This has been one of those weeks in which every­thing I’m read­ing seems related and is click­ing for me. It’s got my mind churn­ing, and I’m still not sure what to think of it all.

The first is from Will Richard­son and is titled The End of Books (At Least, For Me?), a provoca­tive state­ment to be sure. Don’t panic — it’s not really about the end of books, just print books for his own use.

“Turns out my iPad Kin­dle app syncs up all of my high­lights and notes to my Ama­zon account. Who knew? When I finally got to the page Ted pointed me to in my own account, the page that listed every high­light and every note that I had taken on my Kin­dle ver­sion of John Seely Brown’s new book Pull, I could only think two words:

Game. Changer.

All of a sud­den, by read­ing the book elec­tron­i­cally as opposed to in print, I now have:

• all of the most rel­e­vant, thought-provoking pas­sages from the book listed on one web page, as in my own con­densed ver­sion of just the best pieces
• all of my notes and reflec­tions attached to those indi­vid­ual notes
• the abil­ity to copy and paste all of those notes and high­lights into Ever­note which makes them search­able, editable, orga­ni­z­able, con­nectable and remixable
• the abil­ity to access my book notes and high­lights from any­where I have an Inter­net connection.

Game. Changer.

I keep think­ing, what if I had every note and high­light that I had ever taken in a paper book avail­able to search through, to con­nect with other sim­i­lar ideas from other books, to syn­the­size electronically?…”

Hon­estly, I didn’t know about this, either, and I’m now seri­ously con­sid­er­ing going back to read­ing non­fic­tion on my Kin­dle, some­thing I had stopped doing when I couldn’t get at my high­lights and free them. As far as I was con­cerned, they were bricked text. But I logged in at http://kindle.amazon.com and sure enough, there were the high­lights from the three non­fic­tion books I’d read on my Kindle.

On the one hand, this is incred­i­bly appeal­ing, to have all of the excerpts I’ve high­lighted as inter­est­ing to me acces­si­ble, search­able, and remix­able. Really appeal­ing, and the fact that I can now get text out of Kin­dle books makes it a plat­form I may be more will­ing to deal with again, although the inabil­ity to share a book with a friend is still caus­ing some hesitation.

As I began con­tem­plat­ing this, I read Steven Johnson’s recent post, The Glass Box and Com­mon­place Book. It really res­onated with me on a num­ber of lev­els. First, John­son revives the idea of the “com­mon­place book.”

“Schol­ars, ama­teur sci­en­tists, aspir­ing men of letters—just about any­one with intel­lec­tual ambi­tion in the sev­en­teenth and eigh­teenth cen­turies was likely to keep a com­mon­place book. In its most cus­tom­ary form, ‘com­mon­plac­ing,’ as it was called, involved tran­scrib­ing inter­est­ing or inspi­ra­tional pas­sages from one’s read­ing, assem­bling a per­son­al­ized ency­clo­pe­dia of quo­ta­tions. It was a kind of soli­tary ver­sion of the orig­i­nal web logs: an archive of inter­est­ing tid­bits that one encoun­tered dur­ing one’s tex­tual browsing.”

He then goes on to talk about a major prob­lem with the iPad, the way it locks down text (includ­ing pub­lic domain works) in a way that pre­vents users from cre­at­ing their own com­mon­place books.

“[when you try to copy a para­graph of text] …you get the famil­iar iPhone-style clip­ping han­dles, and you get two options ‘High­light’ and’“Bookmark.’ But you can’t actu­ally copy the text, to paste it into your own pri­vate com­mon­place book, or email it to a friend, or blog about it. And of course there’s no way to link to it. What’s worse: the book in ques­tion is Penguin’s edi­tion of Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the pub­lic domain. Those are our words on that screen. We have a right to them.”

John­son then goes on to describe (in a much more artic­u­late way than I’ve been able to) what both­ers me so much about the iPhone and iPad.

“We can try to put a pro­tec­tive layer of glass of the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all bet­ter off when words are allowed to net­work with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trou­ble to build machines capa­ble of dis­play­ing dig­i­tal text if we can’t exploit the basic inter­ac­tiv­ity of that text?… Yes, the iPad makes it eas­ier to carry around a dozen books and mag­a­zines, but that’s not the only promise of the tech­nol­ogy. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forg­ing new links of asso­ci­a­tion, remix­ing them. We have all the tools at our dis­posal to cre­ate com­mon­place books that would astound Locke and Jef­fer­son. And yet we are, delib­er­ately, try­ing to crawl back into the glass box.

