Is the future really free? It seems we've entered an age where there's a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren't investing out of philanthropy. There's value there. YouTube is "free" but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why? Here's a hint: It's not about the Tube.

In the past few weeks, two seemingly disparate events took place regarding control of female sexuality and technology. On April 4, The Telegraph reported that a Saudi woman was beaten, shot, and killed by her father when he discovered her chatting with a man on Facebook. Gizmodo published an interview with "Zoltan," a self-described "technosexual" who invented a robot who could consent to having sex with him because real women made him uncomfortable (and apparently said no). Both stories are interesting (and horrifying) juxtapositions of how technology can help break sex discrimination, and how they can reinforce old notions of the need to control women's behaviors.

I’m struggling here. I’ve been pro-Hillary since 1991, but something I heard on Meet the Press on Sunday has shifted my favor towards Obama, and I cannot stop thinking about it. I want your feedback here. Does good campaign management forecast good governance? If both Clinton and McCain have gone broke, run weak messages, and had many staff battles, why would we trust them with our country? If I was a venture capitalist, which campaign would I invest in? But then, George Bush had a fantastic campaign….

So in case you missed the news, Facebook's Beacon has been refactored into an opt-in program, making it, of course, much less interesting to the marketeer forces eager to monetize our friendships. And so the pro-Beacon lemmings have realized nobody's following them. And so it begins: People starting to realize what "free" services really mean. I wonder at how clueless Facebook was about this.

When Facebook unveiled "Beacon", its new advertising platform earlier this month, it unleashed a simultaneous bi-polar reaction. From privacy advocates, there was outrage and concern. From advertisers, on the other hand,  the introduction of Beacon was as if Facebook had just handed them the keys to El Dorado. Laura Scott wrote a comprehensive post called Facebook's New Ads: If You're a Good Person, Why Should You Want Privacy? that delves into the privacy concerns.

The social network thing is still something I'm trying to wrap my brain around. Maybe I'm not alone. While millions of people spend hours a day in these virtual "communities," I wonder if any of us can have the perspective to really grok what's happening ... to us, to our culture, to our media, to our lives. Time marches on, and what today looks like tomorrow is something about which we can only guess.

You know I can't pass up a good breastfeeding discrimination story, right?