BLOGGING AND PUBLIC/PRIVATE

Given the personal nature of many blogs, i'm often asked why bloggers put so much material out for the public to see. If you haven't visited lately, go to the local mall or any popular teen hangout in your hometown. Feel yourself twitch at the sight of teens romping around in contemporary fashion which shows off much bare skin. Teen fashion has always given adults heart attacks. Why do teens parade around in such costumes? The reason is very similar to why bloggers put material out there. A huge part of identity development is performing for the public in order to experience reactions. You figure out the barriers, you work out what is acceptable. This is how you learn the rules of social interaction.
While this behavior is most visible amongst teens, aspects of it are prevalent in adult culture as well. In particular, think about times when you were frustrated with your boss, partner or children. Have you ever created little experiments just to see how someone would react? Tested the boundaries by doing something that was "not you"? This is part of the same psychology.
Blogs let people work through identity issues by testing things out, but giving them a mirror in which to reflect on their own performance.
Additionally, social performance games help us find like minds. We see this in everyday life too. In BDSM subcultures, handkerchiefs that signal sexual proclivities have been around a long time. If you don't know what a particular handkerchief means, that's fine - it wasn't meant for you anyhow. But even outside of subcultural signals, our dress codes and mannerisms convey a lot about us and i'm sure you've used those cues even here to find people who might share your interests and values.
Many bloggers want to find others who have something in common. They want serendipitous interactions. They perform as digital flaneurs, to see and be seen. They want to be public. But only so public.
Unfortunately, most people's model of what it means to be public comes from the public square. We know when we can be overheard in the park, but that's ok. If someone joins in, perhaps they have something valuable to say. And perhaps we'll speak just a wee bit louder than we need to in order to encourage that. But in the public park, we know the risks and we know how to make certain that the wrong people don't overhear.
The problem is that the web is not the public park. Thanks to persistence and search-ability, there are multiple degrees of public-ness. And then, of course, thanks to PATRIOT, there are unannounced voyeurs. People are not accustomed to this - how do we perform for unknown audiences or to be overheard years from now or by people that we can't see? This is not part of our mental model. We don't have an understanding of what it means to speak to all people across all time at once. Or to speak to people we can't see or even imagine.
The typical response that i get is that we need to get over it, privacy is dead. We should teach bloggers that they are in public. But bloggers aren't naive - they know they're talking in public and they view the benefits of being public as more important than the risks. Honestly, the only way to really model the potential risks is through complete and utter paranoia. And frankly, who really wants to live like that? We simply do not have the cognitive models to really understand the heightened state of public-ness that we've created. It's not about knowing what it means to be public because it's not like any public we've seen before.
So what do we do? How do we learn to negotiate layered publics? This goes far beyond PATRIOT. It is not simply about the backdoors that governments want to install to spy on their people. It's about the ways in which people can negotiate multiple social contexts simultaneously. It's about learning how to manage invisible and potential audiences instead. It's about changing every social rule that we've learned since childhood.

SO WHY SHOULD LIBRARIANS CARE?
Blogging presents all sorts of interesting challenges that are relevant to librarians. The privacy issues are obvious and librarians have already set the stage through their response to PATRIOT. The question is - how do we go beyond resistance to political agendas and provide people with the necessary tools?
Beyond privacy, there are access issues. The flood of self-produced content is overwhelming, making it very difficult to navigate and find relevant or desired information. For the most part, search companies are banking on their technology to solve this access scaling problem. Unfortunately, their approach has severe limitations.
Currently, search companies do not handle inconsistent data types, make good sense out of metadata, understand the context in which information is produced, know how to handle temporally dependent data, or understand the difference between information and communication.
Bloggers have completely clogged page rank algorithms. As a result, i'm the top result on far too many things simply because i blogged about it once. Posts that i wrote in 1997 still receive daily comments because, in search, they are seen as just as significant as the post i wrote yesterday. I write about disconnected things but the algorithms collapse those items and seem to think that they are connected to each other. All of this makes no sense. While blog search tools have been on the market for years, this doesn't eliminate the problems in main search engines.
Blogs are seen as information instead of communication or identity production. This creates all sorts of peculiarities about trust and reputation. There is a difference between publishing something as original, thought-out work and performing your mental wanderings. I'm an academic - i do publish. But i don't see my blog as the same as my academic works. Yet, whenever you search for topics that i research, my blog comes up long before my published work, mostly because publishers have tried so hard to lock down this material behind walled gardens.
Search has a tendency to flatten all sorts of contexts. Think back at when Deja came out to search all of Usenet. Suddenly, a very intimate conversation about the Gaza Strip in soc.culture.israel is seen on the same page as alt.politics. Those two groups assume very different intentions, but search says that they are equally important and relevant. This is even more visible when you are searching for people. Suddenly, conversations that you're having in alt.sex.bondage and comp.lang.perl are connected. How do you expect people to work on impression management when they cannot maintain social boundaries?
Blog access is faced with this dilemma as well - how do you actually provide context and meaning? How do you deal with the removal of temporal information? How do you explain that a post was intended for an audience when search introduces an entirely different one? How do you negotiate audiences who don't understand your intended context?
Yesterday, a stranger found my blog through a search for Kanye West. The anonymous commenter decided to tell me that i was just an "ignorant freeloader who [relies] on some b.s. 'slave story' that [my] grandmommy told [me] about her grandmommy." Having become accustomed to such comments, i just ignored this. But suddenly, all of my blog readers who know me and come to my blog because they agree with me got offended and a flame war began. How can we create safe space for conversation? Social walls have value in letting people know the context in which they are speaking.
Many of the problems presented by blogs are not new - they're simply bigger and more visible. But technology is not solving this problem. These are social information issues, not technological ones.

