FOR OUR TRUST IS NO LONGER IN THEE

After my woefully inadequate last post, it seems only right that I address the issue of trust. We were discussing with Mr Rokison why we trust certain things and why we don't trust other sources. Seems an interesting topic, so that's what I'm going to talk about today. I suppose that there are a few of sources that I would trust pretty much unquestioningly: my immediate family (apart from cunning little sisters and suchlike), doctors, the Bible. The last one is too personal to really be widely applicable and the second is probably the weakest of the three, so that leaves my parents. Why do I trust my parents? Why do I trust anyone?




I think trust is either inbuilt or developed. We have an inbuilt trust in parents because they brought us into the world and we entrust our lives to them, so it seems a bit illogical not to trust them. We develop trust in them when we are very young because they are the people satisfying our needs with food and water. Similarly we trust doctors with our lives when we are seriously ill because they have our lives in their hands, and we trust them to stop us from dying because that's what they're paid to do. Again, pretty logical.




However, when we start talking about who we trust where media and the internet are concerned, things get a little more complicated. Seeing as the general public are increasingly becoming the journalists of the 21st century world, we no longer know who we can trust. I have always trusted The Times newspaper, simply because for me they have always been symbols of integrity - I have grown up with The Times, and I have come to take its word as quite trustworthy. However, now I can see that perhaps it's not so simple to trust this blindly. We encountered a bit about reliability in the Wikipedia entries, so inevitably some of the stuff will overlap. Here goes - why I trust what I trust.

1. The writer. If the writer is a credible, reputable person who has already written good articles, then of course I will be more inclined to believe what he or she has to say. I suppose this, combined with social conformity and expectation, is why I trust The Times more than some of the things on the web. We have so much to learn about the web because it is so new, but The Times is an old, well-respected institution.
   


2. Reputation and previous content. Most people would take what something like The Mail or The Sun have to say with a pinch of salt because the tabloids are generally regarded as fear-mongering papers that perhaps don't always tell us the most truthful stories. Hence if I find a blog that has a good reputation, like the Huffington Post or something like that, I am more likely to buy into what it has to say. That's why lots of people don't trust Wikipedia, even though it has proved itself reliable more often than not - it has a bad reputation.


3. Medium. This is a slightly odd one, but thinking over this I found that I was more likely to trust papers than television, and more likely to trust television than the internet. Why? The only reason I can think of is that with a paper, there is something tangible there, something you can read and hold. It somehow seems more real. The TV news also sort of comes into this category because you can see what's happening and you are generally being told (on terrestrial channels particularly) the news by a well-respected institution. We seem as a society to have developed a sort of intrinsic trust in our favourite news anchors and writers, which links into the thing about who writes it.

The problem is that we no longer know who we can trust simply because we are the journalists. If you wrote an article online tomorrow, I wouldn't know who you were, I wouldn't know your reputation and I probably wouldn't like the fact that it was a web article and not in print. However, the criteria I mentioned above simply don't stand up any more. Things like Roo Reynolds' blog, which did an article on the G20 protests, is able to tell us so much more simply because he was there (scroll about half way down to find the article). He came, he saw, he blogged. Because technology is allowing us to do this, we have to think of other critical methods, but often the ideas overlap with the traditional things I mentioned earlier. Reputation - that's why I trust Roo Reynolds. Situation - was the person an eyewitness? Did he/she talk to the people concerned? Officiality - does it come from a news site or a blog? Actually, even the last one may not be the best criterion, simply because blogs and tweets sometimes get the news up faster and more accurately.

In short, we have to re-evaluate the reliability of the internet as a news provider and a source in general because of the way it works. Anyone can post from just about anywhere - does that mean that traditional forms of the media are on the way out? There is already talk of newspapers starting to fail as many turn to the internet to catch up with the daily occurrings, and events like the G20 protests were best covered by the people without the fancy microphones and smart suits - us. I find newspapers have a sort of charm in their seemingly old-fashioned, quaint practices, but the internet will, I think, inevitably overtake it, simply because we are seeing the emergence of a world where convenience is everything. Take what you see on the net with the same critical thought you would apply to a tabloid article or indeed any newspaper article, and more often than not you'll find that the facts come to you. Now if you'll excuse me, BBC SPORT beckons.

COPYWRONG

And so we must move on, onwards, upwards, sideways, anywhere but here, for this is copyright country. British copywright reminds me of Othello: a noble concept, but ultimately flawed and quashed by competitors. But enough of this pretentious drivel. I intend to talk a little but about what copyright is, why it is, how it is and what it shouldn't be. Are we all sitting comfortably? Sorry. No more silliness, I promise.

Copyright refers to an individual's rights over created property, like writing a song, a book or a play, or taking a photograph, or making a film. If you do any of these things, it stands to reason that you should have control over the use of this property. Copyright essentially stops people from saying that stuff you make is theirs, and by taking somebody's work without permission and using it, you break copywright and the law. It's a pretty logical idea, but on the web, things like copyright can get blurred - where does your property end and others' begin? Things like mash-ups, remixes and file sharing have all helped to confuse the lot of us by messing about with how copyright works.

To start with, let's take remixing and mash-ups. These are different things; remixing involves taking a motif or theme from a song and building a song around it, often involving new material. However, a mash-up doesn't use any new material, but instead you don't use any new material. See the difference? One of these is a remix and one is a mash-up.






Now the copyright issue here is that of derivative work. Under the copyright law in the UK, derivative work requires permission from the party whose property it is. It's a problem because mash-ups breach copyright, but sometimes remixes are considered far enough from the original to be considered "derivative work" and so it's technically possible to make a remix from a copyrighted song that doesn't actually breach copyright.