…When your dig­i­tal news feed doesn’t con­tain links, when it can­not be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a para­graph and paste it into another appli­ca­tion: when this hap­pens your news feed is not flawed or back­wards look­ing or frus­trat­ing. It is bro­ken.

The force that enables these unlikely encoun­ters between peo­ple of dif­fer­ent per­sua­sions, the force that makes the web a space of serendip­ity and dis­cov­ery, is pre­cisely the open, com­bi­na­to­r­ial, con­nec­tive nature of the medium. So when we choose to take our text out of that medium, when we keep our words from being copied, linked, indexed, that’s a choice with real civic con­se­quences that are not to be taken lightly.”

And that’s a huge deal­breaker for me. Make no mis­take — apps are just soft­ware. I’m lucky enough to have the entire inter­net at my fin­ger­tips, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to buy an inter­face to it for which one com­pany con­trols what soft­ware I can use to access the great, big, beau­ti­ful web (in this case, Apple, but there are other prod­ucts with this same prob­lem). I don’t take that lightly at all, espe­cially when I read things like David Lankes’ bril­liant take on what net­worked text could be like. Of course, your mileage may vary, and you may not have the prob­lem with these closed sys­tems that I do (and it’s not just with Apple), but that’s my per­sonal value. John­son would fully sup­port Will Richardson’s right to cre­ate his com­mon­place book, as do I.

While syn­the­siz­ing my reac­tions to both of these posts, I started read­ing Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gad­get. I’m only a few chap­ters into it, but it’s already extend­ing how I think about Face­book (a sub­ject for another post) and the iPhone/iPad.

One of Lanier’s con­cerns is how deci­sions made in the design of our dig­i­tal tools lock us in to behav­iors that reduce — and even remove — our human­ity. For the ebook con­text, an alter­na­tive title for his book could have been “You Are Not an App.” It’s really tough to quote excerpts from the book with­out los­ing a lot of con­text and his sup­port­ing argu­ments, but the fol­low­ing excerpts are a glimpse.

“We shouldn’t seek to make the pack men­tal­ity as effi­cient as pos­si­ble. We should instead seek to inspire the phe­nom­e­non of indi­vid­ual intel­li­gence. (p.5)

Lock-in makes us for­get the lost free­doms we had in the dig­i­tal past. That can make it harder to see the free­doms we have in the dig­i­tal present. For­tu­nately, dif­fi­cult as it is, we can still try to change some expres­sions of phi­los­o­phy that are on the verge of becom­ing locked in place in the tools we use to under­stand one another and the world.” (p.14)

Lanier takes an oppo­site approach to where Richard­son is headed. Will is going to end up with Johnson’s com­mon­place book in dig­i­tal form, and that’s extremely appeal­ing to him. I totally under­stand why, and it’s great if that works well for him. How­ever, it’s inter­est­ing to read how Lanier wor­ries about this kind of future and the impact it will have on all of us and our very human­ity. What might we lose in the process of dig­i­tiz­ing every book and mak­ing the con­tent avail­able as unan­chored bytes?

“If the books in the cloud are accessed via user inter­faces that encour­age mashups of frag­ments that obscure the con­text and author­ship of each frag­ment, there will be only one book. (p.46)”

It’s not an argu­ment for a closed sys­tem, just bet­ter and more thought­ful options, inter­ac­tions, delin­eation of author­ship, etc., and I can’t dis­agree with that. What will the civic con­se­quences be of Richardson’s com­mon­place book (or mine, if I go down that path)? Can text be too net­worked? Are there any clues to this in how we cur­rently use our full text data­bases, where we’ve already dig­i­tized every bit and made it remixable?

Over­all, I don’t agree with 100% of any­thing any of these gen­tle­man have writ­ten (although I come pretty close with John­son). They’ve all con­tributed to a very thought-provoking week for me and I really appre­ci­ate that. I’m still try­ing to work through a lot of this in my own mind, and other than the fact that I’m against devices that lock me in to their vision of the inter­net, I’m still not sure where I really come down in this whole thing.

