Internet

A book on time management in talking about long-term goal planning suggests we define the legacy we wish to leave. Coming from academia, I typically think of a legacy as a name on a building, an applicant with an alum for a parent, or a scholarship. However, the artifacts left behind by previous cultures are also a legacy.

Our digital footprints both could be part of this legacy or easily lost. I lean toward all this data we spew about the Internet will be lost eventually. I have seen floppy disks and hard drives die, taking with them the only copy of critical data. I have seen companies report their hard drives stolen from their machines in co-location as why customers lost their data. I have seen companies close web sites because they ran out of money. Let’s not forget natural disasters like earthquakes and floods.

So we keep backups.

Who will preserve these backups once we are gone? Are you able to read the data from computers 40 years ago? Maybe we’ll be better about being able to read the data from past when we reach 40 years into the future?

Not likely.

A few weeks ago, NPR aired a piece where McCain and Obama advisors about technology expressed the policy intentions of each candidate. Also, Obama was described as being a Crackberry addict. McCain was described as personally being technology illiterate, but he looked forward to someone showing him some web sites.

So now, Google purports to allow you to “track the news sites and blogs Barack Obama and John McCain read”. If McCain doesn’t use the Internet (including the World Wide Web), then how is he reading these news sites and blogs? Someone prints them out for him?

The email was an innocuous “Ooh, shiney!” message. RSS feeds are now available for a status site. However, one thing concerned me….

RSS is a relatively new and easy way to distribute content and information via the Internet.

I personally have been aware of RSS since 2002. However, as I am a relatively late adopter of technology, I was not surprised to learn RSS has been around since July 1999. This technology has been available for nine years. 1999 is the same year IE5 became available. That is a few months before Windows 2000 became available. This is before the technology bust which weeded out much of the Internet craps. (Are we due for another one of those?) Next year we can celebrate the 10th anniversary of RSS. Can we really call it new when we celebrate it being around for a decade?

The point of “relatively” was to soften the word new. I was supposed to be mollified by it isn’t really new but it isn’t really old and is closer to new than old. It just sounded to me like whoever wrote it only heard about RSS within the past two years or so. So maybe the message was more “Ooh, shiney!” for them than for me.

Image via Wikipedia

I remember as a kid, my parents restricting television and video game use because they would both make me stupid and violent. They worked too hard, so I had plenty unsupervised time to violate the rules. Plus no force would make me do homework.

The past half decade has seen a resurgence of blame on making kids dumber: the Internet. If I were a kid today, then certainly my parents would be trying to limit my time on it. Comics and radio were also accused of making kids dumb during my parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

What I don’t understand is… If we are becoming so dumb from the current media sources, then how is it possible we can invent new technology to make us even dumber? Perhaps Mark Bauerlein and Lee Drutman should read Everything Bad Is Good For You? (a review) Mike Wesch has an engaging video regarding how kids use these technologies called A Vision of Students Today.

These “dumb” kids know something as despite their involvement with media as they still significantly outperform their parents on IQ tests to the degree the grandparents would qualify for the “special class” taking the same tests. These gains are centered in our ability to create better expansive and interconnecting cognitive maps. I suggest What is Intelligence?: Beyond the Flynn Effect for more about this.

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Would you believe United States employees cost their employers $650 billion in productivity costs in the seconds it takes for them to return attention back to the task at hand? The time spans lost are the same amount of time required to interpret a CAPTCHA. E-mail, instant messaging, Twitter, etc. are all distractions from getting the work done. Those who choose to disconnect or limit the distractions improve their productivity. At least that is what the technology corporations studying the problem have decided. I have my doubts. This sounds like a restating of “all employees with access to the Internet just surf all day and get nothing done.”

What I like about instant messengers is they are more efficient than email but cheaper than a long distance phone call. By marking availability status, employees alert others not to contact them. Employees also may ignore messages until they have are done concentrating on the task at hand. Another article, also from the New York Times, supports this view employees using instant messengers effectively are not distracting.

Looking at an alert just to decide whether to respond would “waste time.” Then again, so would talking about a cool movie, the family, or any of the standard means of bonding which establish trust between individuals (without which far more time would be wasted in mistrust).

Guess there will be more research to debate what is really the problem.

Yeah, I keep writing about identity management. [1][2].

Few Internet users say they Google themselves regularly - about three-quarters of self-searchers say they have done so only once or twice. Study: Googling Oneself Is More Popular

People admit to having looked themselves up once or twice, but few people regularly monitor themselves. I guess its not like one’s credit report?

Of course, calling it a vanity search would keep people from looking themselves up online. Few want to be considered vain, right?

I’ve terminated the daily posting of links from my Del.icio.us account. If you liked those links, then I suggest updating your RSS to the Feedburner RSS feed for Rants (this site). Feel free to comment, email, or IM should you need a recommendation for a reading RSS.

I’m so vain…. I probably think this post is about me….

Probably only people who do vanity searches notice this, but there are spiders pulling names off web sites. They link the names to companies, blogs, and other web content. Supposedly, these sites allow online reputation control. Rather than you claiming your identity as others in this market, they list you in their database with the hopes you claim it.

See, you probably have accounts on several web sites. The idea is to both aggregate the accounts and prove ownership. If your name is John Smith, then you probably are getting confused with other John Smiths. You’ll provide where you work, contact info, which sites belong to you. The site will provide a feed showing your activity in each of these.

My name is pretty unique. If you saw my full name on a site, then would you doubt that its me. Okay, let’s forget the guy who masqueraded with my name a few years ago. Lots of people say I have the best names. He took it too far. By contrast, there are others with my first name who pop up higher in Google. So, you’d need the whole thing. I notice people arrive at this site by putting that name in search engines, so I am pretty sure it works. Naturally, all the sites where I wish to stay under the radar don’t have my name on them.

See… I knew I’d make this post about me.

Am I the only one who remembers fascination with the Deep Web (aka Invisible Web)? The idea of these online reputation services, I think, is to bring positive content up in rankings up to the more shallow areas. Trick is, the users need to be aware of what is and is not positive. Linking your name to your Facebook (used to be Deep Web but less and less of late) profile and giving the world access to pictures of you passed out drunk probably isn’t positive online reputation control.