However, this isn't what I really want to talk about. What I think is the most interesting part of copyright in the UK is how it works and the illogicalities within. There are some sensible things - movie piracy is bad, so are file sharing sites like Limewire - but also some totally daft ones. For instance, if you have any old TV programmes recorded on VHS, you are likely to be breaking the law, because if you have kept the VHS for more than 30 days, that's considered breaking copyright law. There are other things,like how you're not allowed to put iTunes music on more than 5 devices (this is called DRM). Anyway, the point is that while we often are grateful to copyright, there's a great deal of unnecessary clutter in the law. What should we do about it? Well, the government hasn't been terribly good about enforcing the law and punishing people for flaunting it. We should be concentrating more on things like LimeWire. It seems silly to my mind to worry about whether someone's kept an episode of Antiques Roadshow from 1995 as opposed to cracking LimeWire, which lets people share music files and the like, which utterly breaks the law and robs musicians of royalties. We need to address this imbalance now, because more than half of all downloaded music is downloaded illegally, which will, if it continues, simply stop artists from making music. (I should stress at this point that bands do not make their money from albums, but from gigs, and it is the albums that get people to come to gigs, so really it all works out the same.) Read this article about how Radiohead completely changed music marketing. These just go to show how quaint the copyright laws and conventional pricing laws seem as a result of the blistering pace of advancing technology.

So what am I getting at? I suppose the answer is that copyright seems a little, well, silly in the state it's at at the moment. Most people would willingly break copyright even if they don't know the full extent of the law. We should feel obliged not to break copyright, but we don't. The government need to try and adapt copyright laws to be able to deal with the slipperiness of the digital age. How they do that I have no idea, but watching this already forlorn cabinet face up to this could be fun. Let's watch and laugh, children. Sorry. I know I promised not to be flippant, but it was just too easy...

THE BLOUSE OF COMMONS

Photo of woman wearing blouse from Flickr Commons.

As the heinous pun above suggests, this May week we are going to be looking at Flickr Commons. We've come across Flickr before: searchable photo albums, tagging photos, phenomenally successful Web 2.0 business, yadda yadda yadda. But wait! it gets better: Flickr Commons. It sounds a bit like it might be something to do with governments: it is, after a fashion. Essentially what it is is that Flickr has joined up with several civic institutions to let the people of earth (and possibly other places too, but let's not go into that) see the photos that were previously kept hidden in archives and civic files and comment on them, tag, post, add, emulsify, whatever. The first, and hitherto one of the most important, institutions to take up this offer was the American Library of Congress. There are a number of weird and wonderful things about this. First, this means that government institutions are signing up to the revolution of information. Gone are the scared faces of ancient librarians peeping from behind their office chairs at the big bad computer screens: now the big institutions are sharing what they can offer and contributing to the knowledge of the online community.

The bigger issue is how they are able to do this. Copyright is what governs who can put photos and other material where, when they can do it, and what gives them the authority to do it. The laws governing copyright are convoluted, outdated and in Britain's case absolutely ridiculous. If every person who had kept a video cassette of a TV program for more than thirty days was chased up, it would be bedlam. We think the judicial system here is bad now, but if we stuck resolutely to the letter of the law, we would a) lack a great deal of common sense and b) be getting the wrong end of the stick. Copyright is there to protect creative forces - artists, musicians, writers etcetera. Many of the old photos in the Library of Congress lack identification, date lines or something telling us who took the photo. So the Library of Congress has decided to post many photos with the disclaimer "no known copyright restrictions". The brilliance of this is that they aren't breaking the law by categorically stating the rights of viewers to use and reference the photo, but they provide us with this seemingly innocuous statement. But there's more. We are invited by Flickr Commons to look at the copyright laws governing use of material in general before we use the photos. Not only this, but it's a two-way thing: we are also encouraged to give back by tagging the images or perhaps putting comments up that can shed some light on the historical context of the photos. This is, in my opinion, a masterstroke. The public get to use the photos, but they are doing what we should have been encouraging them to do from the start: they are considering the law of their own accord, and they are even helping to contribute to help us develop a better cultural picture. Now the Smithsonian Institution and the Imperial War Museum have also signed up. So now you see how the cultural research facilities of the world are at last sticking their necks out and saying, "Look, here are some rather special photos. Use them, but don't mess us about. Read up about what you have to do, use them, perhaps credit us, but be sensible." It remains to be seen whether in this frenzy of joy we will spill the figurative red wine of foolishness over this precious opportunity. See below for the videos.

Welcome!

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

You're invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments.

Flickr Commons statement (for link see above)

POST PECHA (KUCHA)

Well that was interesting. As an exercise the Pecha Kucha was very unusual: we don't usually get examined on the structure of a presentation over the content, so that was interesting. I think that as a system of presentation, Pecha Kucha has both good and bad points. It's great for making you condense information and keeping the attention of the audience, but it is quite offputting to be quite so regulated strict about the time keeping. I would have preferred to have a "time gate" in which we had to change slides, which admittedly would have made it less demanding, but I think that the standard of presentation might have been higher.

As for my own personal performance, I thought I did quite well. I agree with Mr Rokison that I perhaps chose a difficult topic to talk about - it isn't easy to explain away a song about the pain of putting a child up for adoption through financial need without a) playing the song and b) talking for longer than 20 seconds. However, I didn't think I did that badly at all: my timings were fine, I conveyed an argument and I knew my stuff (at least, I thought I did). I thought some others were better, though: Lazarus' talk on Alan Bennett, with clarity, passion and knowledge, stands out, and so does Fabian's talk on man-eating snakes, which was rather macabre, but impressive nonetheless. If I were to do another one, I would try to do some things differently. I would try to talk about something that wasn't so hard to talk about. I would also try and be a bit more relaxed, and finally I would try and have a bit more fun with it - I felt like I was doing a piece of work, not a talk about an album I love. Anyhoo, there's nowt can be done now. Have a look and tell me what you think.