REMIX CULTURE
There's another aspect of blogging that i think is critical and that has to do with its distribution power. Because blogs are networked identity productions, memes spread fast. Things that are of value to one person get replicated on blog after blog and it becomes a huge distribution channel. This has great implications for information distribution, but there's a component of this that is currently under attack. And that is remix culture.
Remix has been around a long time in lots of different forms. There's the above ground forms such as edited book collections and CD compilations, but there are also underground forms. Like blogs, underground remix is primarily about communication and identity production. Underground remix occurs when you take cultural elements from one source and mix it up with other sources to produce something expressive. Fan fiction is a form of remix where people write new narratives using well-known cultural characters such as Harry Potter or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One form of musical remix involves taking recordings of political statements, slicing them up and mixing them on top of musical tracks to make a particular message. For example, the Rx has just released a new song called "White Lines" that remixes commentary by George W. Bush into a song preaching the wonders of cocaine. Remix includes every form of media, from pictures to movies, text to audio. Remix allows people to express themselves.
People often assume that remix is simply an artistic production that abuses copyright. Rather than seeing remix as bi-products of cultural consumption, we turn their creators into artists. Honestly, was yesterday's remix of "It's the End of the World" art? I would argue that remix is primarily about communication. Remix lets people react to culture and politics, share their beliefs and find like minds.
Blogs serve as a massive distribution channel for remix. Do a search for "George Bush Don't Like Black People" and you'll see blog after blog sharing the link to the Legendary K.O.'s remix of Kanye West's statement and other commentary on the state of New Orleans. The problem with this is that blogs are not underground and their persistence puts this form of cultural communication at risk. Do you think that LITA got copyright permission from R.E.M.? What happens when a remix becomes very popular online? Those people run the risk of the attacks by copyright owners who think that they are destroying their property. Remix is cultural currency and blogs are distributors; they are engaged in acts of freedom of speech. But what if it isn't seen this way?

GOOGLE, BLOGGING AND REMIX - TYING IT TOGETHER
It wasn't so long ago that librarians were seen as pirates. How dare you let people take books for free? And make copies!?!? You are all a bunch of thieves!
Guess what? The search companies and bloggers are under the same attacks right now. The lawsuit against Google Print is breaking my heart. I spent years staring at my bookshelves, trying to practice witchcraft by screaming "grep" over and over again, praying that the right book would pop out. When Amazon first launched search inside a book during my final exams two years ago, i broke down crying. Finally i could find lost references and search the 700+ tombs scattered across my room. I begged every author i knew to make this service available on their books. And yet, two years have gone by and only about a tenth of my books are searchable. Why? Why? Why? We have the technology to do this but Google and Amazon are being called pirates and a thieves.
People have been using new media to communicate for as long as i can remember. In sixth grade, we gave mixed tapes for Valentine's Day. Did we think of ourselves as DJs? Certainly not! We were expressing our youthful perception of our relationship to our Valentine. Today, we are making our political values known, joking around with culture and collapsing the relationship between consumption and production. Technology is emerging to let us express ourselves through audio and video, to remix ourselves into culture. And yet, remixers everywhere are under attack because their acts have become too mainstream, too public. Technology has made culture far too visible, creating the best and worst kinds of voyeurs.
It is easy to stand back and say "not our problem" but search companies, bloggers and remixers are going through the same battle that librarians have had for years. I think about the librarians i know and the ones whose voices i read in the blogosphere. Librarians are some of the best spokespeople for civil liberties. Please, i beg you, don't turn your back on others engaged in the same information distribution activities as yourself. Google is not your enemy simply because it has capitalistic goals and is run by cocky boys with their machines. Remixers are not your enemy simply because they are primarily punk-ass kids. And bloggers are not your enemy simply because they have no shame in disagreeing impolitely in public. We all run by different rules but we all have the same goals in mind. My only request is that you don your eye-patch, practice your arrrr's and help protect the distribution of information in all its forms.

