by Christopher Allen & Shannon Appelcline [This is the second of a series of articles on collective choice, co-written by my collegue Shannon Appelcline. It will be jointly posted in Shannon's Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities online games column at Skotos.] In our previous article we talked about the many systems available for collective choice. There are selection systems, which are primarily centered on voting and deliberation, opinion systems, which represent how voting could occur, and finally comparison systems, which rank or rate different people or things in a simple, comparative manner.

Another Orkut user and I have confirmed a privacy hole in Orkut whenever you send a message to someone via Orkut. For instance, whenever I send a message to anyone in the system that is forwarded by email, in the message headers it will read: From: "Christopher Allen" <member@orkut.com> Reply-To: "Christopher Allen" <christophera@alacritymanagement.com; When someone reads the message in their email software, the "From:" line will be my name but the fake email of <member@orkut.

I've read of emails, Orkut messages, and blog postings since my post yesterday, so I thought I would share some with you. There have been a number of good posts, as well as user comments at Danah Boyd's blog Apophenia. Danah Boyd writes Correcting Marc Canter's Perception of My Views Marc - i don't believe that users should take these relationships more seriously; i believe that YOU should. Users will do whatever they damn well please, and i think that we should learn from them.