BLUE, HERE IS A SONG FOR YOU...

So. I have been instructed to create a "Zen presentation" or Pecha Kucha for ICT, using Wikipedia as one of my main starting points, about anything at all, most likely something that means something to me. But wait - before you start thinking that my ICT teacher is a bored, lazy oaf, he has actually been quite clever by making us do a Pecha Kucha in particular. This means that we have at most 10 slides, each of which advances after exactly 20 seconds. This means that we can a) accurately predict how long each presentation will take and b) stop the presentations from turning into bloated, soporific banality-fests like most of the marketing presentations in existence. It also challenges us, i.e. the pupil, not to ramble and it makes us squeeze as much information as we can so people don't get bored. No fancy animations, no dodgy graphs, just pictures and a few words. A good example of people doing this can be found here at Ignite Where 2.0.

I decided to write about the Joni Mitchell album "Blue", which is widely recognised as a work of brilliance. It is an example of an artist baring her soul and laying it all out there. But I digress. The research is what I am here to write about. I started by going to the Joni Mitchell Wikipedia page, which was not great. I know Joni Mitchell's life story quite well, and it was distressing to see a warning at the top saying that the page had no reliable sources or citations.

However, when I got to the bottom of the page there were plenty of sources. It turned out that the warning had been there since September last year, and since then people had obviously done something about it. I checked the references and sources, and the ones I checked were good. I found the Joni Mitchell Discussion List particularly useful. I then went on to the main page for the album "Blue". This was less reliable - it had less sources, and they were all rather poor. The only really reliable bits were the parts about the various awards and accolades the album won. The other really helpful bit was a link to an interview by Cameron Crowe, which was great for trying to understand the mindset Mitchell wanted for the album. I know that this isn't really ICT, but it is relevant and it is what my presentation will be about.

Finding out the true meanings of the individual songs was a bit harder. Some of the songs from the album had individual pages on Wikipedia, some were not. The ones that were had few sources, if any - most were stubs. Again, the JMDL was helpful, particularly for the song "Little Green". Two things during this project struck me: the first was how easy it was to back up information on Wikipedia with hard, impartial fact. I could be sure of the information I garnered from the "Little Green" Wikipedia page because it appeared on an official, Joni Mitchell approved fan website. The second is perhaps more interesting (to me at least). "Blue" is a desperately sad album, dealing with all kinds of emotional trauma. I am in awe of the courage and boldness that Joni Mitchell displays by publishing this album. That's just a short aside from me. Back to the tale of the research.

In conclusion, I found that using Wikipedia as a primary research resource was not as bad as I had anticipated. All the things I found were verifiable, there were no utterly outlandish or ridiculous statements and the information I garnered has proven useful in writing my Pecha Kucha. So I hope you enjoy my Pecha Kucha, which I will put in my next post. Until then, enjoy these people showing you how presentations should (and should not) be done, and don't try and ignore Wikipedia as a valid source of information. Just make like a blowtorch and use with caution and discretion.

WIKIPEDIATRICIAN

I am painfully aware that the title is woefully poor. I'm tired. Sorry.
Aaaaanyway, this is intended to be a brush up on whatever else needs saying about Wikipedia, so try and listen for the short time I will distract you.

• Sandboxes are important, more important than I stressed in the large post. They are where you learn to use Wikipedia. They show you how to interlink, reference and provide images for articles and then show you the result while not actually publishing what you write. If you're planning to use Wikipedia, using the sandbox(es) is essential as it allows room for error but still shows you how to use Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia is always going to be a work in progress by its very nature: there will be no Wikipedia Mk. II or anything, but on the plus side, updates can clearly be made quicker than between editions of a regular encyclopedia. For example, when the 7/7 bombings happened, the Wikipedia page was updated hundreds of times in the hour after the page was started, while newspapers only got one chance to get it right. Wikipedia is quicker and easier to edit than other information sites and therefore more accurate on the whole and in the long run.
• Wikipedia is a community and a tool at the same time, but 80% of the content comes from 20% of the users (see here for that funny rule that governs this). Everyone knows a bit about something: if you see an error that you can correct with reference, do so. It only enhances the experience for everybody and there's nothing to stop you. Try and think of ways that you can help Wikipedia and then it'll be even better for you and for others.
• Wikipedia is massive beyond scale. If you looked at every single page in English alone for only a minute each consecutively, you'd have to be looking at a screen straight for about 4 years. That's how big it is. It came from nothing and was edited by us, not by pros. When you think about it, it's weird how so many people have united to form such a behemoth of a website but hardly anyone knows anyone else doing the same thing. We isolate ourselves in order to unify our knowledge. How peculiar.

Well that's it as far as what time and effort constrains me to tell you about Wikipedia. But do try and contribute, even if it's only to a very silly or trivial page. It'll do no end of good. In short, Wikipedia is by us and for us, and we need to keep it that way for it to work. Adios.

See below for pictures, videos etc.

I'VE RUN OUT OF WIKI PUNS...

...So it's time to talk about Wikipedia. Where did it come from? Why has it been so successful? Why is it controversial? Is it really all it's cracked up to be? How can you use it? Do Wikipedia workers wear yak-wool sweaters? All will be revealed...except that last thing.

Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It was born out of Nupedia, a project of the same two guys. Wikis had been around for a little while before then (as we saw earlier) and Nupedia and Wikipedia were run by the same guys, but they operated independently of each other. Nupedia's servers went down permanently in 2003 as Jimmy and Larry saw Wikipedia growing quickly, more quickly than Nupedia, see here for a graph of how many articles are added a day. It resolutely refused to go commercial and remains so to this day. It continued to grow and the rest, as they say, is history.

