Privacy or No privacy...that is the question.

Facebook Shuts Down RSS Feed App
By Marshall Kirkpatrick on Info Architecture

Google Latitude Comes to More Locations: Google Talk and Your Blog
By Frederic Lardinois on News

These two new posts were in my Bloglines box today. I found it amusing that one (Kirkpatrick)was raising Cain about Facebook's cutting out the opportunity to make sharing data easier and the other was really worried about Googles new "locator" that provides information about where you are by city or longitude, latitude.

Sounds like we're caught between a rock and a hard place. I struggle to understand all the techy type details but one thing is for sure you can't have it both ways. Either my information is secure and I can choose when I share and when I don't OR it's not and I lose control of who can access my information and what they do with it. Maybe that's an oversimplification but I hope we continue to err on the side of secure at the level I choose.

I wonder if Frederic and Marshall read each other's posts...maybe we're talking about apples and oranges but the more data I share on various sites the more I have concerns about where it's going. I think it's even a little creepy to have a website suggest a "friend". Perhaps that's because I'm not a digital native. Let me know what you think. As always. Thanks for listening, Leslie

Thing 16

I was unable to locate the 23 Things spreadsheet but I did upload a document of my own and explore the possibilities of sharing. I did discover that Word 07 docs won't load you must save in the compatability mode. I wonder about having multiple editors on one document - do they all have the same rights? I'd like to try that out with a group. I've been listening to conversations in IS about the google doc they use to track the work liaisons do in districts do I've seen an example of how that can work. Look forward to trying it. As always, thanks for listening. Leslie

Thing 9

So call me lazy - rather than think up an answer here is a great quote about YouTube from Alex Iskold: Great Blog - here's the URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/is_youtube_the_next_google.php

"Like any search engine, YouTube is not perfect. In general, short queries on generic topics, like Astrophysics, do not work very well. Somewhat surprisingly, George Washington and Chicken Noodle Soup do not yield good results either. But some searches do work very well. Ian said that his son frequently searches for episodes of Bakugan, which come up perfectly. Another likely search for a 9-year-old, Lance Wataru (a Pokemon character), works well, too. More specific searches, such as Donkey from Shrek, work even better. Anything that can be a video will be a video
I walked away with the impression that we are not quite there yet, but was intrigued. Clearly a lot of things lend themselves to video, not just movies and music clips, but educational videos, tourism and a lot of other things. If video content continues to grow, could video eventually replace text?
Most likely not. The main reason that text rules the web today is because of hyperlinks. Linking pages via text links is what makes the web possible. Hyperlinking videos would be a harder thing to do. Not impossible, of course, because you can link objects and insert text in videos, but it's just not as elegant as text. Besides the linking issue, not everything would be an effective video. For example, a research paper could be made into a video but would not be as easy to follow as the text."

All that said - YouTube has its uses but how do you know what you're getting. For a site "leaning towards entertainment" I'm not ready to say open the floodgates and let YouTube in the classroom. As always thanks for listening. Leslie