Looks like the A-lister brigade is out in force against the opt-in lunacy that is Facebook Beacon. Or, so it would seem, anyway, with Doc Searls, Dave Winer, and Jason Calacanis (and a few others) making some good ol’ impassioned pleas To Do The Right Thing, as this kind of default opt-in status is deceptive, and as Mr. Calacanis eloquently puts it (and I suggest this without a hint of sarcasm) they are Data Hogs as they are “amassing tons of information, selling it under false pretense, and not sharing it with the folks who gave it to them”.

It all makes sense to me, of course.

Will it make sense — as well as the real essence of their cri de coeur — to … say, for instance my *brother*? Or my wife? Or, my non-tech friends? How about *your* non-tech friends?

I mean, will average Facebookers care?

Will they care that Facebook isn’t making available in an easy XML format a copy of all of their data and transactions, available for download at a push of a button? That Facebook is actively scouring the transactions of their life so that it might be monetized now — or later, for that matter?

Let’s phrase it another way.

Do average Facebookers know or care that almost everything they upload *TO* Facebook is then *owned* by Facebook? That everything could be used / potentially abused / sold off in all kinds of ways that makes Facebook Beacon sound like of kindergardenish?

Let’s boil it down even more.

Do you think most Facebook users have even *thought* about reading the Terms of Service?

In an age where we *still* — and will *continue* to until our children our teenagers — read about how an individual’s silly exploits become public knowledge unbeknownst to them, and that news about potentially indiscrete activities could jeopardize your current and future job prospects are still very much News …

The answer to all of the above questions is “Average Facebook users neither know, nor care about the intricacies and *importance* of owning, tending, and guarding, one’s personal data, information, and relationships — unless it directly and overtly impacts their own personal sense of privacy today.”

And Facebook knows it.

In fact, its billion dollar valuation hinges on it.

It hinges on the fact that somewhere deep inside Facebook, I am sure that marketers and venture capitalists are cooking up ways to milk the herd of all its worth without actually alerting the herd to what its doing.

You know, like that privacy thing about the news feed about a year ago.

And that’s all that it really boils down to.

As long as enough people don’t notice or complain about these issues around Facebook nothing will be done. Its in Facebook’s best interests, in fact, that nothing be done.

Getting back to the point at hand, though. Will the cries of the blogging intelligentia be *enough* to galvanize forces within and throughout Facebook? Maybe. Perhaps if there are enough slow news days in the upcoming days and weeks, this could get enough publicity in the mainstream media — via MoveOn.org, for example — for it to catalyze change through public pressure.

But methinks that best way it *could* be done is through a grassroots means *within* Facebook. Someone has to start a group — someone with thousands of friends (like, the limit — 5000) who knows thousands of other connectors — to spread the word.

Because it has to be an attitudinal change, really. And that’s hard to do when its coming from an outside force — it really has to come from within.

You know what I mean.

Getting people curious about what Facebook is really about and what they’re really doing.

Get people interested about what they’re giving up in exchange so that they don’t have to go through the onerous task of actually *emailing* people, but messaging them through Facebook.

Because only if we’re able to do that *first*, will we able to get people to care about Facebook handing over all their data.

Without caring about what Facebook can or can do, and what it does and doesn’t own, nobody will ever want to know or care about these other shenannigans, which make sense to you and I.

But not, say, people like my brother.

And perhaps your brother too.

If you’re wondering what Scott Karp, uber-smart new media blogger at publishing2.com, has been up to (well, I have — but that tells you the extent of what my life is like at the moment) is launching a new service this fall called Publish2.com. You can read the 2800 word treatise on what its about over here, but it sounds like, Publish2 is “a social network and 2.0 platform for journalists (and independent “news bloggers,” “citizen” journalists, student journalists, i.e. ALL journalists, BROADLY defined), which aims to put journalists at the center of news aggregation on the web.”

This is going to be one of those situations where I’m just going to have to see what the final product is about, because although I *think* I know what Scott is describing, that actual summary above, I don’t think, actually gets at the heart of what publish2 is about, which are, it sounds like at least two important things.

Social News With A Twist:
From what I understand, Scott is going to be creating a news aggregator like service which is powered by journalists. Unlike Digg (which he references liberally, and with good reason), or other social news sites, Publish2 will not be powered by the wisdom of the plebs. It will be powered by journalists, who Scott feels are actually the best people to do the filtering as, well, its pretty much their job. As for who counts as a journalist, this is pretty broadly defined, but it sounds like there will be an initial coterie of them (as defined by Scott, Robert Young, and others) [if you'd like to be part of that coterie, you may apply over here], who then get invites to people *they* think count as journalists.

So, does this sound elitest?

Well, of course it does, and Scott admits that this is so. Better yet, should you care? I think, as with all things in life, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. And that is, you should only care if the outcome, the socially bookmarked news, of Publish2 is good.

Cool.

Noteworthy.

Good-at-finding-things-that-non-journalists-would-love-to-read -but-don’t-already-find-them-in-their-or-news-sites.

One issue that I wonder how Scott is going to get around, however, is achieving a critical level of quality through numbers. While the “crowd” that sorts through the news is going to be journalists, with Digg like news you do need a critical level of people submitting news to get a diverse (and “good”) selection of news.

Which brings me to what I think Publish2 will *also* be about

Bringing Journalists Into Social Media:
Its unclear if blogging per se will be part of these tools so far, but it looks like there will be supportive tools, technologies, forums, group hugs and so on (perhaps the latter is done virtually). Scott thinks that there is a niche for this, and this very well may be the case, as Scott is in a good position to comment on the state of journalism and new media, what with his work at Atlantic Media in the past, and, of course his own blog. Bringing known quantities into the mix will help as well, as he’s brought perennial new media media wag, “il professore“, Jeff Jarvis, along for the mix.

Ultimately the second of these things will feed into the first of those things, and I think that it will be Scott’s greatest challenge to not only to gather and evangelize social media and *blogging* to journalists, but to get them to actually participate on this specific platform at this time. He’s got to create something so compelling and so cool — to *journalists* — that they will want to join, and pull that social media engine to churn out all that bookmarked, socially driven goodness.

… and whatever the output of that engine is, that people — laypeople (the plebs) — will find it interesting enough to come back.

Some time ago, I read that social news was attempted by some news organization with mixed results (someone furnish me with a reference). People submitted stuff they liked, but by and large, it only included explosions, car crashes, and babes in bikinis. Or all three.

I think I know and understand what Scott is trying to get at. I like the idea of *elevating* the idea of crowdsourced news by targeting a very narrow band of people. What I do wonder, however, is if the tastes of this admittedly elite few will find a broad enough niche to satisfy the tastes of the many — and if it doesn’t, will having a place for journalists in and itself be enough?