I have talked lots about wikis before, so not much to say there. However, Wikipedia is a bit more than just a collection of wikis. It is probably the most important encyclopedia ever written because it was not written by a team of experts, but by us. The largest encyclopedia on earth, with over 2 million articles in English alone, was written by computer anoraks and catfood enthusiasts and me and you. I, for example, have written a short article on a sports book. Not much, but almost everything is worth something where Wikipedia is concerned (unless you write an autobiographical entry and are subjected to the humiliation of being deleted because of insufficient interest in the page). Create an account, read up on some stuff, fiddle about in the tutorials and sandboxes and you're there: a bona fide Wikipedia contributor. It was created by us and is an example, according to Time magazine, of a "Web 2.0 service success" like Myspace and YouTube and consequently Time made "You" the Person of the Year 2006 for going from the person who watched the people who broadcasted to an army of broadcasters who release extraordinary amounts of information every single day.

Of course, this sort of mass broadcasting hijack is going to lead to some errors in accuracy in terms of information broadcasted. You can't use Wikipedia as an educational resource because some of the things put on Wikipeda are utter rubbish. It's pretty easy for Wikipedia's administrators to spot glaring errors, but smaller errors are harder to find. Wikipedia has three basic rules: articles must be objective, verifiability and no original research - everything must be able to be referenced to a published article. If you're looking at an article, essentially ask yourself these things: has this person proved himself reputable? Has the article been reliably referenced? Can I back this information up? Asking these things usually helps to show whether something is legit. Here are a couple of Wikipedia controversies that have emerged, but nowadays the media (i.e. US) can find fault with anything if we look hard enough. However, it does go to show that Wikipedia isn't squeaky-clean.

Wikipedia is different from anything before it: it will always be a work in progress, and it was built by a community of Wikipedians. It means that the news (because Wikipedia is, among other things, a current affairs site) comes to us - mass amateurisation at its finest. I repeat: we are the journalists. Edits happen at about one per second. It's like a hive of information with bees making cyber-honey. It's unbelievable.

It has transformed the way we think about information, but it was us who made the transformation. Wikipedia is the new way. Is it the right way? We'll have to wait and see.

CAN YOU DIGG IT?

I talked about tagging a little bit in my last post. It's pretty cool; it makes photos searchable, which is a brilliant development. But tagging gets even more clever with services like Delicious and Citeulike. Social networks + tags = social bookmarking. That's what Delicious does: it links you tag sites, see other people's tags and explore those tags. Essentially it's a social network, but it's tagging, so less risk of funny looks at interviews than, say, a photo of you rolling around drunk. That said, it probably isn't wise to do silly things like tag illegal music sites. Anyway, these social bookmarking sites have huge potential. Here's why.

The ideal and default setting for Delicious is "public" i.e. anyone can see your tags. That's significant. Put it this way: you are researching a project that the whole class is doing. You tag some sites with Delicious and your friends see it. They have also tagged some sites, and you all find more and more interesting sites and here's the really clever part: it's all organised in tags, so it isn't nearly as chaotic as bookmarks. A Latin dictionary with dozens of tiny bits of paper with no meaning sticking out of the top versus all the words you need to know being subdivided and labelled by context and urgency - and you can search it. It's a no-brainer. Here's an SPS Classics Delicious page.

This is changing the way we think about information. With the advent of Web 2.0 and specifically services like Delicious,finding information was a tedious, slow, laborious process. You go to the library, find the reference card, fiddle your way through the Dewey decimal system which is still the preserve solely of librarians and geeks of the first order and find the book on the Battle of Hastings you were looking for is somewhere in the middle of the German manga. You are only allowed this book for a short period of time and then you are told that your account expired seven hours, four minutes and thirty-nine seconds before you tried to take out the book. Immensely frustrating, the whole procedure. Delicious takes this process, blasts it to smithereens and reassembles it in a new and far simpler manner. But here's the crucial part: information used to be created and dished out by a class of people who were specific to this task. Now, information is ours to contribute, distribute and classify. If Galileo surfed the web, there would be little to stop each one of us collating the information he had published and/or garnered from the internet, and if we did this with lots of great thinkers and revolutionaries, just think of the sheer volume of previously priceless information at our fingertips. This guy calls that a "folksonomy" and believes we can use it to take over the world (Part 1) (Part 2). A system was recently revealed at TED whereby all the world's digital photographs online are hyperlinked, creating a 3D image of the world. That's unbelievable, and ten years ago it couldn't have happened. The information hierarchy is no more. Delicious makes information more readily classifiable and searchable and the power which comes from information and knowledge is now in our hands. Roll on the knowledge revolution...

A FLICKR OF RECOGNITION

Picture this: you are all at the eleventy-first birthday party of your great-great-aunty Muriel with all the photo albums spread out across the table and you are looking for a picture of the birthday girl as the back end of a pantomime cow. Everyone's crowding around the coffee table as a dedicated team of well-wishers scour all 23 of Muriel's photo albums for this one photo. If only there was a quicker way...


Flickr is the answer. Flickr is the photo sharing service that means that all your photos are in one place (or rather not with the rise of cloud computing). Better still, these photos are searchable. This is because you can tag photos - put little signposts on them that give keywords relating to the topic of the photo. That means that - joy of joys! - you can now access that priceless Muriel memory by simply searching "Muriel the cow's arse". Sorry. Inappropriate joke. I hang my head in shame.

But smutty remarks about one's great-great-aunt aren't the point. The point is that Flickr is a photo revolution. It is simpler and cheaper than putting photos on a CD, and sending a link to someone by email is quicker than emailing a bloated JPEG image. Here's a link to the girl who first thought of Flickr while working at a games company and realised she needed to share her photos with a co-worker. That's another clever thing about Flickr: sending links is viral advertising that encourages people around Flickr uses to use the service as well. It started in 2004 and by June 2006 had 177 million photos. That's 17 photos uploaded every 10 seconds. November 2007? 2 billion images. Wow.

