You Do Not Exist.

That’s a hard concept to grapple with, but in many ways it’s true. At South By Southwest yesterday, the panel tackling online privacy the panelists spent a great deal of time discussing online privacy within our current framework for such discussions – “my data is me”.

One panelist went so far as to suggest that your metadata had an assessable value. He suggested that you should have full control over it and went so far as to suggest that you should be compensated for its use.

That prompted me to tweet the following:

Your individual information has no value. Only in aggregation does it gain value. Nobody targets “you”. They target the characteristic.

That led to a bit of chatter on Twitter and some discussions with people there. Most of those forums weren’t really sufficient for really fleshing out the idea, so let me explain.

First, you should understand that the comment was made in the context of privacy and targeted advertising. My friend Paul actually took the concept in a completely different direction and has been pondering the value of individual Twitter content versus the collective. It’s an interesting take, and one I’ll think on. For purposes of this post, however, I’m talking about targeted advertising and your personal data.

You golf. You eat at various restaurants. You travel. You buy things. You have credit cards for certain stores. You are a collection on indivisual characteristics. In typical psychological analysis, those personal characteristics could probably be described as the self. The “self” is very important to our conception of the world.

In the world of digital advertising, however, the self is irrelevant. Those characteristics are meaningless. Unless you are buying very, very expensive luxury goods, there is a high degree of probability that no advertiser is targeting “you”. No advertiser will run an ad campaign with the sole purpose of getting “you” to buy their product. There is simply no economic benefit to limiting your audience to one person.

They are, instead, targeting a collection of characteristics that you happen to have, and characteristics you share with many, many, other people. Your concept of protecting “your” metadata, then, is illusory. There is nothing of value to protect.

How can that be, though? Advertisers will pay a premium to reach me based on that data. So clearly my metadata has worth.

I’m Unique, Just Like Everybody Else.

Advertisers devlop a profile of the person likely to buy their products. That information is matched against consumer information databases. If your profile happens to match those characteristics, those advertisers will deliver an ad unit to you.

However, they’re not delivering that unit to “you”. They are delivering it to a random identifier in a database which matches a random set of variables they found important.

The problem is our sense of our own identity is tied inextricably to that random set of variables. When people use it to communicate with us, we fell manipulated – we feel like big brother is watching us.

I followed up my first tweet with another that read:

A noble goal would be to get people to divoce their concept of “me” from the individual characteristics that comprise that.

I say “noble” in the sense that we hamper our ability to get the most out of the digital world when we cling to these antiquated notions of “self”. The benefit of the digital world comes from the aggregation of data, information, and creation. We recognize the wisdom of crowdsourcing movements and creating in a collaborative environment, yet we resist the aggregation of information for the purpose of making advertising more efficient.

I, for one, welcome a world of targeted advertising. I may never (at least until I’m 50 or 60) have to watch another Viagra or Cialis ad. I may never see another dancing mortgage calculator.

It is ironic that the value of your personal data, and your control over it, was argued at a conference on digital media. The panels at SXSW spend a great deal of time discussing corporations and the fact that they must give up “control”.

That takes many forms. PR practitioners must give up control of their message. Intellectual property holders must give up control of their creation. Network owners must give up control of their networks.

Despite this, we cling to the notion of “our control” of our data based on the flawed notion that it has value – on an individual level – to anyone but us. As I said, our metadata has no value in the singular. It is only in the aggregate that the information means anything to advertisers.

There is a closed street outside our door that is not on any GPS system. Everyday 10 cars drive right up to the brick wall, because the GPS said to.

That statement was sent to me via Twitter in response to a point I made about the GOP Tech Summit. I had said that the best GPS in the world won’t get you anywhere if you don’t know where you want to go.

Much of the chatter I heard from the Summit centered around the tools, the technology, the apps, Twitter, etc. But none of it addressed the much larger point – we need to know where we want to go before we can ever turn on the GPS.

The summit is a good idea, and I commend the RNC for having the idea.

However, I think the party really needs a better sense of where it wants to go. It is not enough to simply want to get back in power. It’s not enought to say you want to win elections. It is certainly not enough to say we want to deploy new toys and gadgets without any idea of what we want to do.

In the 1990s, we had a vision. We had an agenda. We had a set of core concepts around which we could rally.

Today, we have none of that.

Are we for fiscal responsibility and small government? That’s kind of hard for people to believe based on immediate past experience. Obama, rightly, beat us about the head and neck with that one in his presser. We simply have no credibility on those issues.

Are we for ethics and accountability in elected officials? Well, we kind of pooched that one too.

