I ♥ the EFF
I thought I’d take a moment and give a shoutout to all my buddies at the EFF and remind everyone about all the good work they do protecting freedom of speech online! ›› Bloggers’ Rights | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
social networking archive
Buzz Off, Google
When Google announced and subsequently unleashed Buzz on the world, on February 9, 2010, it was hoping to have a social networking hit on its hands. Instead, it was met with a lot of frustration and anger from users, who found Buzz thrust upon them, turned on and connected to the rest of the internet before users even knew it.
And when I say connected, I mean connected! Everything in your Google profile, including all your contacts and links and your YouTube Profile (like your sharing links to Twitter accounts), Picasa, your Google Reader shared items, and more, became available to anyone familiar with your Gmail address who wanted to follow your Buzz account. And this wasn’t a choice to opt-in, but instead was switched on all at once from Google headquarters and shoved out the door.
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Stopping Cyber-Bullies
My 90 year old stepfather was just recently claiming to my mother that kids didn’t pick on each other back in his day. When she told me about it, we nodded knowingly, smiled, and agreed he has a touch of the old-timer’s. Anyone who is a kid, has been a kid, or has a kid of their own knows that bullying is a big problem, at home, at school and on the playground. But with the advent of the internet, it’s moved into an entirely different arena- online, and taken a new name- cyber-bullying.
Excuse Me, You Have Email On Your Shirt!
Chris Ball is the lead software engineer for One Laptop Per Child, who is a geek and wears t-shirts and has an Android phone, pretty much like a lot of the rest of us.
But recently, a local electronics retailer had a promotion where they gave away free parts to 1000 people, and Chris was one of the lucky ones to participate.
Chris made off with $100 in free electronics and decided, with the help of his wife Madeline, to put them to use in a way no one had ever thought of before- making a t-shirt that keeps count of unread emails! Right there on the front of the t-shirt, using LEDs, it keeps a total count of how many messages are waiting to be read in the Inbox. It uses an Arduino Lilypad and Bluetooth dongle to talk to his Android phone and the count displayed right on the shirt for everyone to see!
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What Do We Google?
Sometimes when you’re bored, you put your name into Google just to see the results, right? I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it… Then that gets boring, so you start looking for other stuff, just to see what you can find.
The staff of Nina Hale Search Marketing compiled some of the funniest and weirdest searches that they charted on Google over the past three months from their clients’ accounts, and found:
1. gloves that people can shoot out web
2. wool gangster shirts
3. what were the boots worn by Tom Selleck in Quigley Down Under
4. do tuna cook while they swim
5. who invented friction
6. kitten smells like rotten eggs
7. is turkey poop brown
8. what is tuna made of
9. what does Farrah Faucet look like
10. did duck hunting change the world…continue reading »
The Trouble With Astroturf
I was going through my RSS feeds yesterday, when, to my surprise, I came upon a glowing review of the tech blog I used to write for. “Techi.com Will Not Bore You” proclaimed the headline! And when I clicked through, I read a shining review of how original the content and magnificent the site was. Surprisingly, for a design site, there was no mention of the site design itself, which, at least from this designer’s standpoint is plain, at best.
The sentence that really caught my attention, however, was “I’m familiar with the guy behind this project and can honestly say he knows what he is doing.” I, too, am familiar with the guy behind this project. His name is Walter Apai, and he is also the guy behind Web Design Depot, a clearinghouse for web design links that has had middling success on the web. He’s also a self-admitted control freak, micro-manager and will freely admit to knowing little to nothing about technology or how to run his business. From what I gathered while working together, he got lucky once and is hoping to replicate his success with Techi.com.
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Facebook’s Like Button Is Not the End of Privacy
All right… here we go. I am tired of how people latch on to one piece of misinformation and freak out. YOUR PRIVACY IS NOT BEING INVADED. You know how pissed I was about Google Buzz. This is an ENTIRELY different concept. That is not what the OpenGraph API is about.
I have already implemented several of the new widgets on the dinner blog. Go and look. You’ll see the new Facebook like button in the upper right hand corner. And you’ll see several other people like the page (and I hope you’ll take the time to like it too). But you only see the name and photos of people you’re already friends with on Facebook.
In my case, I see all but one, because so far only one person I am not friends with on Facebook has “liked” the blog. But, I CAN get info on her because I am the admin of teh page, but not directly thru the blog. That’s a feature for web administrators to keep in touch with people who are interested in their site. The info I get about Likers is their name and face, and access to send messages to their Facebook streams, like I already do/can with the dinnerblog Facebook page. It’s no real change, other than an extension of the venue- it’s still Facebook folks who choose to express their Liking.
Nevertheless, your information is NOT being handed out willy nilly. This is just a method of personalizing your experience as you go to other sites so you can share with people you trust, to your friends you have already made on Facebook. To strangers i.e. everyone else on the web, you are listed as just “a person” and no other information is given out about you beyond that.
Let me say this again: Your name and personal info is only revealed to people you are friends with already. That’s why I don’t have a problem with this, I actually, um, like it. I think it’s a good thing, it makes for a better social experience because it’s transparent and allows for easy feedback from people you know.
Facebook may not be the bestest solution out there, but they’re the one that most of us have chosen, democratically. Unlike Google Buzz, you opted-in by becoming a member of Facebook. If you have privacy concerns, you should by all means delete your Facebook account immediately, not just turn off this one button.
But if you’re like me, and most people, you have your Facebook account for public consumption. The things you post to it and the data you include in your profile are for public consumption as well. You may have tenuous “friend” connections, but Facebook is not a place where you are friends with your stalker ex-boyfriend or abusive former boss. You don’t post about the great sex you had the night before, because you’re Facebook Friends with your Mom.
What people seem to be missing is that this personal-data-that-you-gave-up-willingly is not floating out there randomly. When you opt to go to a website AND you are a Facebook member, AND that site has implemented the OpenGraph API tools that are now available, YES, that site will know information about you UNLESS you have gone and clicked the box on your profile and prevented it from happening. They will only know information relevant to you, however- a message like you and your friend So-and-so and 160 other people liked this page. Again, it’s not random data spewing around the internet.
Really, is this really such a bad thing? Are you really opposed to CNN knowing what kind of news you’re interested in reading before you get there? Or Pandora knowing your music tastes? Or finding a new site and realizing that a couple of your friends found it before you and thought it was pretty cool too, so you’ll stick around and read it and give it a chance?
I think that’s an added value to being a Facebook member, instead of having to re-enter the exact same information every time I visit a new site. On the whole, I prefer a social web to staying in a cave and banging rocks together by myself. I think people are a-feared of what they don’t fully understand. Facebook is a social networking site, not an isolate ourselves in a cave and be a hermit site. We live in the information age now, for better or for worse. It may take some getting used to, but try and embrace the good bits. This is actually one of them, really.
Hacking John McCain
Mike Davidson of Newsvine found that John McCain’s MySpace page was using his code and hosted images without permission, so he made a delicate point about it. Link
Blogs and the Post-Cluetrain Reality
Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid gives a talk to Edelman about the state of blogging these days. Spot on. Link
Free Blogging Resources
Now you can be a “Blogger” too! Link.