Privacy

I don't think anyone completely understands the consequences of Web 2.0 technology on privacy and how this may negatively effect people's lives. As a person over 30, I was completely fascinated with an article I read from New York Magazine, Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll , about younger people using Web 2.0 technologies and their attitudes about privacy. It's such a cultural shift in attitudes, but I also wonder if it isn't a little naive.

What I'm curious about is how combining sources of data from the internet may affect your privacy in ways you may not be aware of. Here are some sites and articles I have found as examples.

Where is Your Username registered is a site I found on the popular bookmarks lists on delicious. It allows you to search for usernames on popular Web 2.0 sites like Myspace and Flickr with links to people's userpages. Before I took this class I wasn't really aware that so many of people's userpages were actually viewable by anyone on the internet. I never really thought about it or just mistakenly thought that you had to have an account with one of these sites to view other people's pages. Since people often use the same username for multiple sites it is easy to collect multiple sources of information on one user. You can view what a user has bookmarked on delicious, what music they listen to on Pandora, and what they are selling on Ebay, for instance.

Facial recognition slipped into Google image search is an article about how you can search Google images but just limit the results to faces. There is currently not an option to select this while searching Google. What you do is add "&imgtype=face" to the end of the search URL and it will restrict your image search to just faces. Here is the Google image search for the University of Alaska Southeast limited to just faces.

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives With Amazon Wishlists demonstrates how to find names and addresses of people who read "subversive" books using Amazon Wishlists and then find a satellite image of their house using Google Maps. It makes you wonder why the government would even need to get records from a library of books a person has checked out if this information is easily attainable over the internet.

I tend to be more private on the internet and not intentionally give out a lot of personal information. When I registered at Diigo, I was asked for a lot of personal information such as my gender, city and state, and industry I worked in. At first I didn't realize it was optional and I put it in. When you create a user profile it also gives you information on who has visited your profile. As soon as I registered my profile I started being visited by a user "Anonymous". This person did not have a photo and all of his/her bookmarks were private. Because I didn't know anything about this person and why they were visiting my profile and bookmarks I thought it was kind of weird. This person has visited my profile on many occasions since. I have since deleted most of the optional personal information on my Diigo account. I think I may also consider using different usernames for different Web 2.0 applications I use in the future.

As for children I think it should be more up to the parents to decide what kind of internet controls they should use to protect the privacy of their children. I'm not comfortable with the idea of using filters or blocking certain sites in a public setting like a library. I think these controls would be to restrictive to adult patrons. I also think that young children should not be unaccompanied in a public libraries for safety reasons.

Security

Our assigned articles on security concerns and Web 2.0 technologies left many unanswered questions about what I should be doing to protect myself as a user of Web 2.0 technologies. For example the article Top 10 Web 2.0 Attack Vectors seemed to be geared toward IT professionals that would be creating Web 2.0 sites or computer security systems in organizations rather than your average user. I haven't taken classes yet in AJAX web development or XML for instance so it was difficult to fully understand the descriptions of the Web 2.0 attacks.

I did do some researching on my own and I found some interesting articles on security and specific Web 2.0 applications:

• Blog feeds may carry security risk - CNET News

• When Widgets Attack

• Social Bookmarking and Malicious Websites - Malicious Code - STN Peer-to-Peer Discussion Forums

• How to protect against Web 2.0 threats - SC Magazine US

The article How to protect against Web 2.0 threats made a very important point:

Web 2.0 sites are, by definition, more open than traditional sites. The hundreds of thousands of users contributing content to Web 2.0 sites make it easy for malware authors to hide and insert malware on dynamically generated Web 2.0 pages.

These articles finally convinced me to install the Web of Trust software that was suggested at the beginning of the class. However, these articles are still geared toward an IT professional and not an average user. Also the articles I found were all written in 2006. I'm not sure what to make of that. Was that because it was a hot topic at the time? Has there been a greater awareness of security dangers of Web 2.0 technology and has that technology improved on it's security since then?

Other than the Web of Trust software I don't have any specific advice beyond the conventional advice given for internet security - updated antivirus protection, avoiding phishing scams, etc..What to suggest for your average user is unclear to me.

