How are you feeling about the new Facebook moves to capture and share your private information by making it almost impossible to find and set every relevant privacy setting in your account? I’m seeing posts like Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook and tutorials helping you find and set various privacy settings within the Facebook menus. Moveon.org has taken up the privacy invasion banner vs. Facebook.
CO to State Facebook Users: “Shut. Down. EVERYTHING.” at eduGURU takes an in depth look at what happened in Colorado with regard to the Facebook Terms of Service. The article also examines similar statements in the TOS information from sites like MySpace and YouTube. You might not live in Colorado, but this may affect you.
Did you know there’s a convention for pet bloggers? Yep. It’s called BlogPaws and it’s real.
In the ten years since 2000, things changed rapidly in the technology field. We get used to them day by day, adopt changes and never look back. When you do take a moment to look back, you realize how much really has changed in the last 10 years. I wrote this as part of BlogHer’s 10 in 10 series. Here are ten things about the last ten years of technology, starting with women in tech.
Two Women
Marissa Mayer is Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google. She started with Google in 1999, with a computer science degree from Stanford in her hand. Ten years later, here she is in action at Web 2.0 Summit 09.
Marissa Mayer is responsible for many of the changes in how we conduct an online life, how we search, how we interact with technology. To my mind, she is the most influential woman in tech for the last 10 years. Fortune Magazine placed her a 44 in a list of the 50 most powerful women, but as far as I’m concerned, she’s number 1.
Dori Smith runs a close second in influence behind Mayer. It’s not because Dori Smith is an important public face for a big corporation. She’s much quieter and less public. Here she talks about JavaScript programming.
Dori she did something years ago, the ripples from which are still spreading through the tech community. She created a web site called Wise-Women with a tech oriented discussion list: an old fashioned listserv. For all these years, the focus in that list has been women (and men too, but mostly women) helping other women with technical issues. Scores of people have learned much of what they needed to know from conversations on the Wise-Women list. The focus has never wavered, the information sharing has never stopped.
Dori Smith is not spending all her time on listservs, however. She written a number of books on topics like JavaScript, was a founding member of the Web Standards Project, and produces all sorts of information on programming. She has helped a great many learn about technology.
Two Websites
It’s hard to narrow the list down to two influential websites from the last 10 years, isn’t it? So many important sites get left out. Surely BlogHer has been relevant for women. Here are two I think have had huge general impact.
YouTube tops my list. YouTube changed the way we learn, the way we share, the way we teach, the way we play. It’s often the first place we look for something—a video of Marissa Mayer speaking at a conference, for example. We go to YouTube for news, for music, for tutorials, for interviews, for everything.
My second choice is Facebook. In a way undreamed of 10 years ago, Facebook has changed our lives. We use Facebook to keep in touch with friends, promote our work, find jobs, support causes, and play games. Facebook pulls in information to your personal page from other social media sources such as Twitter. It’s the ubiquitous social network.
Two Innovations
Beginning the decade with the Y2K bug and moving through literally hundreds of technological innovations in the 10 years since the meltdown that wasn’t, plenty of new tech has claimed a place in our lives.
Mobile phone technology changed the decade, starting with clunky and limited phones and advancing to the iPhone (released in 2007), mobile technology has altered lifestyles in numerous ways. Using myself as an example, I no longer have a home phone, just a cell phone. I whip out that phone 50 times a day for one reason or another, but seldom to make a phone call. If I want to tell you something, I’ll text it or tweet it. If I want to learn something I’ll search for it or find it with an app especially designed to give me the exact information I want from a weather forecast to a movie time to a map.
Wireless everything is now standard. Even 30,000 in the air. Smaller and smaller computers that connect wirelessly to the Internet from everywhere. Netbooks, iPads, tech innovations that grow more and more portable while doing more and more of your daily chores. iPods that don’t just play your tunes, but connect wirelessly to get your mail and let you surf the web. Restaurants prosper whose main claim to customer loyalty comes from free and fast wireless.
Two Flops
Microsoft could never get Vista to capture the public’s affection. Now we have Windows 7—thank you Microsoft—but for a while, it looked like Vista was going to make even the most loyal of Microsoft fans turn away from the mother ship toward that juggernaut known as Apple.
