people to pay for news online?

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

The recent election in Iran was one of the more dramatic stories this year, with powerful images of protests and street-fighting dominating television and online coverage.

Because traditional news organizations were essentially shut down by the authorities, it fell to citizen journalists -- many of whom were among the protesters -- to provide the images that the world would see, using such social media as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

This has raised a number of ethics, standards and legal questions for mainstream journalists. My colleague John Clarke, Reuters Global Television Editor, found himself in the middle of the issue as images became available and clients demanded coverage of the election's aftermath. John discusses the issues raised, the lessons learned and the opportunities for the future below. As always, his opinions are his own.

-----

Protests following the controversial Iranian election have put citizen journalism even more firmly in the spotlight. With traditional news gathering organizations effectively shut down by authorities, text, video and stills being produced and posted on social websites by the protesters themselves became the main way that much information was getting out of the country. This dramatic coverage -- regardless of (and perhaps even enhanced by) its shaky nature -- was accessed by Reuters (and other news organizations) and distributed to clients and viewers around the world.

Citizen journalism isn't new. We have long accessed amateur footage of stories around the world, from plane crashes to wars to natural disasters. However, the internet and mobile devices have resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of content available and the speed of delivery, the ability to deliver outside of normal controls, more uncertainty over origin, ownership and verification, and the viral nature in which it can all spread around the globe.

At Reuters, we have used video from social networking websites for several years. We put in place strict rules about how such material can be accessed and used, with only senior editors authorized to approve running this material.

Verification is a major issue. Video or photos might not be what they purport to be, either because of sloppy information from the person posting it, or deliberate deceit, either to create mischief or for political or other reasons.

Another important consideration is that copyright still applies to the internet. The person posting material might hold copyright, or worse, they might not hold copyright. The material could originate from a private individual, a company or another news organization. Wherever possible, we have sought to find and seek permission from the originator of the material, as we would do for any third-party material accessed in any other way. This can apply to hard news and lighter material, including funny visual postings that have gone viral and have become stories in their own right.

When the Iran story broke, even when we were able to operate, we still accessed internet-posted amateur video. But such footage became even more important when our operations were hampered by authorities –- the sheer number of mini-cams and mobile phones taking visual images meant there would be good material we would want, even if we were able to operate freely ourselves.

Early on, we set up a 24-hour monitoring of Twitter and various social networking sites. We made a call early on that we would relax our rules on clearance –- protesters posting video and pictures on social networks wanted to get them to the world, and we were another conduit for that. Other news organizations followed a similar rationale.

Throughout the Iran story, however, we were extremely careful about what we wrote and said about material accessed from social networking sites, certainly not taking at face value what (little) information usually comes with such posts.

We have been clear when we are unable to verify content or location or date, and have also clearly stated that we’ve accessed it from a social networking site. Our subscribers (and their viewers) are also intelligent enough to know that no-one can 100 percent verify this type of material and are similarly circumspect, and the shaky, low-resolution quality of much of this material is an immediate signal to clients and viewers that it was shot by an amateur.

This approach does not, of course, absolve us of all responsibility. There have been many videos and photos we haven’t used because they have not rung true for one reason or another.

Iran was also a special case in that citizen journalism was not only a way to get video and photographs, but it was a very important part of the story itself. We didn’t just get video from citizen journalists, we did several stories, like the one below, about the importance of citizen journalism in Iran, which put our use of it in its proper context, too.

Iran was in many respects the culmination of trends in the way citizens have been using the web for the past few years –- a confluence of the proliferation of mobile recording devices, internet delivery and social networking sites that allow almost instantaneous interactions between users and an exchange of information and ideas.

How social networking intersects with traditional news organizations is also an evolutionary process.

It will not be good enough for traditional news companies to simply take from citizen journalists –- it needs to be a two-way exchange of content, information and ideas, with mainstream news companies contributing via blogs, chatrooms and other social networking sites, whether in the general news area or in specialist forums such as those for the financial community.

Verification, copyright and quality will always be significant issues -- even more so as millions of people around the world have the ability to distribute and exchange content. The combination of citizen journalism, and the standards of news organizations of companies such as Reuters, has the ability to produce a richer flow of information around the world.

