I’m sorry I haven’t updated my blog lately. I am in the midst of a major family emergency and have not had time to do anything else.
I will start posting again when I can. Until then, I hope you have a happy and peaceful holiday season.
~Susan Mellott
Facebook backtracks on its latest privacy invasion tactic. After more than 50,000 Facebook users signed a petition blasting Facebook’s latest changes, Facebook has changed its new advertising and marketing strategy using Beacon to gather and distribute information about purchases Facebook users were making through over 40 popular online shopping sites. Facebook said it provided 2 opportunities to opt out of having your information shared, but many people did not notice the opt-out window before it disappeared and it defaulted to sharing your data.
With the many popups that come up when on the web and knowing that it is not a good idea to click on a popup that you do not recognize, I’m sure many people ignored the popup and had no idea that Facebook was gathering information about their purchases and sharing it with their Facebook friends.
This caused some Facebook users to find out what they were getting as gifts for the holidays and others to have items such as their movie purchases distributed to all their friends without their knowledge. I’m sure that there are people on Facebook who would prefer that the movies they buy are not shared with everyone who knows them on Facebook!
Facebook users rose up in protest and Facebook announced that it would change its policy to one of ‘opt-in’ instead of ‘opt-out’. In other words, you would have to specifically agree to share your purchase information as opposed to specifically saying you do not want it shared.
Here is some information from MSNBC in a post called “Facebook does an About-Face on Privacy Policy” on the purchase gathering and distributing that Facebook implemented about 3 weeks ago:
40 commerce Web sites using Beacon
More than 40 different Web sites, including Fandango.com, Overstock.com and Blockbuster.com, had embedded Beacon in their pages to track transactions made by Facebook users.
Unless instructed otherwise, the participating sites alerted Facebook, which then notified a user’s friends within the social network about items that had been bought or products that had been reviewed.
Facebook thought the marketing feeds would help its users keep their friends better informed about their interests while also serving as “trusted referrals” that would help drive more sales to the sites using the Beacon system.
But thousands of Facebook users viewed the Beacon referrals as a betrayal of trust. Critics blasted the advertising tool as an unwelcome nuisance with flimsy privacy protections that had already exasperated and embarrassed some users.
Some users have already complained about inadvertently finding out about gifts bought for them for Christmas and Hanukkah after Beacon shared information from Overstock.com. Other users say they were unnerved when they discovered their friends had found out what movies they were watching through purchases made on Fandango.
And an apology was offered:
“We’re sorry if we spoiled some of your holiday gift-giving plans,” Facebook’s Paul Janzer wrote in a posting addressed to Beacon’s critics. “We are really trying to provide you with new meaningful ways, like Beacon, to help you connect and share information with your friends.” Janzer also acknowledged Beacon “can be kind of confusing.”
I think that “kind of confusing” is Facebook-Speak for “deliberately misleading”.
This is not the first time Facebook has had users rise up over privacy changes. Last year, Facebook rolled out a “news feeds” tool that tracked changes to users’ profiles. After thousands of users rebelled, Zuckerberg issued a contrite apology and added a way to turn off the news feeds.
I saw that on my (and other friends) Facebook and thought that it was a bit iffy. And actually, I still have it on mine and so does most of the people I know. Even though Facebook offered a way to turn it off, that doesn’t mean that they made it easy or clear. I really didn’t even know it could be turned off until I read the article from MSNBC and I still don’t know how.
And there was the whole debacle about Facebook making people’s profiles available to search engines. I went through the process to do what they said so my profile was not shared, but it was extremely complicated and I really don’t know exactly what I ended up with.
I am so totally against the whole ‘opt-out’ style that Facebook is going with, especially since it is doing some really devious things without people’s knowledge. Yes, there are changes all the time to various social networking sites in order to improve their services. But I really don’t see how Facebook can stand there and say that these fall under that category. Either they don’t care, or they think their users are too stupid to know what they are doing, or both.
These are things I don’t think Facebook should be doing in the first place. But at the least, they should be something that Facebook users can choose to implement only if they want to, and can easily turn it off if they decide against it. Still, I think it is shady to even have it as a part of Facebook.
Facebook has come a long way from when it started and it was a safe and secure site for students to congregate. And while it is nice that it has opened up some, I really don’t see it as being much different from MySpace anymore and in some cases, even less reliable as far as privacy and respect for its users are concerned.
While almost all of the Web 2.0 social networking sites have been pretty decent and relatively trustworthy in my opinion, I am having serious doubts about Facebook. And I think Facebook users should too. It is not what it once was and I’m not sure that Facebook users realize that.
