The big movement in web communities recently, or so says Time Magazine, has been user generated content. Whether it’s YouTube’s video extravaganza, blogging, or photo sharing from Flickr, the goal has been sharing information about yourself. But user generated content has an elder sibling which I have to confess to finding a bit more interesting — community created content. Forums have a long history of creating complex content through the interactions and information sharing behaviors of their members.
MyBlogLog has created a recent stir in the blogging communities by providing an easy way to connect bloggers with their own communities - essentially creating a community of blogs. This expansion of the two-way blogger/commenter relationship into a more three-dimensional interaction has a lot of potential. Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) recently wrote (in a comment):
This is a good example of the benefits of a blog community - not only can blog readers find out about me and my interests, but I have a way of finding out more about my blog readers. And, as I’ve found in this case, readers who are interested in what I am blogging about might themselves blog on topics which interest me.
Not every reader of your blog will comment. Not every reader will have a MyBlogLog account. However, the interesting combination of readers and fellow bloggers creates a unique collaboration. Rather than having pure statistics - knowing you’ve been visited by 48 people, 65 percent of whom used Internet Explorer and so on, you have a small insertion of real human data in your statistics. MyBlogLog can tell you that this person actually visited your blog and that person admires you enough to have added you to their contacts.
Really, it’s pretty cool.
Google Privacy is not a fancy new Google service. (Nice idea - personalized privacy management of your Google Account - I like it.) Nonetheless, doesn’t exist. The privacy of your information at Google is the subject of an investigation by the Norwegian Data inspectorate, along with privacy concerns at several other Norwegian search engines. This organization is attempting to answer a few specific questions, according to Pandia.com:
Well…maybe specific isn’t quite the right word, actually. The quote from the Pandia article, by Senior Engineer Atle Arnes of the Inspectorate, asks:
“Why do the search engine store the IP addresses [of searchers] for so long and are they using them for?”
This is actually a pretty wide-reaching query - I’d certainly be very curious to see the answer to the second part of the question. Somehow, however, I suspect that Google’s answers won’t be leaked very far out into the public unless they obfuscate any interesting part of the answer. Of course, it’s entirely possible that what Google does with the information they collect is nothing, but I think few people would believe that.
Privacy is a chronic concern in the Internet age. There’s no question that the information available to search engines can easily identify a person associated with their queries, even without any IP address or other uniquely identifying information. What the holder’s of this information will do with it is a curious question.
In theory, Google employees could know my calendar, my bank information, have access to my email, my search history, have indexed my hard drive, and know what websites I’m affiliated with and have webmaster privileges for. That’s a LOT of information.
What does Google know about you?
Question: does reprinting and republication in a new format give the publisher rights to control the use of a public domain work?
Answer: not under current copyright law!
But Google would like it to. In their Google Book Search, they’ve included text placing restrictions on use of the books which they’re making available. It’s not necessarily legal: but what is written can frequently be accepted as law by any user without knowledge of the laws surrounding copyright.
Philipp Lenssen is challenging this position. Good luck, Philip!