Provided we clearly flag the origin of material and put the relevant context around it, our subscribers, our viewers and our readers –- who are already immersed in social networking as consumers and contributors themselves –- are smart enough to evaluate this content, without challenging our core journalistic values.

-- John Clarke, Global Editor, Television

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

Are we too connected?

In recent days and weeks I’ve been wondering if our mobile phones, Blackberries, text messaging and constant access to email and social media have brought us too close together for our own good.

Or maybe the quality of our connected life is only as good as the information we share.

At this point, social media and microblogging phenomena like Facebook and Twitter focus on short answers to such generic questions as, “What are you doing?”

We hear from network and cable television anchors who tell us what they’re having for lunch (often a quick sandwich in the company cafeteria because they are, well, really busy). Or from usually cynical White House journalists who can’t resist Tweeting which B-list celebrity they saw at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Here are a few actual Tweets from the so-called nerd prom:

• "Just spend quality time with ricky schroeder #nerdprom".
• "post #nerdprom sightings. demi/ashton, james franco, owen wilson, eric holder, mayor fente, d axelrod, christopher hitchens, dana delaney". (This one's fitting since Ashton Kutcher is the world's most followed Twitterer).
• "Just got picture with Dule Hill."

Given the quality of the material, it's little wonder that a Nielsen study found that Twitter retained only 40 percent of its new members after a month of use. And that was after Oprah started sharing her 140-character thoughts. Before that it was 30 percent.

But could it be that this “me, me, me” quality of Facebook and Twitter is just an early evolutionary stage of something smarter and more useful? There are some encouraging signs -- and that's a good thing, because we're becoming ever more connected.

How connected are we?

• Facebook has more than 200 million active users and more than 100 million log on at least once a day. More than 3.5 billion minutes a day are spent on Facebook and more than 20 million users update their statuses at least once a day.
• A Nielsen survey found that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the last quarter of 2008, an astonishing 80 messages a day. That's more than double the previous year's figures and works out to more than three messages an hour -- if they never sleep or go to class.

How connected are we going to be?

• Delta Airlines reported that more than 300 of its aircraft will be equipped with wi-fi this year, enabling email users to stay connected -- or shackled -- to their accounts even seven miles above the earth. Other airlines are closely watching Delta's experience.

Media outlets and other institutions are finding ways to take advantage of this connectivity, moving beyond gossip and gab.

• ProPublica recently introduced Change Tracker, an application that monitors government websites and sends out notices of changes as they are posted via a Twitter feed. Some of the changes are a bit obscure -- "Biography of Millard Fillmore [rare] changed on 5/27" -- but others track changes to the website following the spending of economic stimulus money.
• The Vatican has added an iPhone app to reach out to young, connected people, according to Online Media Daily. Young people "are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture," said Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Social Communications department.
• At Reuters, we're using Reuters Messenger to build chat rooms in which our journalists can expand their conversation with the marketplace through informal, dynamic interactions with a group of engaged financial news clients on our terminals.

We're also using Twitter in some intriguing ways:

• Specialist journalists use it to share articles and build up a following.
• Online editorial staff and bloggers use Twitter to distribute news and solicit reader comment.
• Journalists are using Twitter during live events like Davos (Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger used it to break news there earlier this year) and to solicit questions for newsmaker interviews.

There are huge implications for those of us in the news media as we try to reach an increasingly fragmented and distracted audience awash in information, some of it wanted and much of it not.

And journalists who work and live in the digital world (and that’s just about all of us now) will find that there is little or no difference between our professional and private personae in the wide-open world of social media. A visit to my Facebook page, for example, would reveal to my friends that I have a strong interest in horse racing; an affection for the New York Yankees (an obsession, my wife would argue); and take great pleasure in the words and music of Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Townes Van Zandt. What you won't find is an indication of my politics or religion.

Here at Reuters, we are developing guidelines for how our journalists interact with social media.

• If Reuters journalists want to use Twitter or social media as part of their professional role they should seek the permission of their manager.
• If Reuters journalists use Twitter professionally they should use the word "Reuters" in the name of their streams or somewhere else on the page.
• The Trust Principles apply to Twitter and social media -- they should do nothing that compromises them.
• Microblogging and use of social media tend to blur the distinction between professional and personal lives: When using Twitter or social media in a professional capacity our journalists should aim to be personable but not to include irrelevant material about their personal lives.