And what’s the sig­nif­i­cance for libraries? I’m not sure how much Will Richard­son uses libraries now, but what does it mean when he can net­work the text from his Kin­dle but his library can’t cir­cu­late any con­tent to it? That’s also a design deci­sion (made by pub­lish­ers) with very spe­cific civic consequences.

John­son ends his post by call­ing on jour­nal­ists, edu­ca­tors, pub­lish­ers, and soft­ware devel­op­ers to fight for com­mon places (not glass boxes) and con­nec­tions. What respon­si­bil­i­ties do libraries have to pre­vent the civic con­se­quences he describes? In the pages I’ve read so far, Lanier encour­ages devel­op­ers to think care­fully about the behav­iors their prod­ucts lock peo­ple into — does that include libraries? How can we help main­tain com­mon­place books in a world of dig­i­tal text while still main­tain­ing the edges of author­ship? Do we as librar­i­ans really want to pro­mote the iPad’s lock-in, espe­cially if we’re not explain­ing those civic con­se­quences to the next gen­er­a­tion of read­ers and con­tent generators?

At this point, I have a lot more ques­tions than answers.

I’m one of the many peo­ple who doesn’t like some of the recent changes to Facebook’s default pri­vacy set­tings, and I agree com­pletely with Anil Dash that if those defaults aren’t good enough for Mark Zucker­berg, then maybe they should be changed.

How­ever, I think I’ve dis­cov­ered a way to par­tic­i­pate on Face­book with my friends and still be com­pletely hid­den from the web, even more so than in the past, but I need your help to fig­ure out what’s going on.

A cou­ple of days ago, by pure chance I noticed that the pub­lic ver­sion of my Face­book pro­file had dis­ap­peared from Google’s search results com­pletely. If you’d searched for me in the past, you would have got­ten a link to my pub­lic pro­file, which dis­played my name, pic­ture, friends list, some groups I belong to, and (I think) some pages I’ve fanned.

After this week’s changes to Facebook’s defaults, how­ever, that pro­file no longer comes up at all in a search on Google or Bing. In fact, if you’re not logged in to Face­book and you click on a link to my pro­file with my per­sonal URL (which I assure you does still exist), you’ll get a “page not found” error.

I’ve con­firmed this with oth­ers, even peo­ple who I’m friends with on Face­book. If you’re logged out, there’s no way to get to my pro­file. My the­ory is that one of two things is caus­ing this to happen.

1. I’ve always been wary of pro­vid­ing Face­book with too much infor­ma­tion, so I never filled out any interests.
2. A cou­ple of days ago, I went to Face­book to read my feed and got a popup win­dow ask­ing me to link my pro­file to one of the pages for my high school, col­lege, grad­u­ate school, and my city net­work. I didn’t want to do that, so I clicked on the “ask me later” but­ton, which should mean I’m not part of any net­works right now.

I’m sure Face­book thinks it’s pun­ish­ing me for not par­tic­i­pat­ing in its new adver­tis­ing sys­tem, but this is a pretty sweet spot for me to be in because my Face­book account is one of the very few that I truly keep pri­vate and where I’m only adding “friends” now (as opposed to any­one who friends me). I get to par­tic­i­pate with my friends the way I always have and don’t have to deal with all of the new “like” crud and pri­vacy issues. And I think any true friends can still find me, as I believe that any­one logged in to Face­book can still find my pro­file. In fact, I think I’m still show­ing up on other peo­ples’ “rec­om­men­da­tions” side­bar, because I’m still get­ting friend requests from peo­ple I don’t really know.

This is great, and I’m very happy with this setup, inad­ver­tent as I think Face­book meant it to be. I’m also not will­ing to change it to test what’s caus­ing it, so this is where I need your help. I don’t want to add any inter­ests or link my pro­file to a net­work in order to find out if that changes any­thing, because I may not be able to undo the change. So I’m ask­ing for your help in answer­ing the fol­low­ing ques­tions so that we can all fig­ure out what’s going on. Hope­fully those of us who want to be pri­vate on Face­book can truly do that now. It would also be help­ful to have this infor­ma­tion so that we know if/when Face­book fig­ures this out and changes it.

Please leave answers in the com­ments, and thanks for your help!