Mashups

What makes mashups different then web applications is that mashups use data from more than one source to create a completely new web application. The mashups I chose were:

• Similarity Web
• Dumpr

The Similarity Web is an Amazon mashup that takes information that amazon displays on an item for "customers who bought this item also bought" and displays it in an interesting visual format with links back to the Amazon website. I thought this mashup would be useful at work to help patrons find similar books based on their favorite authors and other books they have liked. I have tried it on a few books and found it is a little slow at times but I still like it. Also sometimes if you enter the title of the book nothing shows up, but putting in the author's name will make the book show up. You can also search for other items besides books - any category that Amazon sells. I will continue to use this mashup at work and recommend it to patrons.

Dumpr is a cool image editor/Flickr mashup combo. You create an account and can use photos on Flickr or photos you upload to the site and create new images with different "effects". I spent several hours just trying out the different effects on some photos I had taken:



This is a photo I took and modified with the Rubik's Cube effect.




This effect allows you to take an existing photo and show it like it is an image in an art gallery.




This is called the Brilliant Circle effect. It was from a photo I had taken of cow parsnip and fireweed.

Dumpr is very easy to use. You save your finished photos in your account. You also have the option of saving them to your computer, sending them as email or uploading the image to Flickr. There is also options to publish the photos on various blogs, social networking sites and news aggregators. I will continue to use Dumpr because it is a lot of fun!

Web Applications

Here are the four web applications I chose for professional/educational uses:

• Elf | Your Personal Email Library Reminder Service
  


• hakia Search Engine


• TinyPaste
  


• FaceYourManga
  

I heard about Elf from work at the library, but I haven't tried it until now. Elf is a notification system that lets you know when library items are due or holds are available. We currently have an email notification system with the Juneau Public Library System, where we sent out notices a day before items are due. But it's limited, and we often get complaints that people aren't receiving our emails. Elf gives you many more options and customization features. With Elf, you can choose an email, RSS feed, or text messaging notification, or any combination thereof. You can also have an email notification ccd to one or more email addresses.

You can also select when you want notices sent out to you. You can choose a day of the week to send out notices, or how many days in advance you want the notice sent. You can also select to have notices sent out repeatedly. Currently Library Elf is only available in Alaska at the libraries in Juneau and Fairbanks but hopefully it will be available at other Alaskan libraries in the future. I set Elf up to get an email notification at two separate email addresses and also put a feed on Pageflakes. This is something I would recommend to some of our more computer/tech savvy patrons.

For my next web application I picked hakia Search Engine. I'm curious about alternative search engines to Google so I thought I would give it a try. Hakia is supposed to be a meaning based search engine where you can ask it questions and it looks at the meaning rather than the text keywords. I decided to do a search for the question "how contagious is whooping cough?" on both Google and Hakia. Google gave me results that were based on keywords in the search were as the results Hakia gave seemed to look at the question more as a whole. One useful thing about Hakia is that it will separate your results into all results and credible sites, which have been recommended by librarians. I would like to have Hakia as a firefox extension so I could have it on my firefox browser as a drop-down search engine selection, but that isn't an option now. I plan to use Hakia, particularly if I'm not not happy with the results I'm getting for a particular search on Google.

My next web application is TinyPaste. TinyPaste is a site where you can quickly enter text and save it as a webpage. I think this is useful if you have some information that is not on the web you can easily create a webpage and then save the link on your social bookmarking site. You can also create a page and then download it to your computer as a text document. I like to keep bookmarks of all my favorite recipes but I haven't found all of them on the internet. With TinyPaste I could type in the recipe, save it as a page and then link to it from my social bookmarking site. I am sure I will find many other uses for this application.

FaceYourManga is a fun site where you can create your own avatar. Its very easy to use and you create a cartoon likeness of yourself. You first select your gender and then you get a whole bunch of options for face shape, skin color, hair, eyes, mouth, clothes, glasses etc... I took a picture of myself and tried to create an avatar that looked as close to the picture as I could. When you are finished the image is sent to you by email. I used the image I created on this blog and also as my student picture for my classes.