UPDATE: Here is a link to another interesting article called “Takesies Backsies: Facebook Flouts User Privacy… Again“.
~Susan Mellott
First of all, I’d like to give a huge shout-out the Grabill Library Branch of the ACPL who were featured in a talk that Jessamyn West gave on 11/8/07 called What Works: More My Library, Less MySpace. If you look on slide #32, you will see a screen capture of their Grabill Branch Library blog, that shows how they successfully use the Twitter stream to promote their branch. Way to go!
Also, thanks to David Lee King for writing about The Big Juicy Twitter Guide by Caroline Middlebrook. This is a great online guide about everything Twitter, with an emphasis on how it can be used to market your product or services. Which is exactly how Grabill Branch of the ACPL is using it! Here is a brief overview: “I have tried to present a complete picture of Twitter and show techniques / tools / guidelines for Twitter usage for all kinds of people”.
And last, but not least, here is an email newsletter that I received from Biz Stone and the Twitter Team that I thought I would share since it has lots of great Twitter info.
Hello Twitter-ers,
There have been raging wildfires and rumbling earthquakes
inspiring avalanches of Twitter updates over the last few weeks
out here on the West Coast of the US. In Tumultuous times, people
turn to Twitter. In fact, there’s been a steep increase in the
number of SMS and IM devices activated recently. This is probably
due to the Track feature which allows folks to follow keywords or
phrases in real time. Is your phone activated?
Activate: http://twitter.com/devices
Do You Owe Someone A Beer?
Foamee.com is a fun IOU system built on Twitter that helps you
track who you owe beers to (and vice versa). All you have to do is
follow the account “ioubeer” and then send it @replies. So, say
you owe me a beer for helping you change a flat tire, this is what
you’d send to Twitter:
@ioubeer @biz for helping me change that flat tire
Then, your IOU will show up on the front page at foamee.com.
There’s even a way to tell it when that beer has been redeemed.
I think a root beer version is in the works. Maybe even a latte
version? Those are foamy too. Dan Cederholm of SimpleBits design
is the mastermind behind this fanciful creation. We think it’s
really cool. Thanks Dan, we owe you a frosty one!
Visit: http://foamee.com
Follow: http://twitter.com/ioubeer
More: http://simplebits.com
Other Cool Stuff
Foamee is part of a growing list of interesting applications that
interact with Twitter. Jott, for example, has created a way to
send a Twitter update by speaking into your phone–your voice gets
converted to text and sent out to all your followers. This is a
much safer solution for people who insist on updating Twitter when
their attention is required elsewhere–like driving!
Twitter by Voice: http://jott.com
More Twitter Apps: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps
Featured Twitter-ers
We have a sidebar on the Twitter public timeline page where we
occasionally mention accounts you might want to follow. For
example, during the San Diego wildfires, KPBS News, LAFD, and the
LA Times had important live updates. The following accounts are
less of an emergency situation but interesting, nevertheless.
SkinnyJeans is wondering if Twitter can help her lose 10 pounds.
http://twitter.com/skinnyjeans
Jamie Kennedy is experimenting with Twitter.
http://twitter.com/jamiekennedy
Maureen is serving up a steady stream of tiny recipes.
http://twitter.com/cookbook
Sara Bareilles is sharing the details of her budding career.
http://twitter.com/SaraBareilles
On the subject of emergencies, that earthquake we had recently in
Northern California was highly Twittered. This blogger captured a
lot of the action: http://tinyurl.com/2xv5el Also, if you’re a
Bay Area resident you might want to follow the updates of this
profile http://twitter.com/SFSurfrider regarding the recent oil
spill in San Francisco Bay.
Twitter on the Mobile Web
In case you didn’t know, Twitter has a mobile web site that you
can access from your phone’s web browser at m.twitter.com. Twitter
developer Britt Selvitelle has been quietly improving the site
recently. It’s a great way to check out what people are up to when
you’re waiting for a bus or taking the subway home from work.
Britt’s Twitter profile is http://twitter.com/bs in case you want
to @ioubeer @bs for making the mobile site!
Happy Twittering!
-Biz Stone and the Twitter Team
http://twitter.com/biz
~Susan Mellott
NOTE: it is back up now. It was just down last night for a while.
I received an email from my cousin Jason who was trying to view my blog and was having trouble getting in. So I went to my blog and I too was having problems getting my blog to load, although I could get the admin screens just fine.
So obviously it was a problem with one of my plugins. I deactivated the Google Analyticator plugin first (since I’ve had some small problems with Google Analytics in the past) but that didn’t solve the problem.