1. If you’re logged out of Face­book, can you see my pro­file? http://facebook.com/shifted
2. If you’re logged in to Face­book, can you see my profile?
3. If you’re not friends with me in Face­book and you can see my pro­file, what do you see? Please be spe­cific in list­ing which pieces (eg, name, pic­ture, groups, etc.)
4. Does your pub­lic pro­file dis­play in search results?
5. If your pub­lic pro­file dis­plays, either when oth­ers click on it or in search results, do you have inter­ests listed in your profile?
6. Can you com­pletely remove your inter­ests from your profile?
7. Have you seen the popup win­dow ask­ing you to link your pro­file to spe­cific pages/networks?
8. If your pub­lic pro­file dis­plays, is your pro­file linked to any of these pages/networks?
9. Can you remove your pro­file from being linked to any of these pages/networks?
10. If you go through these steps of remov­ing inter­ests and links to pages/networks, does that remove your pub­lic pro­file alto­gether, the way it did mine?
11. I’ve also unchecked the box to allow per­son­al­iza­tion in my pri­vacy set­tings. If your pub­lic pro­file isn’t dis­play­ing, have you done that?

Adden­dum: I think Polly found the actual answer (noted in the com­ments below). There’s a set­ting in the pri­vacy –> search set­tings that may finally remove your pro­file com­pletely from pub­lic view.

Make sure you uncheck the “allow” box, and if you want even more pri­vacy, change the “Face­book search results” set­ting to “friends only.” I should also note that I know for a fact this set­ting either wasn’t there or wasn’t work­ing prop­erly last month, as I had a debate with some­one about pri­vacy and looked at my pub­lic pro­file while not logged in, so some­thing def­i­nitely changed recently to allow for this level of pri­vacy. What I’m unsure of now is whether that “allow” box is checked by default or not (ques­tion #12?). I have to say that if that box is not checked by default, I’m pretty impressed with Facebook’s new stance.

And as Phil noted in his com­ment, make sure you change the pri­vacy –> pro­file infor­ma­tion set­tings to man­age what your friends can share about you. That’s a really impor­tant one.

The big deal: It looks like Face­book has indeed changed its stance on pri­vacy and has defaulted the “allow” in the search set­tings to opt-in, rather than opt-out. I think this is new, and it’s very wel­come in my opin­ion, espe­cially since you can fur­ther nar­row the “Face­book search results” set­ting. Has any­one seen that “allow” box checked by default?

If this is true, pro­files have dis­ap­peared from Google, right? Is this a pre­emp­tive move on Facebook’s part to take over peo­ple search from Google? I don’t know, but it seems like some­thing has changed.

This week­end, I did some­thing really cool (for me). I got to watch a March Mad­ness game on my TV that CBS wasn’t show­ing in my local mar­ket on my TV, with­out pay­ing the cable com­pany. Life is full of short vic­to­ries, and this is one of mine. More impor­tantly, I real­ized I’m liv­ing in the heav­enly juke­box I used to talk about in my pre­sen­ta­tions years ago.

I’ve been actively build­ing my cloud for the last six months, but I’ve been build­ing towards this for the last ten years. The caveat is that the way I’ve built this setup works for me, and one-size def­i­nitely doesn’t fit all. I’m lucky to have the resources to build my cloud, and I know most peo­ple won’t go to these lengths to get more media. It should all be eas­ier and work bet­ter than it does in 2010, but there’s no one really great solu­tion yet (that I know of).

Why a cloud?

It started last August when I decided it was time to inves­ti­gate a cen­tral­ized backup solu­tion, a way to lis­ten to our music col­lec­tion from any­where, and the abil­ity to lis­ten to dif­fer­ent music in dif­fer­ent rooms of the house. In my ideal world, I also wanted sim­i­lar access for video, a way to eas­ily watch inter­net video (eg, YouTube, Hulu) on my TV, and the abil­ity to stream Net­flix to my TV. The off­site stor­age is impor­tant to me (I used to backup to Mozy, but I also want to own my data, and the idea of repli­cat­ing sen­si­tive doc­u­ments on servers owned by com­pa­nies focused on the bot­tom line (Drop­box, Microsoft Live, etc.) wasn’t very appeal­ing to me.