By now Flickr is up there with Facebook for being seriously good at what it does. There is now a Flickr smartphone app, which might sound daft, but let me put it into perspective: you take a photo on your phone then upload it to Flickr. Your smartphone automatically "geotags" the photo you upload through the phone's GPS. When you look through your photos on Flickr, you get a map telling you exactly where in the world you took each one of your photos. That's quite impressive.

Flickr have even managed to deflate the tricky issue of copyright through "Creative Commons". This gives users a variety of options for how their photos are used by those who find them on internet searches or otherwise. You can say people can use your photos for non-commercial use, use it and credit it, or your photo but not "derivative work" based on it. The point is that it is a total revolution of the copyright idea; Creative Commons and media-sharing websites like Flickr and Youtube are not making you pay for a privilege that ten years ago would have been a sticky topic. In fact the photo of the cow above is from Flickr. It's hard to express it, but Flickr is a new way of looking at media sharing. Sounds lame, but it really is big news (see an article from The Observer here). Muriel would be proud.

AND ANOTHER THING...

Read this from Time magazine for a humorous take on why Facebook isn't just for the teenagers...

ALAS, POOR FACEBOOK...

A typical teenage Internet user. Or a monster. Almost the same thing.

...I knew it well. Or at least I thought I did. I have learnt in the last few weeks that Facebook is a lot nastier than the innocent little social networking site that it shows itself as. I thought I knew you, Facebook! (sob, sob, cue cheesy violin music.) But seriously, this has shown me just how contradictory, intrusive and insidious Facebook can be. I have told you mostly the good so far; now some other stuff which is mostly bad and ugly.

Last week we established that it is perilously easy to hack an account through an application. A bit more on these applications. These are essentially things that provide a service, such as games. However, applications such as quizzes and "top friends" require access to your account information. This, if you are not quite careful, then gives them access to your friends' account information as well. Such applications do come up with a warning at the start, but most people will tell you not to be so boring if you actually pay attention to such things. Not only this, but some are horribly intrusive. Things like asking the question "Do You Like So-and-So?" as part of an application and then telling them essentially whether or not you like them through a notification is, in my opinion, awful. How are you supposed to respond when you are effectively told "I don't like you" across the internet by someone you thought was your friend? Oh wait, that's right! There are hardly any real friends on Facebook. Sorry, I am a little angry, but my point stands.

Very few people bother to adjust their default privacy settings, not realising how dangerous this can be. Letting the whole world and his dog see practically everything about you, especially intimate things only meant to be seen by your friends, is sheer madness. Here is a link to a decent set of guidelines by Nick O'Neill, a Facebook expert, and another one from the security company Sophos. Reading through these two and putting them into practice, it seems as if they are pretty much diametrically opposed to the use of my peers. I have done the recommended things and I am not allowed by my parents to put photos of me on Facebook. By doing these things I have pretty much been rendered a Facebook vegetable. Any Facebook user will tell you that Facebook is all about putting photos up and laughing with people at them. Unfortunately future employers and university registrars disagree. However, what annoys me the most is that Facebook gives its own recommendations for privacy and a safety policy, and then condones the use of applications such as "So-and-So is having Sex! Click here for more or try it for yourself!" That really irritates me.

Facebook and the like are a parallel society. A society where the governors reserve the right to take over your affairs after you die. A society where things that are inappropriate for good reasons in the real world do not turn a head. A society where an image of mob rule is projected and officials do whatever they please, regardless of hypocrisy. A society where sick comments and jokes are suddenly transmogrified into desperately funny comments and jokes just because they are on the internet. But it isn't all bad. It can bring people back together and can be a great way to network with friends. Facebook is a service, not a tool, which means that it is not simply a means to an end, it is also a body that is "intelligent" in its own right.

I also worry about identity online. If I am "tagged" in a silly photo and it is seen out of context, then it might be taken the wrong way. What does that say about me to a stranger? There was a controversy over the online photo-sharing service Flickr when two girls posted a photo of them in Australia and this was used by Virgin in an advertising campaign without the permission of the girls who were in it. While I am all for technology, I don't like the way that it makes it easier to take advantage of you.

This has made me think about why I got Facebook in the first place - to be in the loop. Essentially I was just going with the grain, following the crowd. The trouble is that when absolutely everyone follows a trend it is nigh on impossible to do anything except do the same for fear of complete ostracism. Maybe I am being vain and like many others wildly overestimate people's desire to be near me and even then, half the people I am "friends" with now will not want anything to do with me in twenty years' time, and friend lists are well-meaning but seem a little difficult to manage - every time I try to set one up whatever internet provider I am using doesn't respond. Deeply unhelpful. However, that lady Danah Boyd has again some sensible stuff to say on the subject which you can read here. Basically as long as we have a fairly reasonable self-contained identity online we can make sure that we don't end up looking rather foolish. Here is her blog, which is supposedly very good, and here is Sam Jackson's site, a student who she mentions. It is all good stuff, so read it if you have the time. Maybe Facebook isn't so bad after all, but I am still very frightened by it. I suppose I have a choice: either roll with everything Facebook can throw at me or delete it and ignore it completely. The overall message is, although I have got angry this time round, is that it isn't necessarily the right thing to do if you scream and run from all social sites, even though they are pretty scary. Just have a care. Make like a paranoid android and DON'T PANIC!

Here are a couple more videos, funny but true (especially the last one):

DO THE SMS GENERATION DREAM OF SHEEPS' FACEBOOK PROFILES?