Then I deactivated the Odiogo plugin and my blog loaded just fine.
I went to the Odiogo Blog and the Odiogo Website and neither one would load. Clearly they are having some sort of problems.
But in the meantime, if you are having this problem and you have a self-hosted Wordpress blog, you just go to your Plugins tab and deactivate the Odiogo plugin.
When the problem is fixed (which we should be able to tell by going to the Odiogo blog), then we can reactivate the Odiogo plugin.
~Susan Mellott
I grew up without the internet. Heck, I grew up without computers. We were never even taught about computers in high school and I was just lucky that I took a temp job entering data into a database for a huge new system that a local company was in the process of creating which expanded into reviewing the parent-child design charts and then into being accepted into their programmer trainee program which truly changed/saved my life.
And I was a mainframe programmer for several years before DOS was created, which was a major first step for having a usable PC for business. When I first started programming PCs, we wrote each program to run on the PC, the TRS-80 and the Apple. And each program could only be 32k in size so we did a lot of calling a program that called another program, etc. We actually cared about every bit (literally) of memory we used. We finally had to require any agent who wanted to use our programs to have at least 256k memory. That’s k, not meg. And that was really expecting them to have a high-end system for the time.
So obviously we didn’t have internet access to speak of. We did have modems, big 300 baud cradles that you set the whole handset of the phone (back when they had 2 pieces) into this large rubber cradle. And we actually managed to communicate with each other via very slow text based interaction and ftp. I had online friends and belonged to forums and passed data back and forth even back then, but it was not an integral part of my life. Just getting a driver update or finding and getting a copy of a driver that I needed was quite a chore.
Now, I can’t imagine life without the internet. I spend probably 25% of my time online (maybe even more), doing business or looking something up or writing in my blog or shopping or surfing or playing or skyping or twittering or emailing or any number of other things.
Just this weekend on the internet I have:
I shop online at Woot! and Steep and Cheap and Whiskey Militia. I shop at Overstock and Ebay and Amazon.
I use search engines constantly to find information, how-to questions, self-help, medical, research and more.
I use it for communications, using email, chat, IM, twitter, yahoo groups, email lists, Skype (online phone) and more.
We’ve visited online friends all over the world including Pauline in Amsterdam, Andy in Germany, Meng and Cindy in Singapore and Peter in Japan, where I got to do my very first Iaido training at a little dojo in a little town outside Osaka with a 7th dan and and an 8th dan.
Once upon a time, we shopped at our local stores and if they didn’t have what we wanted, we got what they had. And unless it was very common, you didn’t check for the best prices, you just looked for something like what you wanted. We used reference books, the Physician’s Desk Reference, encyclopedias and reference librarians to get information. We communicated via phone and letters. When was the last time you wrote a letter? I can say that for myself, I really can’t remember.
I didn’t miss it when I didn’t have it, but now, I can’t imagine living in such a small space again. The world is a bigger place now and there is no going back.
~Susan Mellott
Thanks to Google, Yahoo and other Search Engines, I can find information on almost any topic I can think of. This has made a huge impact on just about everything I do.
I remember having a set of World Book encyclopedias when I was growing up and they were the be-all and end-all in just about everything I needed to research for school, for anything I was curious about and for anything my parents and I wanted or needed to know more about. Most good parents who could afford to all had a set of encyclopedias in their house. And they had at least a little bit about just about any topic you could think of, from Shakespeare’s plays, to how to do basic household repairs, to geography, history, politics, you name it. We also had World Books’ Childcraft, the how and why 15 volume encyclopedia which featured a classic blend of photos, illustrations, fiction, and nonfiction to capture and keep the interest of a young student.
I used to sit down and just read through each Childcraft book, they were so interesting. I did the same with the World Books but more flipping through and reading about things that caught my eye.
But although we didn’t realize it at the time, we were getting a very limited view of each subject. Sure, we learned the important basic data, but we only got one viewpoint and one interpretation, and it was the most generic view possible. Which in light of the fact that it was the only view we got, was a good thing, but still we ended up with the most generic, undisputed (at least at the time), mainstream view of everything.
And you would think this would have insured that at least what we learned was reliable. And to a large extent this is true, especially for the specific, concrete things like the birds of North America or the names and characteristics of dinosaurs. But how can you teach or explain or even say that someone “knows” about Picasso or the history of American Indians or even the culture of a country using just one reference that tries to be as non-confrontational as possible.