I did a lot of research and couldn’t find any­thing that let me do every­thing, but Win­dows Home Server soft­ware came close, so I pur­chased an HP Medi­as­mart EX485 server. As the name implies, the Medi­as­mart series is designed to give con­sumers access to their media from any­where. It comes with Win­dows Home Server soft­ware pre-installed and out of the box, it’s sup­posed to do the fol­low­ing things:

• Backup all of the com­put­ers on your net­work auto­mat­i­cally on a sched­ule you set. This includes dif­fer­en­tial back­ups and restores.
• Peri­od­i­cally grab media from all of those com­put­ers and copy it to the server.
• Main­tain your router and DNS set­tings so that your server is acces­si­ble from out­side of your network.
• Give you access to all of your doc­u­ments, files, music, and video from anywhere.

I say “sup­pos­edly,” because I’ve never been able to get the media col­lec­tor to work con­sis­tently, and the inter­face to the music col­lec­tion is under-described by the term “sucks.” I had to rip most of my CDs for the first time at a higher bitrate, so I just ended up copy­ing files to the server man­u­ally in big chunks. I’m also the main per­son in the house who pur­chases music, so I can main­tain that rou­tine pretty easily.

My Juke­box in the Cloud (so named by Deanna)

The inter­face prob­lems and lack of func­tion­al­ity were big­ger issues, though. For exam­ple, there’s no way to get details about songs, rate them, or cre­ate playlists, all of which is pretty unfor­giv­able in a prod­uct designed specif­i­cally for con­sumers. After fur­ther research, I installed Orb, which is some pretty cool, free soft­ware that does a big piece of what Win­dows Home Server does. It gives you remote access to files, music, pic­tures, and video on the com­puter where it’s installed, plus you can man­age inter­net radio sta­tions, favorite songs, rate songs, cre­ate playlists, and cre­ate a dash­board view. Did I men­tion it’s free? If you have a com­puter you always leave on, you can emu­late some of my setup for free using this software.

My music library in Orb

Where Win­dows Home Server beats Orb is in its abil­ity to update port for­ward­ing on the router auto­mat­i­cally, backup all of the com­put­ers on your net­work, and offer a RAID solu­tion for that stor­age. I have 400GB+ of files, music, pic­tures, and video on one 750GB drive, but I was able to drop in a sec­ond drive, and the soft­ware auto­mat­i­cally started mir­ror­ing files to it for redun­dancy. That part was pretty amaz­ing, and I can access all of those files remotely, whether that means at work or in dif­fer­ent rooms in the house. Pretty sweet.

Con­nect­ing the server to the home system

That was all well and good, but I also wanted to play music with­out hav­ing to queue it up on a lap­top first, which meant we needed a way to get the server con­tent to play through the home the­ater sys­tem. Plus, we wanted to start stream­ing Net­flix videos to watch on the TV, as opposed to our com­put­ers. I again started doing research, which led me to the dis­cov­ery that the Xbox 360 that was just sit­ting on the shelf (we play more Wii than Xbox) was actu­ally a solu­tion wait­ing for us to rec­og­nize it.

Because the server and Xbox are both Microsoft prod­ucts, they talk to each other pretty eas­ily. This opened up a whole new world for us, because now we could show any pic­ture and play any music or video from the server on the big HDTV and the sound through the audio receiver and 5.1 surround-sound sys­tem with­out the need for a com­puter in between. In addi­tion, the Xbox gives us that desired access to Net­flix, Pan­dora, and even Last.FM through the exist­ing sys­tem. I can also cre­ate my playlists in Orb via a web browser and play them through the Xbox. More sweetness.

Watch­ing “Bat­tlestar Galac­tica” via Netflix’s stream­ing ser­vice through the Xbox on the HDTV

My biggest com­plaint about this setup is that the Xbox isn’t designed to be a media cen­ter, even though it has all of that func­tion­al­ity built into it. This means the inter­face isn’t very good here, either (no playlists, incom­plete dis­play of meta­data, long lists to scroll through), but I didn’t have to buy any addi­tional equip­ment, so that was a big plus. If Microsoft ever decides to spend time work­ing on inter­faces, it would have some killer prod­ucts for the con­sumer market.