In an email to the editorial staff, Editor-in-Chief Schlesinger told Reuters journalists, "whether we like it or not, our online identities are inextricably linked with our workplace identities....Things we do online could very easily taint our journalistic activity. If one of us self-identifies as 'very liberal' politically, it may well be the truth, but would advertising it simply feed the myth that journalists in general have a liberal bias?"

"The easiest rule," Schlesinger cautioned, "is to stop, think and imagine: How would you feel and how would you react if someone made your Facebook page or blog or online comment a story? Could you defend your objectivity? Could Reuters defend having you on the beat you’re on? Could your reputation, and ours, survive someone making an issue of it?"

I'm sure neither Schlesinger nor I have had the last word on the relationship of journalism and social media, nor on whether we're all too connected. What we need to pay attention to is the quality of those connections.

What do you think about how journalists are and should be using social media and microblogging? Let us know here -- and don't feel like you have to keep your thoughts to 140 characters.

John C Abell is the New York Bureau Chief for Wired.com and edits the Epicenter Blog. The opinions expressed are his own.

Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla in the social media space, with some 200 million members, a valuation of perhaps $5 billion and a base that has expanded well beyond its early roots as a private hangout for bored Ivy League students.

But, like the ad says, life comes at you fast — and there is nothing more unforgiving than internet time. So, are the best years ahead for Facebook, or is the finicky mob of cool kids — and now their parents and grandparents — already peering down the road for another Next Great Thing?

One thing is for sure: Nothing lasts forever. We need Microsoft, perhaps, but nobody gets very excited about it anymore (except maybe a hyperactive Steve Ballmer). AOL? They could do no wrong when dial-up was king. But when broadband made competitors out of the telcos AOL had leveraged to create an onramp to the internet, a steady decline into near oblivion began.

The internet roadside is littered with bold ideas hatched too early or denied a dignified death. David Wetherell was considered a bold genius when, in 1999, he turned up his nose at a deal that would have valued his internet incubator CMGI at about $18 billion. Fast Forward to 2009: CMGI is now ModusLink Global Solutions, and worth about 1/100th that.

But at least it's still around. Netscape, the granddaddy of all dotcom IPOs, was purchased by AOL before the dotcom bubble burst and was RIP for all intents and purposes in 2007. Video powerhouse Broadcast.com? Bought by Yahoo and now ghostware. Yahoo isn't doing all that great, for that matter.

So far, though, Facebook keeps catching the wave. It not only makes money, but a profit — perhaps as much as $200 million this year. Not bad for a company that has no discernible business model. It is said to be worth as much as $5 billion, a figure extrapolated from rejected cash infusion offers by private equity firms and the secondary market for employee insider shares. That's a far cry from the $15 billion valuation implied by Microsoft’s $240 million investment for a 1.6 percent stake in October 2007, but it ain't hay, and we are in a global recession.

Valuation is an important part of the Facebook story, but other numbers are even more important: Facebook's demographics. The story of this metric can almost be told with a single factoid: Mark Zuckerberg matched the median age of a Facebook member when he started the thing — and now, at 25, he still does.

Age creep is a good thing — the alternative is death, remember. The college farm system delivers basically the same number of students at any given time, and they are always about the same age. Growing your membership would mean skewing the metric up or down. It's hard to go down too much. As it happens the fastest-growing group is women over 55, and there are even slightly more members between the ages of 45 and 65 than there are 13-to 17-year-olds.

So far Facebook has avoided the worst mistakes of other social networks, which contributed to their own irrelevance by failing to adapt. It might have been the death knell for Facebook to open up to the parents and grandparents of their earliest adopters, but it didn't turn out that way. Facebook has attracted a vibrant developer community, but they don't allow the rampant customization that makes some MySpace pages epilepsy inducing. And even though it has flirted with the dark side when it comes to user privacy, its support for OpenID may prove to be the most significant milestone in the advent of an open and social web.