Microsoft Zune, the mp3 player meant to compete with the iPod, was another stunning flop. Sure, it played music as well as the iPod, but it didn’t provide the experience that an iPod did with its beautiful and simple interface. In the never ending face-off between Microsoft and Apple, Apple keeps getting the experience right and Microsoft keeps flubbing it. Apple is like eating at Benihana. Sure you can get fried rice and grilled shimp at any decent Asian restaurant, but you don’t get the Benihana experience just anywhere. Zune just doesn’t provide the cool experience.
I hate to lay both flops at the feet of Microsoft, with so many flops to choose from, but the Microsoft giant has been losing ground to Google, to Apple, to open source, and to just about every other innovator who wants a piece of the pie.
Two trends
Social networking is a pervasive trend affecting everything from personal interaction and network building to political fund raising. I don’t know how long this trend will continue to grow, but the growth has been astonishing. We have people proposing marriage and finding jobs on Twitter, documenting life on blogs or places like BlogHer, setting up coffee dates on Facebook, and looking to the social networks for answers, advice, and connection. Social networking grew exponentially during the last decade.
The final item in my list of ten is the trend toward digital delivery of things we used to go to the store to buy. Music, movies, books, tech support, financial services, television, phone service, news—the list is long. Yes, you still have to go the store to buy a mattress, but the mattress store in my neighborhood is now in the former location of a Blockbuster video. Blockbuster is a thing of the past with Netflix bringing movies straight to your TV. Many businesses that thrived in the past are struggling and dying in a digital economy. By the time another decade has passed we should know how this particular trend has played out. I, for one, hope that news organizations with paid investigative reporters find a way to survive in a world of digital delivery.
Feel free to suggested the big events, people, and stories of the last decade that I left out.
On a personal note, I must mention that this blog will be 10 years old in 2011. I didn’t quite begin when the decade began, but I’m becoming a venerable oldie in the blog world.
Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.
I’ve had many a textbook that I modified for my own instructional purposes, but I didn’t do it by rewriting an author’s copyrighted material. I’ve also written a few books that I fantasize are used as textbooks, so I’m wondering how this development is being presented to authors. What control do authors have over changes?
DynamicBooks are presenting themselves inexpensive, interactive, and innovative. Right now they have about 100 of Macmillan’s books that fall into this program. (This deal fairly screams iPad to me.)
Pearson, which is the parent company of Peachpit and New Riders, was quoted in the NYT article.
“There is a flow to books, and there’s voice to them,” said Don Kilburn, chief executive of Pearson Learning Solutions, which does allow instructors to change chapter orders and insert material from other sources. Mr. Kilburn said he had not been briefed on Macmillan’s plans.
While this idea may have the potential to bring improvements to education, I want to know a whole lot more about the details before I endorse it. Right now, the details are hard to find. It could be a nightmare.
Jeffrey Zeldman, who wrote a book recommended for use it just about every web design course in the world, is leading a panel at SXSWi on “New Publishing and Web Content” next month. I don’t think they had this development in mind when the panel was suggested months ago, but I hope editable digital textbooks will be among the things discussed during the session.
Another problem I had was that I didn’t recognized many of the names of the web design experts they interviewed. Of course, there’s no reason why I should know every web design expert on the planet, but I do stay in touch with this area of knowledge. All the men interviewed had interesting job titles, and are no doubt good at their jobs.
None of the men interviewed by Smashing Magazine were educators. Few of them mentioned formal training for web designers, and when they did, it was all about what happens outside of formal training. They talked about passion and experience, about finding work and freelancing. None of them talked about how their education prepared them to work in the web design field.
As a web design educator, I think the attitudes and comments of the men interviewed in this article deserve careful thought by folks like me who identify as educators of web designers.
One of the scarier facts about online life is that privacy requires constant vigilance. There are ways to look at your purchases, your remarks, your friends list, and your other public data and learn a truly astonishing array of things about you.
The TSA is talking about doing full body scans at airports, which may create images that can be saved and transmitted. Melanie Wyne watches what the FTC is doing about privacy to help real estate professionals run their businesses.
I decided to reveal some personal information and let you see what you can figure out about me with the knowledge.
I was listening to a new album while driving in my car and wondered just what sort of analysis a person could make about me by looking at the last 5 CDs I’d purchased. A mini case study, if you will. I buy CDs almost every month, so it’s a rich mine field of data about me. What am I telling an online marketing analyst by buying these items?