Facebook time wasting activities ?

We all knew it; however, the statement seems more valid after Daily Time’s this survey that concludes:

Pakistani office going community loves the Facebook, the most, out of all other time wasting activities.

The previous office time waster king was the MSN, Yahoo Messengers but over the years web applications have been developed that diverted the Internet traffic from these messengers.

These days, Twitter, online video games and popular video search engine Youtube are among the top office time wasters, noted Daily Times.

But even the bosses know that blocking these web sites would create frustration among the employees as they get a chance to refresh themselves just by checking their account on Facebook for a few minutes.

You may consider blocking Facebook, if you are boss and if you feel like a lot of amusement going around with less work in your office.

Interestingly, the people contacted for comments, wished not to be named as it could affect the repute of their organizations and they would be termed as “less professional”.

Work Place vs Social Technology

Surfing the net at work for pleasure actually increases our concentration levels and helps make a more productive workforce, according to a new University of Melbourne study.

Dr Brent Coker, from the Department of Management and Marketing, says that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t.

“People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says.

“Firms spend millions on software to block their employees from watching videos on YouTube, using social networking sites like Facebook or shopping online under the pretense that it costs millions in lost productivity, however that’s not always the case.”

According to the study of 300 workers, 70% of people who use the Internet at work engage in WILB. Among the most popular WILB activities are searching for information about products, reading online news sites. Playing online games was the fifth most popular, while watching YouTube movies was seventh.

The attraction of WILB, according to Dr Coker, can be attributed to people’s imperfect concentration. “People need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Think back to when you were in class listening to a lecture – after about 20 minutes your concentration probably went right down, yet after a break your concentration was restored.

“It’s the same in the work place. Short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity.”

However Dr Coker says that it is important such browsing is done in moderation, as internet addiction can have the reverse effect. “Approximately 14% of internet users in Australia show signs of Internet Addiction – they don’t take breaks at appropriate times, they spend more than a ‘normal’ amount of time online, and can get irritable if they are interrupted while surfing.”

“WILB is not as helpful for this group of people – those who behave with internet addiction tendencies will have a lower productivity than those without.”

Source

Danger of Web Attacks Safe Your Network

The problem of Web-borne threats is not theoretical: millions of users have been impacted and the threat is getting worse. Today, Web threats are more numerous and more virulent than those that are delivered in email, and it is easier to be infected by them. Further, blended threats in which links to malicious Web sites are delivered in email, instant messages or through social networking communications are becoming more popular, making the simple act of Web surfing a potentially devastating threat to corporate networks and security.

The problem is going to get worse for two reasons:

• Most Web pages and sites are not adequately protected from infection, such as SQL injection attacks or cross-site scripting, leaving them vulnerable to exploitation by malware authors.

• Defenses against Web-borne threats are not as extensive as those protecting organizations from threats delivered through email.

• When presented with a threat delivered through email or instant messaging, users generally have to do something, such as click on a link in a message – with Webbased threats, nothing more than visiting a Web page is required to become infected.

However, the Web is also fraught with risks, such as malware that can be downloaded to a network or an individual’s computer by doing nothing more than simply visiting a Web site. 

Further, even Web sites that are legitimate for use in a business context can serve as a source of these threats there are thousands of examples of otherwise valid Web pages and entire sites that have become a source of malware ranging from simple keystroke loggers to much more malicious content.

After email, the World Wide Web is among the most important tools available to people who use a computer as they perform their job. It offers a ready source of current information, an infrastructure for developing various types of content, and a platform for communications and collaboration.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

Clearly, every organization must do something to protect itself against these threats. Among the many things that can be done is to implement any of the growing number of Web security capabilities that are available. While on-premise solutions are available that will provide robust protection against Web threats, hosted solutions offer some unique advantages, including lower costs, more proactive threat protection, lower impacts on bandwidth and storage, and the ability to free IT staff for activities that might provide more

value to an organization. 