As you may or may not have realised, I have shamelessly pilfered the title of the short story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" for the subject of this blog post - social networking. What is the point of Facebook? How do we use it? Why has it caused controversy? Where did it all come from? Ah, but in hyperspace "there are no truths, only questions" (Danah Boyd - we'll hear more about her later).

Facebook began as a site where Harvard students could create a profile and talk to others, but even from the beginning it was shrouded in controversy. Mark Zuckerberg, the supposed founder of Facebook, has been accused of stealing the idea from classmates who hired Zuckerberg as a programmer for a remarkably similar social site. The case remains unsolved - read more here.

Facebook has made other people angry too. The initial Zuckerberg scheme was to put pictures of two people up next to each other and get people to vote on who was more attractive (The Facebook), but this was shut down by the Harvard administrators soon after. Offices have banned Facebook because of the number of workers messing about on Facebook instead of working. The biggest controversy came in 2006 when Zuckerberg introduced the "News Feed", which is the home page on Facebook. It details everything all your friends have done in the last little while - status updates, comments, wall posts, everything. This caused a furore as students in particular started to berate Zuckerberg for the invasion of privacy. What these students seem to forget is that they put the stuff on the internet and Facebook can change their policies at any time without undue warning and as users we must be aware of the potential for people to see everything we put on the web and more. As normal, the mass of teenagers checking notifications and just generally interested in technology has seemed to make some people think that Facebook represents everything that is wrong with this country and all Facebook users are feckless twits. Now why would anyone think that? Let's see why and how people use Facebook.

Facebook is a social network online. A social network is just a way of linking people together - I know a guy who knows a guy who know a guy who I could buy a car off. We use Facebook to get in touch and we arrange prices, collection et al. That's one way of using Facebook - making drawn-out processes shorter. However, a great number of people use Facebook to make contact with friends or family. My cousins at university keep in touch with their parents through Facebook, and I arrange things with my friends on Facebook (yes, you did read that correctly, I do in fact have friends). Friends on Facebook are an interesting thing. Do you consider all your "friends" on Facebook to be your friends in real life? It seems to me that "friends" means, where Facebook is concerned, those people whom you talk to most regularly. Calling these people "friends" could be viewed by cynics as a way to make it seem like those who we don't care enough about to actually want to talk to face-to-face are closer to us than they actually are. Danah Boyd has a detailed article on how we use Facebook here.

Mark Zuckerberg

I am all for social networks, but I worry about who my message goes out to. My privacy settings list me as not searchable on Google and only friends can see my profile, but I think that what goes on the internet stays on the internet, and that could potentially be very damaging. You can't actually delete your Facebook account with any great ease, only "deactivate" it, which is a fairly intrusive situation. Why can you put everything on the internet and then not take it off? A situation that highlighted this problem occurred with a software writer - read more here. The BBC have also identified that some seemingly harmless applications could harvest account and identity information, which could be a terrible problem. I worry that future employees can find me on Facebook and that what is supposed to be an outlet for me outside of school ends up reading like a CV, which is a worrying situation. Do I toe the line and miss part of Facebook's objective, or do I go wild and potentially get grilled by universities and potential employees (read what The Times had to say here)?

So that's what's what. Things worth thinking about: am I using Facebook how I want to, how I am supposed to, both? What problems do I face from the material I put on Facebook? Is what I put on Facebook a true reflection of who or what I really am? All this and more up for discussion before next week, when there's more Facebook and a look at the popular photo-sharing site Flickr. Here, of course, are your videos:

WHO AM I?

Q. What do I, a Michigan musician and an American elementary school have in common?

A. We are all William Yates!

I found out all this information simply through a Google search. I went in expecting to find at least something other than information about me, but I ended up with about six and a half million hits. That's a little scary. I, like any other person, want to know that I am an individual with an identity. But where does my online identity stop and my offline identity begin?

Here are some fairly uninteresting things about me: I go to St Paul's School, I have blond hair, I cycle to school most mornings. However, this is only part of my offline identity. If you really wanted to you could, with the internet, find out my discipline record throughout school, my political views, my full date of birth, my parents' salaries, my teachers' Facebook passwords and goodness only knows what else. The amount of personal information available through the web is terrifying.

It isn't only the internet. There are devices we use every day that record information about our spending habits, our whereabouts, who we contact. For example: some time ago my dad had to be airlifted off a ski slope because of an injury at considerable personal expense. Within about 36 hours his bank had phoned him to ask what had cost so much. The Problem is that with so much financial information on the internet, it is becoming more common to see people trying to steal your identity and use bank details and the like to their advantage - identity theft. Your Oyster card keeps track of where you are - if that information fell into the wrong hands, think of the trouble it could cause. The Metropolitan Police requested information about specific Oyster card whereabouts 436 times between August 2004 and March 2006. Phone companies are constantly keeping tabs on you so that they can unlock phones and help us out of trouble, but this could pose a significant threat to our privacy if they fell into the wrong hands. Is Big Brother watching us? Is it bad or good that we have all this information floating about in cyberspace?

Thankfully, there are lots of things that can help us stay safe on the web. Things like Roboform, a program for PCs, allows you to store all your passwords and details and access them via one "master-phrase" so that you don't juggle passwords, hackers don't get near your data and filling out forms online can be done quicker. To me this is a brilliant idea: it is doubtful (but not impossible) that we will ever find an answer to computer security that doesn't involve some recollection on our part, but Roboform offers to do that for us. Similar products include 1Password for Mac and Password Safe for all computers. The problems come when people misunderstand or just ignore safety policies. Did you know that Facebook can change its privacy policy at any point and we wouldn't necessarily be notified? Safety with web identity depends on us following the rules.