Feel free to provide analysis of me in the comments based on these 5 purchases. Lacking anyone else to do it for me, I’ll tell you what I think they mean. See if your analysis agrees with mine.
Here are the last 5 albums I’ve bought:
The Truth According to Ruthie Foster by Ruthie Foster. Here’s a video of her doing a solo of “Stone Love” from this album at a CD release party at Waterloo Records in Austin. I bought this CD in a local independent bookstore, so there might not be any digital trail about this purchase.
The Fall by Norah Jones. Here’s a music video of “Chasing Pirates” from this CD. I bought it at iTunes, so it’s in a database.
Blues Around the World, a Putamayo compilation. Here’s a recording of one of the songs from this album, this one is “Slide Blues” by Botafogo. This is another CD that may not have any digital tracks, since I bought it in a local store called Peace Craft that sells goods from around the world.
The Orchard by Lizz Wright. Here’s a music video of My Heart from this album. I bought this one at iTunes.
The List by Rosanne Cash. This is a rather clumsy preview video of the entire album. This one came from iTunes.
Have you decided what you think my purchases reveal about me? Here’s what the iTunes Store recommends for me today. Are they on target?
I’m not enough of a marketing person to know what my buying choices mean for sure, other than that I buy a lot of music. However, I promised an interpretation, so here’s my self-analysis. I think my choices show a strong preference for women’s voices. I think they show a preference for jazz, blues and country. I think they show an interest in music that is international, or not necessarily in English. I think they show a lack of interest in hiphop and top 40 music and an inclination toward lesser known regional or world favorites. I would conclude that these are the purchases of an older person—I don’t think many twenty-somethings are buying this music except perhaps the Norah Jones.
Most of those things are true, with one exception. Rosanne Cash and country music. I don’t normally buy country music. I was attracted to The List because it carries a story about family and American roots that seems significant to me. Rosanne Cash is a good singer and I like women’s voices, so I can take a little dose of country for the sake of the history involved with the album. Here’s the story of The List, as told on NPR’s Fresh Air. Someone looking at this purchase would not know that was why I was interested, however. iTunes certainly considers me a target for country music purchases—you saw the recommended album by Steve Earle.
Just knowing that I listen to public radio tells a lot about me. If someone tracked me for a long time, they might figure out that I buy artists based on hearing interviews with them on Fresh Air with some frequency. That would be some pretty fancy database infosharing, wouldn’t it? However, the Apple Store knows that I subscribe to the Fresh Air podcasts, and it also knows mostly what I buy. Could they connect the dots?
What else does this little bit of data tell you about me? Do you see something I don’t? Do the two African American choices mean something? Does Norah Jones’ exotic background combined with the Putamayo choice mean something? If you didn’t know about the two CDs I bought locally, but only knew about the three I bought on iTunes would your conclusions be completely different?
How much of my privacy have I given up with this story?
I’m a stand-in for Ronni Bennett from Time Goes By in the Fem 2.0 Wake Up Campaign on work/life blog radio series. The program where I’ll be representing the elder blogger community is “Work/Life and Older Americans: Taking Care of Oneself & Others.” The discussion airs on Feb. 2 at Talk Shoe. Luckily, I’ll be the moderator and will be asking the questions rather than providing expertise on the topic of caregiving.
Others taking part in this discussion include host Kim Gandy, Deborah Halpern, Communications Director of National Family Caregivers Association, and Deborah Russell, Director of Workplace Issues of AARP.
The Fem 2.0 series of ten programs covers work life issues from every direction. Check the list of all the programs. The people involved are top notch and the discussions promise to be worth checking out. Take a look.
Fem2.0’s campaign, Wake Up, This Is the Reality!, aims to change the way our society talks about work, to shift the story away from privileged “balance” and corporate perspectives to one that reflects the reality on the ground for millions of Americans and American families. We need this shift if we want policy makers to know how tough it is out here and move them to act on legislation around such issues as paid sick days, healthcare, child and elder care, equal pay, etc.
To achieve this shift, we must be many and we must be LOUD.
If you have some insight to offer on the topic of work/life and older Americans you can participate in the blog radio event at Talk Shoe where you can submit comments and questions. After the blog radio programs are finished, there will be a blog carnival where posts from individual blogs can be submitted to Fem 2.0 for the carnival.