The web applications I chose for my hobby were Tin Eye Image Search and Worth1000.com.
Tin Eye Image Search lets you upload an image or put in a URL to the image on the web and it will do a search of the internet and tell you where else the image appears on the web and if it has been modified. I thought this might be useful if you had a lot of photos on the web and wanted to see if people were using or altering your photos without permission. I tried searching with some web images that I thought would be very popular but I did not get very many results. Tin Eye is still a beta version so perhaps it will eventually become more powerful and useful.

Worth1000.com is a Photoshop site where you can create an account and enter and vote in Photoshop contests. There are many examples of excellent and hilarious photoshop pictures here.

Widgets/Gadgets

After looking through many sites on widgets, I found most to be fun and entertaining, like the cat widget on this blog, but not really useful. I did find some that were somewhat useful, and I put them all on Pageflakes. The ones that I have chosen to discuss here are:

• Google Search

• Calculator

• LabPixies Clock

• Sticky Note

• The Weather Channel
  

• Epicurious Recipes Widget

Google Search was a widget called a "flake" that you can add to your pageflake pages from the pageflake site. It's handy because it will give you result links within the widget without opening up into a new page. It will give you results for web, news, local (directions), blog, and video. I was dissapointed though that I could not use the google search widget for calculations or definitions, which is somthing you can do with the regular search engine. I added the Calculator widget from Pageflakes to do calculations.

The LabPixies Clock was another Pageflakes widget. It was fun because there were many different clock designs you could choose from. The design I chose also displays the date. I wanted it to display the date because sometimes at work at the library some of our computers don't display the date when you put the mouse cursor on the time on the lower right of the computer. "What is today's date?" seems to be a question I get asked a lot when I am working with the public.

I put the Sticky Note widget from Pageflakes on my pageflake main page so If I need to jot down some notes quickly that I can refer to later. Also the The Weather Channel widget from Pageflakes I use as well. Its like a RSS feed of the weather but it displays a graphic for each day to depict the weather forecast. Its good to get an instant glimpse of the weather forecast by visiting my pageflake homepage especially as the weather is getting colder and we get into the winter season.

The Epicurious Recipes Widget I found on a site called Widgetbox. I like the Widgetbox site because it made it very easy to add a widget to a blog like blogger or wordpress or to a news aggregator like pageflakes or igoogle. You just create an account, login, and click on a button. This Epicurious Widget displays new recipes from the Epicurious site. I liked the layout for this widget including the scroll bar button. One interesting thing is that you can get an RSS feed from Epicurious of new recipes to display on Pageflakes that will look similar to the widget but won't have a link to the Epicurious home page. One thing I've learned is that if you have a choice between a widget and a feed to try both because one may be more useful than the other.

I believe I will continue to use these particular widgets unless I can find another similar widget on another site that works better or has more features.

Adobe Air

Adobe Air products create applications that were previously available only on the internet to be downloaded to your desktop. I'm not sure what the advantage would be for myself, because at work and home I easily have access to the internet. My work at the library includes a variety of work at different library branches, so I can work at up to eight different computer terminals. With having an application on the internet, I can do something at one terminal at work and access it at another, or at home or another computer outside of work. Also at the library I would need our network administrator to install anything on our computers because I don't have administrative privileges. This makes it cumbersome for myself and creates a lot more work for him as well. I'm also not crazy about downloading a lot of things to my home computer, for security and space reasons.

So, when I was looking at an Adobe Air application to try, I looked for something that was more like a traditional desktop application. One application I decided to try was Shrink O'Matic. Shrink O' Matic is an automatic image re sizer and batch processor. Drag an image or multiple images into the program and it will automatically re size it for you. You select the size limits and the destination folder. You can also save it in different formats.

I was hoping this would be a like a free version of the batch processing option you have in Photoshop or Fireworks but it has some limitations. It appears that you cannot re size anything larger than 800 x 600 pixels. I was not able to re size any photo immediately after I've taken it with my digital camera because the size was too large. I had to find a smaller image that had already been re sized to try it out. Because there are no instructions in the program it took me a while to realize that I could not re size larger images. At first I thought the program wasn't working, but a user had left a comment about the sizing on the Adobe Air site, so I figured out that was the problem.

Shrink O' Matic does work very quickly so it may be useful for making batch thumbnail images from images that have already been resized and altered in an image editing program. I will have to see if this will be a useful program for me.