Another safety feature that techies swear by is encrypted data. This is when instead of passwords, which can be cracked quite easily by humans, computers invent a code that makes all your information into gibberish for all those who don't know the code or cipher. The cipher can be translated by a special key, which tells you what the actual information says. These keys can have various bit values - the higher the bit value, the more possible combinations there are. For example, a 56-bit key allows more than 70 quadrillion (70 000 000 000 000 000) combinations. That, I'm sure you'll agree, is quite impressive for a key the fraction of the size of a blank word document. Read more about it here. Encryption is used in computers for all sorts of things, among them protecting personal data and therefore your identity from people, which is rather reassuring.

Another interesting advance in the field of technological identity has come in the shape of the Google Profile (here is the unofficial Google blog explanation). Google is becoming a social network with things like intelligent address books where your contacts are "friends" and calling emails "conversations". To this avail it has a new feature that lets those who you allow to view it access all the social networks you want your friends to see. Cool. A network that lets you access blogs, Facebook and Twitter, all in one place. It looks like it will be big - really big. It also shares all your contact details, though, and when you can be searched on the web that might not be so good. But never fear, Google lets you choose who sees the important stuff. Read more here.

So. Places you can have profiles or an identity: Facebook, blogs, microblogs, instant messenger, the list goes on. Even your email is likely to disclose some information about you: my email is the name of where some of my cousins live. Some people like to use their names. Interesting (if slightly odd) psychological questions: does our email address show who we really are? If not that, what does? Is our Facebook or our blog who we are online and offline, one, the other, both? Are we safe in the knowledge that our data is safe under password or encryption? I suppose that we will only know what's safe when we are let down by it.

Here are some worthwhile videos.




Another video, this time about how we identify ourselves to websites.

TWITTERIFIC

This.

Is.

A.

Blog.

And life's little interesting moments...

...tend to come between blog posts.

And that, o best beloved, is the ethos behind microblogging. Microblogging is like blogging in that you tell the world what you are doing, but micro. That means that when you don't have time to make a whole new blog post, you go to your microblogging site (Twitter, Jaiku et al) and update your status. Your friends "follow" you and get informed whenever you update you status. Sounds familiar? That's because it is the younger brother of Facebook. At around the same time as the birth of Facebook, other techies were thinking about getting in touch in a whole new way. The idea was that you told your friends what you were doing without round robin emails or time-consuming blog posts. Little bite-sized bloglets were first thought of like this by a Fin named Jyri Engestrom in early 2006. He created Jaiku, so named because the microblogs his users created looked like Japanese hAIKUS. JAIKU. Twitter was started around the same time in Californian by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone and Evan Williams, and is probably more successful than Jaiku. Twitter is used by a multitude of this world's great and good. Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross and Robert Llewellyn all have Twitter, and people like to think that by following these people on Twitter they are that little bit closer to their heroes (it's also shameless self-promotion). Here is a collation of Jyri's philosophy on microblogging and social networking.
(I tried looking at this on preview and it didn't go straight to the slideshow. Try clicking on the hyperlink.)

Microblogging: Tiny social objects. On the future of participatory media

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: jaiku mobile)

Jaiku had arrived. Then later that year, in October 2006, Twitter was commercially launched. Twitter, like Jaiku, can be done from mobile devices, which means that you can update your status without even having access to a PC or laptop. Twitter lets its users update what they're doing in 140 characters or less (the post is called a tweet). That is proper microblogging, and to honour it, I shall write the next few paragraphs in chunks of 140 characters or less.


So that was it. We have microblogging. Unfortunately, along came Facebook and offered to do all that Twitter could do and more. (130)

Jaiku failed largely because it was invite only, meaning that you couldn't actually start an account without having been invited. (128)

But all is not lost. Objects can microblog too - the Mars Rover has a twitter feed, and so does the River Thames. Clever, huh? (125)

Microblogging hase some advantages over Facebook too. There are fewer security risks, it’s easier to follow people and it's generally freer. (140 exactly!)

The way I see it, we shouldn't compare this to Facebook at all. Facebook is not a blog - it is a social network, made to arrange dates and stuff. People who say that microblogging like Twitter is timewasting drivel have missed the point. Finding out what your friend thinks of the new series of Scrubs, sharing frustration over a new gadget or just saying that your teeth look freakishly white this morning, life is about the little info-cameos from interesting people that get us through the day. Some people do that by phone or face-to-face, some do it across the internet, which is just as valid a method in this day and age.

That is microblogging in a nutshell. I made up this little rhyme to help you remeber (maybe it should be called the Jaiku-haiku). Shout to the world with your tongue all unfurled! Twitter's a hit; go with Twitter, you twit! (titter)
Yes. I am perfectly aware it is shamelessly awful. Could you do better? Hmmm...
See here for other stuff to know about microblogging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaiku





Another brilliant (but unrelated) video...

EVEN MORE ON WIKIS

We've seen how wikis work. Now it's time to move on to more about the way of the wiki (sounds like a dodgy kung-fu ICT comic). They can be used as business tools, educational resources and research databases and much, much more. The most popular individual use is for people trying to write books because wikis are easier to manage than lots of little bits of paper. Here's some interesting stuff about wikis.

BUSINESS

A software solutions company called Atlassian has a blog and one of the posts relates to wikis and their potential within business. I found this a little dull but I reckon that it would probably be more interesting if I was a hotshot entrepreneur. Look for yourself here.

Another use of wikis within businesses is for customer support. The Lenovo ThinkPad, a laptop, has a wiki that lets customers share their problems (Unhappy ThinkPadders Anonymous, perhaps?) and learn more about new software for their ThinkPad. I thought that this was really clever because it lets ThinkPad users talk to each other and help each other learn as well as providing a forum for problem solving, which is one of the key principles behind wiki. The page has been accessed almost 2 million times, so it must be doing something right.