More video

This setup does almost every­thing on my orig­i­nal list, but I still wanted to be able to watch Hulu through the exist­ing sys­tem, and I didn’t want to have to man­u­ally down­load YouTube videos to watch them on the TV. Look­ing around, I came across the amaz­ing PlayOn soft­ware ($40), which was the final piece of our puz­zle. By load­ing this soft­ware on the server, we gained the abil­ity to watch Hulu, YouTube, and some cus­tom PlayOn chan­nels for The Daily Show, The Col­bert Report, and NCAA March Mad­ness games on demand. Really sweet! This piece was a lit­tle bit more dif­fi­cult, but it all works if you fol­low the instruc­tions.

Pick­ing an episode of “Mod­ern Fam­ily” to watch from Hulu via PlayOn through the Xbox to the HDTV

Mak­ing it all eas­ier to use

I then tied every­thing together with a hand-me-down Log­itech Har­mony remote to make it easy to man­age all of the var­i­ous pieces. The “watch TV” but­ton turns on the TV to the right input, the audio receiver to the right input, and con­trols the cable box. The “watch a movie” but­ton turns every­thing on with the right set­tings to watch a DVD, but pretty much every­thing else except the Wii runs through the “lis­ten to music” but­ton, because that’s what starts up the Xbox. This is espe­cially help­ful because with­out the uni­ver­sal remote, I’d prob­a­bly be the only one in the house who’d be able to turn things on and off for dif­fer­ent activ­i­ties. Another big plus is that we can con­trol the Xbox with easy-to-understand but­tons, rather the game con­troller that came with the con­sole. I can’t rec­om­mend a Log­itech uni­veral remote highly enough.

Con­clu­sion

For the most part, this is all work­ing very well for us. We lis­ten to our music a lot more, includ­ing at work, and some­times the inter­net video piece really comes in handy (like dur­ing March Mad­ness). We espe­cially like stream­ing Net­flix (which can also be done through the PlayOn soft­ware if you don’t have an Xbox). At this point, the biggest issue is that I still need a way to backup the server off­site, but I can’t find a rea­son­ably priced ser­vice for this (most com­pa­nies charge business-level prices because they haven’t yet rec­og­nized there’s a grow­ing con­sumer mar­ket). Someone’s going to make a killing offer­ing a con­sumer backup ser­vice for media, but that day hasn’t arrived yet. I’m look­ing at other workarounds right now, but I haven’t found an ideal solu­tion. (Have you? Leave a comment!)

It’s been a long road to get to this point, but it’s excit­ing to have all of this geeky func­tion­al­ity work­ing. In the future, I hope to get rid of a lot of paper by scan­ning it to the server, and I may inves­ti­gate adding a TV tuner to record pro­grams directly to the server and set­ting up print­ing over the inter­net to our home printer.

How you can do some of this

This is pretty geeky stuff, although most of the process was eas­ier than I thought it would be. It’s also a Microsoft-centric approach, some­what by acci­dent. I still think Microsoft needs to do a bet­ter job with its inter­faces before its home server/media cen­ter prod­ucts could go main­stream. How­ever, there are ways to do pieces of all of this eas­ily, with­out Microsoft prod­ucts, and some­times even for free.

• If you have a com­puter that you leave on all the time, you can stream music and video or access files from it for free by installing Orb. You can even hook up an exter­nal drive to that com­puter if you need more stor­age. (It works on Macs, too.)
• If you have an old com­puter lying around or can pick one up cheap, you can pur­chase Win­dows Home Server for $99 and con­vert that machine into a home server. I only paid the $500 for the HP Medi­as­mart server for the con­ve­nience fac­tor of hav­ing it pre-installed with the soft­ware and a 750GB hard drive. If I’d had more time, I might have built it myself.
• You don’t need an Xbox to get con­tent from the server to the TV/home the­ater sys­tem. Inter­net TVs and DVD play­ers are on the mar­ket (every­thing will have access to the inter­net built-in even­tu­ally), and there’s mid­dle­ware like the Roku. Because I was able to get the Xbox work­ing in about 10 min­utes, I didn’t inves­ti­gate which of the other options might be best. Inter­est­ingly, TiVO is enter­ing this mar­ket with its new TiVO Pre­mière box, but it’ll still require a monthly fee, which I wasn’t will­ing to pay. I don’t think it pro­vides access to the user’s col­lec­tion, although it does bring in all of that inter­net content.
• There are also other ways to stream sites like Hulu and Net­flix to your TV. You can install the PlayOn soft­ware on a reg­u­lar com­puter (as opposed to a server) to watch those chan­nels, but you’ll still need the mid­dle­ware to get the stream to the TV. Of course, you can also just install PlayOn on a com­puter and watch the chan­nels on that com­puter, or hook it up to a TV using an A/V cable. That’s what I used to do, but I wanted to be able to use my lap­top while watch­ing “TV.” Note that PlayOn will also work with a Nin­tendo Wii or Playsta­tion 3.
• Jason Grif­fey has writ­ten about using the Drobo sys­tem for back­ups. I prob­a­bly would have gone this route if I didn’t also want the remote access to my media files. How­ever, if you’re look­ing strictly for a backup solu­tion or if you aren’t backup up your data, this is an excel­lent option.

