Clive Thompson is examining the idea of radical transparency for Wired, and naturally he’s throwing open his own notebooks and computer files, and has a post up on his blog soliciting thoughts on the topic. Here are his three central ideas:

-Secrecy Is Dead: The pre-Internet world trafficked in secrets. Information was valuable because it was rare; keeping it secret increased its value. In the modern world, information is as plentiful as dirt, there’s more of it than you can possibly grok on your own — and the profusion of cameraphones, forwarded emails, search engines, anonymous tipsters, and infinitely copyable digital documents means that your attempts to keep secrets will probably, eventually, fail anyway. Don’t bother trying. You’ll just look like a jackass when your secrets are leaked and your lies are exposed, kind of like Sony and its rootkit. Instead …

-Tap The Hivemind: Throw everything you’ve got online, and invite the world to look at it. They’ll have more and better ideas that you could have on your own, more and better information than you could gather on your own, wiser and sager perspective than you could gather in 1,000 years of living — and they’ll share it with you. You’ll blow past the secret-keepers as if you were driving a car that exists in a world with different and superior physics. Like we said, information used to be rare … but now it’s so ridiculously plentiful that you will never make sense of it on your own. You need help, and you need to help others. And, by the way? Keep in mind that …

-Reputation Is Everything: Google isn’t a search engine. Google is a reputation-managment system. What do we search for, anyway? Mostly people, products, ideas — and what we want to know are, what do other people think about this stuff? All this blogging, Flickring, MySpacing, journaling — and, most of all, linking — has transformed the Internet into a world where it’s incredibly easy to figure out what the world thinks about you, your neighbor, the company you work for, or the stuff you were blabbing about four years ago. It might seem paradoxical, but in a situation like that, it’s better to be an active participant in the ongoing conversation than to stand off and refuse to participate. Because, okay, let’s say you don’t want to blog, or to Flickr, or to participate in online discussion threads. That means the next time someone Googles you they’ll find … everything that everyone else has said about you, rather than the stuff you’ve said yourself. (Again — just ask Sony about this one.) The only way to improve and buff your reputation is to dive in and participate. Be open. Be generous. Throw stuff out there — your thoughts, your ideas, your personality. Trust comes from transparency.

Here are a few thoughts. In general, transparency is a powerful, revelatory thing. When I was working at a newspaper, I was bewildered by the peculiar customs surrounding corrections. You couldn’t be too detailed, and you couldn’t identify the flaw in the editorial process that produced the error – an editing glitch, a reporting mistake, et al. The idea was, we are a literally a corporate entity, and we rise and fall together. (And we really, really don’t want to get sued.) Needless to say, I thought this kind of opacity was bit odd at a paper that does a great job shining a light on the community. But that’s the way papers are. The NYT is thinking about abandoning its public editor position, which has caused some gastric distress among the editorial ranks, but on balance been good for the paper and its relationship with the public.

Let’s accept that these days, circling the wagons in this way is self-defeating. And that secrecy is (mostly) dead. What’s the implication for journalism? Un-secret information can still be un-transparent. A lot of interesting and/or horrible stuff is not secret, and never was. It’s just that nobody’s paying attention to it. Or it’s too complicated. Or nobody ever saw it in quite that way before. More transparency will help expose these things, because more eyes will be probing more information. But we can’t assume it will all happen automatically, or that the process will be unerring, because it also depends on who’s doing the probing, and their motivations (as with the warbloggers’ recent attempt to take down the AP).

Malcolm Gladwell had an interesting New Yorker piece recently arguing that because virtually all the information on Enron’s nutty accounting practices was in the public domain, the prosecutors’ claim of a nefarious plot was bogus. As Gladwell notes, it took journalists and lawyers to burrow into all that stuff and make sense of it. What some consider the ultimate smart crowd, or at least one with the best incentives to weed out bad bets – the market – didn’t pick up on it.

I’m not sure I understand the “reputation” idea. For an individual, it makes sense. Becoming more transparent will definitely goose my Google profile. But it’s also the kind of thing that can be abused. If I’m a corporation, a government agency, a politician or Paris Hilton, I am going to want to shape my reputation (well, maybe not Paris Hilton), and maybe trash those of my competitors or enemies. A logical response would be not transparency, but to put bullshit out there instead (or a faux-transparent mixture of truth and BS) – like the sunny press releases that accompanied Enron’s dire quarterly reports.