Even so, Facebook must be hearing footsteps from Twitter, the new kid in town. Twitter is in many ways the anti-Facebook: a distributed society that does one simple thing rather than a gated community with a gazillion avenues and possibilities. Twitter became a geek darling at the 2007 SouthBySouthWest conference in Austin, Texas, and went vertical earlier this year when politicians and celebrities "discovered" it. Some of the cool kids are already saying it has jumped the shark now that the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Sen. John McCain on are it — but they are probably just jealous about the hundreds of thousands of followers these celebrities have.

For the moment, Twitter seems to be sucking all the air out of the room. In the "fastest-growing" metric it is as much a no contest in Twitter's favor — quadrupling to 17 million U.S. visitors in the past two months — as it is in Facebook's for overall membership. Like Facebook, Twitter has no real business model yet and yet seems able to sustain itself just fine for many years to come. On those rare occasions Twitter gets bad press, as it did last week when it changed an arcane user setting without warning, the worst insult hurled its way was that its imperious behavior was Facebook-like.

Even Facebook seems to get it. It rolled out design changes two months ago in a clear nod to the Twitter view of the world. As TechCrunch's Erick Schonfeld put it: "Despite its already considerable size, Facebook is showing how adept it can be in responding to new threats. If Facebook cannot buy Twitter, it will try to beat it instead."

Facebook has already made many transitions that have tripped up less nimble organizations. It went from being as exclusive as you could possibly be — Harvard students only — to letting in anyone. It's as popular now with grandparents as it is with their grandchildren. It is a daily fixture in the lives of tens of millions of people.

Game over? Dude, this is the internet.

Follow Abell on Twitter.

Also on Wired.com:

Star Trek Gallery: Then and Now

Life Before the Console Age: Gallery of Forgotten Electronic Games

Video: Avant-garde Cellist Zoe Keating Fuses Music, Macbook

From Brick to Slick: A Historic Gallery of Mobile Phones

-- Tom Ilube is chief executive officer of online security firm Garlik. The views expressed are his own. --

Facebook's announcement that they are taking a new approach to their policies on the use of personal data is a quantum leap. By allowing users a greater role in its governance, the world's most popular social network has set the benchmark for all organisations holding an individual's personal information.

It is a brave and important move for Facebook: by allowing users to have a say in the way that their personal information is used and distributed, consumers will finally be allowed to take control of their digital identities.

In the past couple of weeks, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has oscillated from holding on to people's information forever to the position he announced today - giving users the chance to have a say on what happens to this data.

Facebook has learned the hard way that consumers value transparency above everything else. The world watches their every move and this naïve attempt to change their terms and conditions, without fully consulting their users, meant there was an inevitable loss of credibility.

The scale of the backlash against the changes has clearly alarmed Facebook, and with over 8.5 million subscribers in the UK alone, the risks of not taking action were too high. The furore has re-awakened them to their responsibilities to users and also reminded them of their founding principle - to help make the world more open and transparent. And it is in accordance with this, they have published both the Facebook Principles and the Rights & Responsibilities.

Users are already thanking Facebook for their honesty and engagement on this crucial issue, with almost 3,000 publicly welcoming the move on Zuckerberg's blog. Naturally, the devil is in the detail and we must wait to see how this principles play out in practice. However, as the public become more aware of the dangers associated with posting personal information online, they begin to expect organisations to do more to ensure this data is not abused.

With this increasing acceptance of the importance of personal information, people have realised that it is a valuable commodity - not only to themselves, but also to companies and advertisers. As this awareness grows, organisations will not be allowed to take consumers' personal data for granted, and will learn that they can only earn the opportunity to gather it if they are aware of their obligation to use it responsibly.

The Information Commissioner has warned against tardiness with people's information and privacy - be it individuals on social networks or the Government's proposed mega database. In this light, it can only be hoped that Facebook's move will have implications for the wider world.

By democratising the gathering, storage, use and application of information obtained from its users, Facebook has acknowledged the huge responsibilities involved in holding personal data. Zuckerberg has now set the standard for transparent privacy policies within all online organisations and we will be watching avidly to see if others follow suit.

-- Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

Academics, family researchers and even baseball history nuts have noticed recently how some important archives of older newspapers from around the world have vanished off the Web.