EDUCATION

The wiki is a great way of learning - we know that already. There are some good examples of this when it comes do education. Last year the SPS Physics A-level candidates started a wiki so that they could start pages and then edit each others' in the hope that they could help each other revise. Judging from the results, it worked.

The Auburn University School of Architecture started a wiki called Design Studio, giving students the chance to get ideas out there instead of trying to collaborate in the somewhat stilted atmosphere of the classroom. It is pretty impressive - you can see that it means something to the students and that they care about the stuff they are doing and want to help each other. For some reason architecture students find it easier to collaborate and make deep and meaningful philosophical and architectural observations when slobbing about in tracky bottoms instead of the classroom. Who'd have thought it?

RESEARCH

The potential for wikis as a research facility is plain to see. If you can talk to scientists over the web about a new species of platypus or something then it's going to be much more efficient than snail mail or email. The Science Museum started a wiki (see it here) that contains information about some 250 objects within the museum. Anyone can visit the site, which is really easy to use, and find out about these objects. This works very well as a wiki because it makes it very easy to edit it to include the knowledge that scientists continually gather.

There's also an interesting essay by Harvard Law professor David Weinberger on this concept, saying that "students shouldn't be reading textbooks, they should be writing them" - read it here. The idea behind this is that in a way sort of similar to blogs instead of being passive sponges soaking up knowledge, wikis make the harvesting of knowledge and interactive process - I give knowledge, he gives knowledge and together the whole is almost greater than the sum of its parts. Give students the information and put the onus on them to create a coherent wiki among themselves so that it helps them. That way if it's rubbish, they still learn because they do badly in their exams. The whole point of learning is interaction, and that is what wikis are all about.

STYLE

Now for the wiki small print: there are certain stylistic and etiquette elements fundamental to wikis. The basics can be found here. A few adapted commandments of wiki:

1) Thou shalt not be antagonistic

2) Thou shalt collaborate in a helpful fashion

3) Thou shalt not tweak the HTML unless strictly necessary

4) Thou shalt not edit thine wiki after it hast been published

5) Thou shalt learn to disagree respectfully

6) Thou shalt not write drivel

So now you know just about what's necessary for you to go and start a wiki. What's great is that you can do it on anything - sausages, Stephen King novels, green energy - and somebody somewhere is almost guaranteed to find it useful, and when they do, hopefully they'll put some stuff on your wiki, and it will blossom and be a garden of knowledge in simplified HTML. See below for some links and go start a wiki - the 21st Century blank canvas.

IT'S A WIKI WIKI WORLD

Before the wiki, making a web document was a closed-off, private affair. Then *cue trumpet fanfare* Wikipedia (and all its little wiki children) arrived! Wikipedia, like blogs and Facebook, has transcended the gap between techies and luddites and entered the dictionary of common modern parlance. Wikipedia is different: it's a wiki (as the name suggests), or rather a large number of wikis, which means that it is a collection of web pages created, edited and augmented by the public. But the really clever part is that there is no "Big Book of Wikis" that explains the intricacies of HTML for potential wiki writers because there doesn't have to be. A wiki uses a simplified markup language so that us thickos can understand what we're doing, which is better for everyone really.

Wikis are what people like Vannevar Bush and Tim Berners-Lee dreamed of when they were pioneering the internet: a system whereby anyone at all could contribute to a webpage, each man furthering the knowledge of those around him. The first Wiki was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who went to Hawaii and got the "wiki wiki" bus between Honolulu airport terminals ("wiki" is Hawaiian for "quick"). He created WikiWikiWeb in March 1995, inspired in part by Apple's HyperCard, a program that allowed users to provide links in "card stacks". Wikis were soon seen to be a great collaborative medium and Cunningham wrote a book with Bo Leuf outlining the basic principles of wiki:

1) Anyone can compose or edit a wiki without needing a special browser or program

2) Wikis allow users to make links to other wiki pages which are relevant to the page

3) Wikis aren't really meant to just be looked at by casual visitors. Users are invited to contribute to wikis.

While a great number of people disregard the third statement, the first two statements are very important. Absolutely anyone can make a wiki and you don't have to be especially well-versed in HTML or know what IP address means. Wikis do the hard work so you don't have to. For example, mistakes ("Neil Young was born in 2023 and is a moose") can be corrected easily: just hit the "edit" button, correct the mistakes, and hit "save" ("Neil Young was born in 1945 and is a Canadian singer, songwriter and film director"). The moment when wikis entered the public conscience was a little like presenting a credit card to the spend-happy teenage girls of the world for the first time: everyone just went a bit crazy. The wiki was a big step forward.

This is how a wiki works.

Step 1: I provide some information.



Step 2: Someone elso adds some information and hits "save".



Step 3: someone provides some useless stuff





Step 4: The finished piece.

So that is your actual wiki: very simple, but easily the best collaborative medium on the web. It doesn't even have to be about furthering the knowledge of mankind - you could start a wiki for such a simple purpose as making a kit list for a school trip. Obviously wikis are going to look better than felt pen scrawled on paper. But hey. It's the credit crunch.

Wikis are a people thing. We can't go out and tell six billion people about Neil Young, but putting it on a wiki lets lots of people see it and add stuff to it so that everyone learns. It truly is a brilliant solution to collaboration and information sharing. Wikitastic.

If you want to start your own wiki, here are some links to wiki creating sites:

www.pbwiki.com

www.wetpaint.com

www.wikispaces.com

For an explanation of wikis far greater than my own, watch this video.

AN EXPLANATION
This is a continuation of a blog from about 36 hours ago, but then my Google Account was mysteriously deleted. Best not to dwell on that, so this shall now serve as my ICT blog for evermore. Just thought you might like to know. So...when looking for ginglymus.blogspot.com, your efforts will be futile. Come here instead: plesianthropus.blogspot.com. Get it? Good.