The way to demonstrate our commitment to these ideals is using the technology to put our money where our mouths are.

We need to identify dirty politicians – not just dirty Democrats. If our guys are implicated, we need to primary them.

We need to put all legislation online for public discussion – not three days before it’s law, but the moment it is suggested. Imagine all the legislation of Thomas together with all the power of a Wiki? What if we allowed the people direct participation in the legislation our elected Republicans submit? How could the Democrats refuse to hear bills if they carried the signature of tens or hundreds of thousands of co-sponsors?

These are just a couple of ways we can use tools to support our agenda. Unless we’re having that sort of discussion, all of the “we should use Twitter more” nonsense will do us no good at all.

The opening keynote of the Blog World Expo is underway in Vegas. Richard Jalichandra of Technorati is walking the audience through highlights of their State of the Blogosphere survey work to be released starting Monday as a five part series.

If you’re interested in looking at the characteristics that separate the top tier bloggers from the lower tier it all comes down to hustle. That’s pretty mych true of any profession, but that hustle takes a different form for blogs.

The average top-tier blogger posts 10 or more times per day and utilize 5 or more web 2.0 apps.

Perhaps the most interesting facts for social marketers are the way bloggers interact with brands. 90% talk aout specific brands, and 80% talk about customer service experiences. That should be enough to make any company take blogs seriously. However, the more relevant stat is the fact that 61% of bloggers report they are influenced by other bloggers discussion of products, services, and customer experience.

In short, whether you are online talking about your company. product or brand or not, there is an active and vibrant discussion of it taking place. You need to decide whether or not you want to be part of it.

Once every few months, the RNC rolls out the next e-mail from Member Services pimping another retarded looking little elephant as the hook for their latest fundraising effort. Today’s e-mail, however, is absolutely the best.

Embroidered with the official logo of the RNC, Sam is decked out in red, white and blue and is sure to be the hit of your July Fourth party.

Well sure he is. Because my friends are such drooling, Neanderthal simpletons that they’re overly amused by a cheap piece of Burmese fluff. You should have seen how crazy they went when I waved a lit match in front of them. It was like the beginning scene of 2001 with the monkeys going spastic over the giant chocolate bar.

Come on, seriously. The gang at the RNC must be embarrassed to send these out. This is truly one of those “just hold your nose and do what the finance people ask” messages.

I find it hard to believe that the response to these things is staggeringly successful, but they must be. Otherwise why would an institution so crazed with appearance and pomp trot this stupid thing out for every major and minor holiday. After all, there was Max, Maxine, and Patrick. Now Sam joins the line up.

I guess it escaped the attention of the RNC that the most famous Maxine in DC is Maxine Waters. The two most famous Patricks are Kennedy and Leahy. The most famous Max is Baucus.

To be fair, moderately famous Sams include Republican Rep. Johnson from Texas, Republican Rep Graves from Missouri, and GOP Senator Brownback. However, the best known Sams in DC history were likely Rayburn and Nunn – both Dems.

Honestly, can’t the RNC do better to reward participation than hand out stuffed bears named after Democrats? Why not give away an elephants named Newt, Goldwater, or Ronald? There would be no mistaking that those were named after GOP icons.

Having dinner last night, discussion turned to the iPhone and the new version set for release in June. Chatter around the table turned to whether to upgrade (or purchase, for the people at the table without the device already). It seems everyone’s waiting a month before contemplating the big purchase.

I’m not, and I’ll tell you why. One word… Android

T-Mobile is releasing Android based phones this fall. Enabling development of a huge array of applications for the phone has the potential to create the iPhone killer. T-Mobile is talking internally about their new G3 platform and the phones in development as unlike any phone/network you’ve ever seen.

Now, I have to admit, the fact that the iPhone is only available through AT&T is the main factor in me refusing to purchase. However, even if the announcement coming out of Apple in June is the end of that exclusivity and the wider distribution of iPhone to other platforms, I’m still not buying.

Take the Google-driven Android platform, and combine that with their new FriendConnect service to unite all of their properties and other social nets through a giant open-source and open access distribution network, and the “gee-whiz” aspect of iPhone allowing you to browse YouTube and Facebook suddenly seem like an antiquated concept.

You’ll be able to truly interact from the mobile device. Tie your mobile’s built in GPS to location based social networks and you’ve got capabilities for connection on your phone that Apple just doesn’t match with the iPhone.

Add the fact that T-Mobile has been playing up wi-fi roaming via their phones, and suddenly your T-Mobile Andriod phone has is a wide open playground for development. The possibilities of this are endless.

In a nutshell, that’s why you’re unlikely to see me schlepping an iPhone any time soon.