And even if you looked at more than one reference book or other “trusted” reference on a subject, you still most likely got a one-sided viewpoint, that of whatever was the most likely to be non-confrontational and non-controversial. And whatever was written by people in academia was highly regarded, even though much of it was recycled from what some other academic wrote, without any first hand knowledge of the subject. In other words, just like bloggers frequently do, they read a lot about something and then put it all together in “their own” paper or thesis or other scholarly work. But much of the time, their knowledge was assumed. They didn’t know from their own experiences, they knew because they had read or studied it from someone who had done the same thing, on and on. Who knows how far back you might have to go to actually get to someone who had actually experienced it rather than just “researched” it.
Now we have the opposite problem. We have at our fingertips vast amounts of information on just about any subject you can possibly imagine. Want to know reasons for taking a martial art? I got 2 million plus hits just in Yahoo. How about the Detroit Riots of 1967. Almost 300,000 hits. Information about being left-handed? Over 12 million hits, including stores that sell gadgets for left-handed people, reasons why people are left-handed and famous left-handers. And this was all one page 1 of my search.
But what of this vast bank of information is valid and what is something that sounds reasonable but has no basis in fact? I personally feel that a lot more of what I find doing searches on the internet is really pretty reasonably sound than a lot of people seem to think. I constantly hear about how untrustworthy the information is on the web and how you can’t trust it. And yet, most of what I find (granted, I avoid the sites with titles such as ‘Elvis’ Guide to Culture’ or ‘A Klingon’s Guide to Battle’) is reasonable (although from differing viewpoints) and is well thought out. And with some cross-referencing, most things can be reasonably well verified.
And people talk about how search engines, being entities that in the business of making money, skew the results towards sites that advertise with them or that have put a lot of thought into marketing themselves so they show up early in searches. And that of course has some bearing in fact. However, it also means that sites with more reliability frequently get presented first. On an aside, I’m surprised at how often a Wikipedia entry shows up for a topic on the first page of a search. This is a relatively recent development, I remember not too long ago when you almost never saw Wikipedia. I don’t know if it is because Wikipedia is increasing its entries or is doing better at search engine optimization or becoming more trusted or what, but I have definitely noticed it.
I just read in the paper about a new Wikipedia tool demo by the UCSC Wiki Lab that examines an entry’s contents to determine how reliable each piece is, mostly by examining the reputations of each contributor responsible for each line. It determines the degree in which each contributor’s work survives consequent edits by other people. This is an interesting way of looking at it and I can see how that sounds reasonable. However, many accurate contributions get overwritten, not because their contribution was inaccurate but just to expand what was written or in the case of controversial entries, to rewrite it to their own viewpoint.
It background color codes sections of entries in Wikipedia in various shades of orange to indicate that the section may not be reliable (the darker orange, the less reliable). Sections in white are deemed reliable. Here is the Wikimania 2007 talk on this.
Here is a link to a paper entitled “A Context-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia” that explains more about the algorithms used.
This is an interesting idea and many Web 2.0 sites are using some sort of method that helps determine the reliability of what they contain, such as the number of links to a post or blog (assuming that if it is linked to, it contains something that other people deemed valuable).
However, I was not very impressed with the Wikipedia Reliability demo. It uses a subset of a copy of Wikipedia from Feb 2007 (which is fine). But as I randomly went through the artlicles, I didn’t really find any that made much sense to me as to why they trusted or didn’t trust any given information. Whatever their algorithms may be, it doesn’t look to me like they work very well.
So what is the answer? Should we do as the doomsayers say and avoid anything we find on the web? Is the web the new encyclopedia? Or should we reach a happy medium, discarding the obviously doubtful, looking at several sources to get a general consensus, putting some thought into forming an opinion and when we make some decisions, trusting but verifying?
In other words, should we treat what we find on the web any different than anything we see on the news, read in the paper, watch on TV, read in a book or any other way that we get information.
I don’t think so and I think most of us are aware enough to practice this regularly anyway. Maybe it is a matter of some people learning that approaching information on the web is not so different from how we approach any other sources of information. And ultimately, it can give a much broader and thorough view of something than just reading about it in an encyclopedia.
~Susan Mellott
Flickr, the online photo gallery is THE web 2.0 tool for putting your photos online. Many people use it and it seems that most pictures you find online are stored on Flickr. There are a few other online galleries such as Shutterfly and kodakgallery (that I used because I have a digital Kodak camera that interfaces with the Kodak Gallery).
And since I’ve used Kodak Gallery mostly, I have just recently started uploading some pictures to Flickr. And I just ran into a limitation of Flickr. Did you know that after you’ve uploaded more than 200 pictures, only the latest 200 pictures will show unless you upgrade to a paid Flickr account? All the pictures will be available if you upload (they don’t go away if you upload more than 200) but you can’t see them until you upgrade. It is cheap, $25/year, but 200 pictures are not many pictures so if you use Flickr much at all, you’ll need to pay for it. And clearly, most of the accounts I look at on Flickr has upgraded since they have more than 200 pictures.