The problems have surfaced since PaperofRecord.com, a collection of more than 20 million newspaper pages of papers ranging from the Toronto Star to Mexican village periodicals to newspapers as far as Perth, Australia, merged into Google News Archive.

The problem, researchers discovered, was that Google has had trouble reformatting the newspaper images and gaining rights to display some of the older publications. It has, at least, temporarily removed some of the archives from public view.

There is an idealized view of the Web that sees it as a storehouse of human knowledge, and in the sense of the breadth of what I can find with a random Google search, this is true.

But for all its openness, the Web has proven to be a leaky vessel for historical preservation, with much of its treasure trove lost in a maze of altered Web pages, broken links and deleted sites.

The head of the British Library recently warned in The Observer newspaper that if this digital memory loss is not fixed, we "are in danger of creating a black hole for future historians and writers."

Archives of The Sporting News, founded in 1886, and nicknamed the Bible of Baseball, is among the publications that has fallen victim in the transition of PaperofRecord.com to Google ownership. Some older Mexican newspapers are also offline, academics complain.

Preserving history on the Web is a struggle even for Google, whose stated mission is "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

"We're doing our best to find a solution to include as much of the acquired content as possible," a Google spokesman says of the newspaper archive transition.

But as more and more of our collective memory is hosted online, the danger grows that we lose the content and context of events that happened just days ago, let alone weeks, months or decades back.

Try retracing the links to old scandals or unflattering images on the Web, say to Enron or Parmalat or other fallen corporate names. Most of them are gone, despite the best efforts of sites like Wikipedia or Smoking Gun or the combined energies of the blogosphere to ferret out and preserve such history.

Where is the global sense of outrage that followed the looting of Iraq's National Museum as U.S. troops stood by in the turmoil following the ouster of Saddam Hussein in 2003? While hard to measure, I think it's a safe bet that the world suffers the loss of a museum full of artifacts every day by depending upon the Web to host our precious cultural memories.

That's not to neglect the enormous value of the Web as temporal medium for sharing information. The latest celebrated example of this is how independent analyst Alex Dalmady used financial data from the Stanford Group's own website to uncover the unlikely financial returns promised by the bank.

His Web detective work is the exception that proves the rule. It was all information hiding in plain site and Dalmady simply had the courage to say the emperor had no clothes.

"One does not have to be a detective, or even a financial expert, to spot financial institutions that may prove insolvent, or worse, with the passage of time," Dalmady crowed in a report he wrote. "As the saying goes, if it looks like a duck..."

Examples like Dalmady's are, sadly, the exception.

The World Wide Web as it has evolved over the years has made it almost purpose-built for obscuring or deleting uncomfortable facts. That wasn't the intention of Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, whose vision was that every address would point to a discreet page of data. Instead, Web designers have found it convenient to create dynamic Web addresses that may make it impossible to find information the next time you return to a site.

Even Dalmady's work in January is already hard to reproduce. The Stanford International Bank Ltd site informs visitors the company has been put into receivership and provides no links to its past business.

The recent privacy backlash by Facebook users began when the management of the world's most popular social networking site attempted to address the issue of who owns the history of conversations that occur between Facebook friends if one of the parties leaves the site.

Changes made last month to Facebook user guidelines implied that the company owned the rights to users' personal data, including message and photos, even after they shutdown their accounts. The company has since back-peddled and assured its 175 million members that, indeed, users control the data they create on the site.

Susan Feldman, an expert on Web search with research firm IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts, says the problem of the disappearing Web is very real and also partly a mirage. The limitations of current search technology that depend on users choosing the right keywords to find what they are looking for is part of the problem.

Help is on the way from improved search tools such as text analytics and concept clustering technology that will help users find more of the information they may think is lost on the Web.

But until the Web's important information archives are secured in modern libraries and improved search tools are widely available, the sense that we are losing our collective digital heritage will only grow.

Enjoy the Web's many benefits, while they are still on your screen. Keep copies of anything you want to remember, or risk losing it, perhaps as early as the next time you refresh your browser. We live in a time where the capacity to record and capture our lives has never been greater.

But using the Web to preserve those memories makes it more and more likely that future generations will consider the early years of the Web to be lost decades.

-- At the time of publication Eric Auchard did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. For previous columns, Reuters' customers can click here.  --