Privacy, blogs and the web : part 2

Orangerful and Don's comments and posts to my last privacy rant got me thinking(I know it being in the morning and me thinking doesn't seem right, does it?). Anyway, Orangerful also had a comment about my reading/ listening post:
"I know you probably shouldn't judge people by what they read or listen to but...oh we all do it! It adds a bit more personality and gives a few more hints about what the person might be like."

So if we get hints and judge people about their choices, what does that do to privacy? Don suggested we should adopt web persona's. So if I am conducting a persona, should I post my reading logs? Web 2.0 participants are posting links to their library thing pages, do I judge them by their links, their choices? Are these choices, my reading lists real or made up? I guess I will be careful as to my postings from now on, too much personal information leads to invasions of privacy.

But, a blog just about my Web 2.0 explorations would probably just be stale and dull. If you explore around some of my comments, esp to Gnaritis Vox's blog, you probably learn more about me than is useful and wise. We have all heard about people with problems when employers access their blogs, my space, you tube, etc sites. We know that library employees are looking at these blogs (which is one of the points of the Web 2.0 assignment), so am I being "judged" by them because of my postings, choices?

I guess I will be more circumspect about what I post and take down the "personal" posts and just go back to the asignments. Safer, probably; duller, for sure.

A Semi-rant

A good way to waste time

Sigh, My lovely and talented wife just sent me the link to the newest "Simon's Cat" video. If you are owned by a cat (dogs have owners, cats have staff) or know someone who is, Iencourage you to waste some time, esp. if need a giggle, with these.

http://www.youtube.com/user/simonscat

Simon's cat reminds my of our male, Blackie, who knows when it is time for us to get up so we can fullfill our duty and feed him.

Privacy and Community

Del.icio.us sounds great, you are able to save and retrieve bookmarks from any computer, anywhere. Like other social network programs however, in delo.icio.us you are part of a larger community and as part of that community you reduce your privacy. When I set up my Picasa page, see last post, I thought about the negatives about putting pictures of myself and friends out on the web, such as since they are "public" posts you have no copyright or expectation of privacy about their use. Anyone can view them, download them, use them without your permission, However, I wanted the pictures available to the others on the trip to use (as I have added pictures to mine from their postings).
We, on this Web2.0 exploration, are to "Make sure you pick an appropriate user name. I would recommend avoiding using your full name as your user name" so to be "private". Yet, we all have an idea who we are, where we work. Do we realize that others in the blogosphere can access our blogs, photos, del.icio.us sites? We want to be part of a community, but how large a community? How much of our privacy do we want to give away?

Some semi-rants

Picasa

Yes, I made the plunge, I created an album on Picasa, google's pictue software. I have not downloaded the software, need to consult the IT cat. I used Picasa since I already had a google account because of the blog, one less sign-in to forget. I do not know the tech diferences between it and fickr, just slothfullness on my part.
I decicide to do it to share the pictures of my bike trip with my compatriots and others. Matt, one of the bikers, already posted 2 albums of his pictures. http://picasaweb.google.com/matthedt/2RLXBikeTour2008

We will see how far this goes.

twits and widgets

there is an older Brit word for an stupid person: a "twit". That word was running through my mind when reading about twitter. Oh Boy IM! (preparing to get too snarky here, settle down) Can we go too far in this wired world? Is everything going on today going to require, a computer, a server connection, a blog, etc etc etc. I still remember getting my first cell phone 6 years ago when both my folks went into the hospital and I was dealing with it at a distance. That was the start of a slippery slope. Yes cell-phones are semi-needed, but we, as librarians are now cell phone police.
maybe I will us a widget to link to some stuff to my blog, maybe not.

On another note, I remember reading on one of the Web 2.0 blogs about haggis hunting, but now can not find the blog(I did comment on the post). Any help ?

Wikis/online software

In a diferent universe, when I taught History, I was careful to make sure that I expressly denouced the use of Wikipedia as a source for research papers. Even after taking classes to the college library for instruction in using its data bases, students, being the normal lazy humans as the rest of us, would try to use Wikipedia as a primary and/or secondary source for the papers. They were horrified when I marked their papers down for it.

Wikipedia and other wikis are as good as the community that supports them. When you trust the community(our new tech wiki) you can trust the Wiki. Since the community for wikipedia is so large, I only use it to provide common social knowledge and then with careful fact checking. Wikis, like many accesible online sources, can and do descend to the lowest common element.

Online software maybe the coming thing in computers, but right now they are reinventing the wheel. "Just like word, excel, etc" they trumpet. These might be good for patrons using public computers, but we supply word and one branch has excel/power point in the lab Color me skeptical.

You Tubbin, Face Book

You tube and Face book both seem like "good" ways to waste time. There is a lot of dreck on them, but good bits also. I put a link on my last blog to the Port Tobacco site and the other you tube video that caught my interest was the video of a Rev War British ship just found in the Great Lakes. Other than that, blah! Both, esp You tube, use masive amounts of band-with, and are full of people wanting their "15" inute os fame.

During grad school a friend proposed a difference between "good" procrastination and "Bad" when needing to work on your dissertation. Good: cleaning the bathroom; Bad: watching soaps.

Most of youtube and facebook are beyond bad

rss feeds, library thing, et al

It seems to me that rss feed are like the digests I get from some of my verbose e-mail list (esp RevWar and 4MA). It would take me hours to get through the individual posts from the lists, with digests I can easily pick and choose. Both however, require me to keep myself wired. When I go on vacation in a couple of weeks (bicycling from Pittsburgh to DC) I plan to be wired free! no checking email, no web surfing.

Library thing is interesting. I decide to use the new Gale data base: books and authors instead. More on this later after I have transfered my book lists from the paper form to the electronic form.

A green idea now going about is transfering mailed items into e-mails. I now get bike club newsletters, The poisened press book news, et al via the web rather than hard copies. I guess this works as long as I have web access.

Every now and then my wife and I talk about building on the 17+ acres we own near a small town in the high country of New Mexico. One of the attractions for me is the difficulty of being wired, now only dial up or sattelite hook-up.

Ah well, if your interested in local archeology, check out the Port Tobacco project blog:http://aacplexploration.blogspot.com/. Just recovering from the poisin ivy gained from being one of the "inmates" at the jail dig