I’m sure I will upgrade, but I just didn’t know that except for just trying it out, I am going to HAVE to upgrade in order to use it.
I have many, many pictures on Kodak Gallery that I want to transfer over (and that is another problem since they don’t make it easy in Kodak Gallery to bulk transfer pictures). But actually, Kodak Gallery also requires that you “pay” for it. It doesn’t have a set charge, but requires that you purchase something from them once a year. Last year we made calendars for our family for Christmas using our pictures and that took care of that requirement. Kodak Gallery is great for that, you can easily create calendars, photo mugs, note cards and all sorts of items from your pictures.
But Flickr is rapidly becoming the standard in online photo galleries and is the tool that most of the cool mashups use for their picture displays. There are all kinds of mashups that other people have created using Flickr and Sean has been experimenting with Flickr hacks from a cool book he got on how to create them. I highly recommend this book if you are interested in exploring this.
Here is a post about mashups using Flickr by Coverpop. It is one of the most amazing Flickr mashups I’ve seen. You have to check these out!
And while you are at it, check out the nice Flickr plugin for Wordpress.org blogs. You can see it in my right sidebar on this blog.
Well, I guess I got off on a tangent 
but the bottom line is, be aware that if you are interested in using Flickr, you will want to pay the $25 a year in order to really use it.
~Susan Mellott
Well I’m sure you all are getting as sick of the repeated speculations as to what really happened with Skype. So am I.
In many ways, it is unfortunate that so much has been written about the Skype outage, to the point that now that people are looking at it from a broader perspective, such as why did their communication fail, or how companies need to review their backup plans for situations such as these, either no one wants to read about it or it gets buried in the overwhelming amount of Skype related posts.
But the bigger picture is not about what happened to Skype as much as it is about how Skype tried outdated, 1.0 communcation techniques that failed miserably in the current 2.0 environment. Even in their ‘clarification’ post today on the situation, seems to sort of recognize they have a communications problem, but clearly doesn’t recognize why.
And forget this is about Skype. Think of it as about any company, in a situation that affects their users and how they communicate and handle the situation.
I wish I had written this post, but it says everything I would want to and so rather than repeat it, just go read P.R. 2.0’s post called “Crisis Communication 2.0 - The Skype is Falling“. Or if you prefer, here is the post on a white background (I don’t care as much for black background with white lettering if I’m trying to read something).
And I hope this doesn’t get buried in the continuing rehash of the Skype problem
~Susan Mellott
Thank you to Anonymous for writing me about this very interesting post: Dimensions of a Potentially Postponed GOP CNN/YouTube Debate .
This post was written by Alex Hammer so I looked up Alex Hammer’s bio and found: “Alex Hammer was a 2006 Independent candidate for Governor of Maine. He is the owner of Media 2.0, including Politics 2.0 (www.hammer2006.blogspot.com). Politics 2.0 focuses on “What’s now and what’s next” in Presidential politics and politics generally. Alex is a columnist for The Magic City Morning Star (www.magic-city-news.com) and a regular guest columnist for The Moderate Voice (www.themoderatevoice.com). Previously, for a decade, Alex was owner of HSC Media, a five-division NYC area based online media company.”
His blog on Politics 2.0 has the most amazing blogroll list of politician’s online sites like their myspace, twitter, facebook, etc. Take a look at his blog for who all is doing what Web 2.0 applications.
Here is just a sampling of links from his list (there are many. many more):
Joe Biden Blog
Joe Biden MySpace Site
Joe Biden Senate Website
Joe Biden Twitter
Joe Biden Website
Joe Biden Wikipedia
Joe Biden YouTube Videos
John Edwards MySpace Site
John Edwards Twitter
John Edwards Website
John Edwards Wikipedia Bio
John Edwards YouTube Videos
John McCain MySpace Site
~Susan Mellott
Somewhere along the way, a whole new (dare I say) paradigm appeared, with all the supporting jargon, acronyms, tools, languages and uses and I was busy programming business apps and missed it.
Then I started paying attention to what my husband was doing as head of the Information Technology Services Department of the ACPL (Allen County Public Library) and it blew me away. All the things I used to do that were just considered playing or obscure or geeky or “kid’s stuff”, suddenly have a real and practical (and accepted) use. And it is not just acceptable, it is valuable.
So here I am, hoping to try it all. All things Web 2.0.