THE WEB REPRESENTS A GROWING THREAT VECTOR

For the past several years, email has represented the most serious threat vector for organizations of all sizes – viruses, worms and other forms of malware have all been delivered via email for many years. However, Web-borne malware is now more common than malware that enters an organization through email as demonstrated by the following statistics from MessageLabs Intelligence Reports:

• Email-borne malware dropped from 0.85% of all email in 2007 to 0.70% in 2008.

• The number of Web sites that carry malware increased from 1,068 new sites discovered per day in January 2008 to 5,424 per day in October 2008, an increase of more than 400% in just nine months.

• In July 2008, 83.4% of all the Web-based malware intercepted was newly discovered as a result of an increased number of SQL injection attacks. 

One of the fundamental problems with Web-based attacks is that literally hundreds of thousands of Web sites can serve as infection points – even legitimate Web sites can infect a network. For example, the Web sites of Business Week1, the Miami Dolphins2, Audi Taiwan3 and the United Nations4 have all been infected during the past few years, infecting visitors who do nothing more than view the content on these sites.

Further, new Web sites are created every day and search engines can make virtually countless numbers of Web sites available in real time that will not be pre-screened by many conventional Web-filtering solutions. For example, during the 24 hour-period ended March 9, 2009, more than 125,000 new domains came online5, representing the potential for well over one million new Web pages, any of which can be harboring an infection that can impact corporate networks and individual computers.

THERE ARE A VARIETY OF NEGATIVE IMPACTS

What can happen as a result of an infection that originates from simply visiting an infected Web page? The quite serious consequences include:

• Malware can be downloaded automatically that can intercept keystrokes or other sensitive content. The result can be loss of login credential and consequent use by hackers, loss of financial information or trade secrets, and otherwise compromised network security.

• Bandwidth and network performance can become strained as malware, bots and other malicious content uses bandwidth in the corporate network. The result can be poor network performance, slow email delivery, and slow Web access.

• Storage costs increase because of spyware downloads and other malicious content occupying taking space on the corporate network. 

Further, mobile and remote users are making the problem worse because many of the endpoints, such as mobile devices or home computers that access corporate networks, are not adequately protected against Web-borne threats and so represent an ingress point for all sorts of malicious content.

What Can You Do About the Problem?

There are a variety of things that organizations can do to address the growing problem of 

Web-based threats, although some of the practices and procedures that organizations can 

implement will be more effective than others.

MAKE POLICIES FOR EMPLOYEE USE OF THE WEB

One of the first and most important things that organizations should do to address the Web 

threat problem is establish formal and detailed policies for their employee’s use of the 

Web. Many organizations do not have adequate Web-use policies, if they have them at 

all. Any employee-focused policy on use of the Web should address the types of Web sites 

that employees are allowed to visit and 

those that are not permissible. Obviously,or

anizations may also want to 

ban non-business sites, as well. Various 

s

tudies over the years have found.

ESTABLISH WEB ANTI-VIRUS AND ANTI-SPYWARE PROTECTION

However, policies for appropriate use of the Web – no matter how specific they are, how 

well they are followed or how well they are enforced – cannot prevent most malware from 

entering a corporate network. As noted earlier, even legitimate, business-oriented Web 

sites have been subject to SQL injection attacks and other forms of infection, and so antivirus 

and anti-spyware tools must be deployed throughout the network. Preferably, these 

capabilities will be deployed both at the server or gateway level and also at the end user 

level. Deploying these capabilities on individual desktop machines, laptops and mobile 

devices will provide the added benefit of protecting against threats that might enter via a 

USB storage device or from a CD-ROM that a user brings from home, for example.

BLOCK NON-BUSINESS-RELATED WEB SITES

Another option that should be considered is the deployment of URL filtering tools that will 

block access to non-approved Web sites. Many organizations have deployed these filters, 

albeit with varying levels of success. While URL filters can be useful, they can rarely keep 

up with the new threats that enter the Web on an hourly basis and for which no signature 

has been created in the tool. Further, URL filters can generate significant levels of false 

positives – blocking Web sites that appear to be suspicious but might have a legitimate 

business purpose.

FILTER CONTENT FOR UNWANTED FILE TYPES

Another capability that can be implemented in an effort to block Web-based threats is 

content filtering designed to block unwanted file types. Blocking file types based on their 

content can be useful in preventing some types of Web threats from entering a network, 

particularly files that are traditionally known to be associated with malware, such as .scr 

or .pif. These systems can also block file types that are generally not used in a legitimate 

business context, such as .mp3, .jpg or .mov files. In addition to preventing some Web 

threats from entering a network, content filtering tools provide the added benefit of storage 

and bandwidth savings by blocking audio, video and other files that can consume large 

quantities of both.