On the Internet Your Reputation Really Does Proceed You

Your DFI (Digital First Impression) really does proceed you these days. Whether you are a person, place, brand, business or thing, people usually can look you up long before they meet or are considering you. Worried about your DFI or that of your kids as they prepare for the future? Take a look at some of the ways the damage can be done in this article called Your Reputation Online, Part 1. These days everything from where you went to school, what your political leanings are, who your friends are (and their candid remarks about you) and even nasty comments from former employers are all online along with every past legal entanglement, divorce, DUI, traffic ticket, or bits and pieces of the past that might have found their way into the police blotter in your local newspaper. Of course, we are all our own worst enemies, usually revealing more online in blogs and on social networking than even our enemies. Have you Goggled yourself lately to see what your DFI looks like?

A Survey Reveals Social Networkers Concerned About Digital Manners

A survey released last week by the Consumer Internet Barometer, a production of TNS and The Conference Board, found that common pet peeves among social networking regulars include lack of privacy and, more interestingly, lack of "manners." While the survey doesn't delve into much detail about what people mean by the lack of manners, it is not hard to conceive of what they might be thinking about. How do you turn down a friend request without hurting the requester's feelings? What happens if you categorize someone as a "teammate" when they consider you more of a close friend? How do you avoid offending someone who doesn't make the cut as one of your "top friends?" How do you politely ask your friend to stop bombarding you with countless invites for yet another application? When should you just pick up and give someone a call versus just blowing them off with a digital message? Would love to hear your thoughts on this in regard to you and your kids.

Flashy Facebook Page May Lower Privacy Walls

Facebook fanatics who have covered their profiles on the popular social networking site with silly games and quirky trivia quizzes may be unknowingly giving a host of strangers an intimate peek at their lives and those of visitors to their sites who take them up on the challenge to play. Every widget or application that is added to a site means handing over information to the developer of that software and suddenly large groups of people you don't even know can have access to your data and that of your friends. That's because MySpace and Facebook, the largest online social networks, let outside developers see a member's information when they add a program. More than 95 percent of Facebook users have installed at least one application, it seems. So think about keeping it simple - for not only your sake, but that of your friends. (This entry is linked to the Washington Post and can be accessed for free but you need to register.)

Where Are We in Internet Safety?

It seems as if we've been writing about online safety on the Web forever, and even before the Web became so popular we were writing about safety on online services. Are we getting anywhere with keeping our children safe online? Certainly there are more programs to keep kids safe today, but there are also more problems-probably because so many more people are online and kids have learned to get around the safety nets we put out for them. Like drugs, smoking, and alcohol abuse education, we've tried scare tactics, monitoring, and reasoning. With technology, we've also tried filtering. Through it all, we've learned that we (teachers and parents) are the best Internet filters, monitors, and guides for our children-better than any program. One of the problems we face is that kids think they know so much more than we do about the Internet and think we are overreacting when it comes to their safety online. So what do we do? Because we can't watch our students all the time, we have to educate them and hope that they'll make the right decisions when we are not there to watch. What else can we do? Ideas?

From Facebook to Blog in One Easy Click

A new software application allows users to export information from their Facebook  social networking account directly to their personal blog. Six Apart, steward of the TypePad blog publishing system, released Blog It, a software application that enables users to cross-post information on Facebook to blogs using software from most of the major blog hosting companies, such as WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, Vox and Movable Type. The Blog It application -- which must first be added to a user's Facebook site -- also allows users to instantly notify people in their social network about the post using Twitter and Pownce, text messaging services that send updates to buddy lists.

Of course this raises some digital permanence issues.  As content travels from social networking site to blog it may lose whatever privacy controls protect it from outsiders. Both adults and kids seem to forget that once info is online you lose all control over where goes and what it comes to look like.

Saudi Blogger Jailed

Most of us take our online freedom for granted so it's important to point out to kids that it doesn't exist everywhere in the world. Journalists who write stories contrary to the viewpoints of the ruling family in Saudi Arabia over the years have been banned and even forced to leave their country, but now the government has taken the unprecedented step of jailing a blogger for his dissident views. Fouad al-Farhan , 32, who blogged under his own name in the cause of "searching for freedom, dignity, justice, equality, public participation and other lost Islamic values,"was recently arrested and jailed for the content of his blog. His arrest sent shock waves through the blogging community in Saudi Arabia where this unfettered form of communication has been booming.

Dollars for Blogging

Writing a blog doesn't take much technical expertise, but it seems that all you need to do to make money from a blog is find a niche, get some good word of mouth, and then add a little advertising. Blogs, with as few as a couple of thousand readers a day, are beginning to generate extra pocket cash for their writers through advertisers willing to take the plunge.  One good example is MidtownLunch.com written by a guy who has found a following looking for a cheap lunch ($10 or less and preferably off a truck) in the midtown Manhattan area. So what's your special niche going to be?

Online Harassment - How Much Is There?

An Associated Press piece in the Baltimore Sun, Studies Spotlight Effect of Online Harassment, notes that finding statistics on cyberbullying is difficult. One problem is the way the questions about online communication are asked. Another problem is that what upsets some children may not upset others. A study on cyberbullying found that 1 in 3 children experienced bullying online, while another more recent study said that the percentage was 1 in every 10 children. No matter what the percentage is, cyberbullying, like bullying in person, continues to be a problem in schools and neighborhoods. It is interesting that one of these studies found that most (64%) children who are bullied online aren't also bullied in person and that most online bullying consists of brief encounters. Encounters that continue, according to the article, might better be termed harassment rather than cyberbullyig. With all this in mind, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention is attempting to study how electronic communication (email, text messaging, blogging, social networking, instant messaging etc.) affects children.

Teaching and Learning in School 2.0

Tim Fish, Academic Program Director, McDonogh School in Maryland, is a tech educator who keeps his school on the cutting edge of technology in education. In a recent talk at the Baltimore Convention Center he led and audience of teachers and administrators from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 to School 2.0. Fish began by showing how, easy it was for him, when using the Internet, to identify and download a piece of music he'd heard on the radio. When he mentioned this to his children, they weren't at all impressed. Why? Because Web 1.0 was old stuff to them and finding information is so Web 1.0. Today's kids are living in the interactive world of Web 2.0, which means our teaching needs to move there as well. Linear learning is not what many of today's students do best; multitasking is. In the talk, Fish shared his ideas about what all this means to educators and what the core values of School 2.0 are. Start your 2.0 educational thinking with words like: evolving, interactive, collaborative, creative, flexible, global, personal, and essential. Will our schools be able to change if we don't change ourselves?

YouTube and the Elections

It's hard to believe that something that wasn't even around for the last set of elections seems to be the be-all and end-all for the one upcoming in 2008. And what is IT? Why the ubiquitous YouTube, which seems to be everywhere these days and is even featured in product ads for the new iPhone as well as car insurance come-ons. Politicians have come to learn to fear and revere the video-sharing Web site that has become a vital part of the campaign for the 2008 U.S. presidential election. From disseminating spoofs like the "I've Got a Crush...On Obama" video we wrote about on an earlier occasion, to showcasing political gaffs that can be played over and over again to the delight of voters, YouTube is also a source of information that the candidates want to get out to the voters. Now YouTube is sponsoring candidate debates with CNN where people are being asked to send in videos with questions for the candidates.

Whether you are rolling your eyes at this news or thinking about making your own video to send in, this injection of technology into a campaign bears watching.  It also means, as we have commented on before, that helping kids understand what's real and what's a spoof is going to be a media literacy skill that needs to be practiced over and over again.