What else have you tried? How are you build­ing your cloud?

started out play­ing “Just Dance” on the Wii (whoo-hoo!)
Wii is a great place to start
when you’re ready to learn how to use a Wii, send your 12-year old out of the house because they show you too quickly
you can teach your­self to do this (really, you can)

why gam­ing?
– con­nect with patrons who are gamers; they love it when you show an inter­est in some­thing that’s impor­tant to them; it’s good to know about gam­ing regard­less of what type of library you’re in
– pro­mote mul­ti­ple types of lit­er­acy
– increase traf­fic
– it’s fun

applied for ALA’s Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Lit­er­acy grant with the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion
got $5000, $4000 of which was spent on Wiis & DDR for each library in the school dis­trict
had a few logis­ti­cal prob­lems but money from the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion was slow in com­ing, which forced some changes
she also loans her equip­ment out to teach­ers
also explor­ing hav­ing kids cre­ate games using Scratch

$1000 for gam­ing at her school — com­put­ers, con­sole, and board games
kids have become the experts and help each other

they do a fam­ily fun night at least once a year
Wendy sets up DDR and Gui­tar Hero + Band Hero
PS2s aren’t as ver­sa­tile as the Wii but can still be good to get you started, espe­cially with DDR
had trou­ble find­ing games that would run on their old com­put­ers
– used Civ­i­liza­tion, a vet game, Star Wars (which is the most pop­u­lar and is her only T game)

gets shy and non-sports kids involved
it’s fun to watch them social­ize and help each other

now we’re play­ing group Back­seat Draw­ing — awesome!

showed some books with game themes
they also read a lot of guides and cheats — they do a ton of read­ing around gaming

men­tioned “Libraries Got Game” by Brian Mayer and Chris Har­ris and their align­ment of board games with AASL’s stan­dards (much love in the room for this)

Wendy was sup­posed to defend the grant to the school board because they weren’t sure they wanted to accept “gam­ing” money, but they had already accepted it by the time she got there

exam­ples of com­puter strat­egy games — Spore (although her older com­put­ers won’t run it), Civilization

showed ALA’s Online Toolkit for librarians

free online games, which often have a cause-related theme (hunger, jus­tice, etc.)
in her dis­trict, any­thing that has “game” in it is auto­mat­i­cally blocked, so she works with them to let cer­tain ones through

Games for Change
Gene­see Valley’s data­base of games let you search by game time and ROI

Daniel Rus­sell, Google Search Qual­ity & User Hap­pi­ness
2010 Alaska Library Asso­ci­a­tion Con­fer­ence, open­ing keynote speaker

Lewis & Clark left with­out a decent map
it’s a com­pli­cated world out there and you don’t want to end up like the Don­ner Party (hey, go that way; it looks good)
what does the cur­rent infor­ma­tion map look like?
let’s be adven­tur­ers but keep our eyes and minds open

did a demo of Google Earth
cost to put the fly­over together = $0 and four min­utes of time
Google will crawl it within 48 hours
when Lewis & Clark pub­lished about their trip, it took 10 years
we see the world dif­fer­ently, and the library isn’t what it used to be
stacks are no longer a core com­pe­tence — the infor­ma­tion land­scape has rad­i­cally changed

1200 exabytes of new con­tent are gen­er­ated each year (1.2 yot­tabytes if that helps or 1.2 bil­lion terrabytes)
3.6 zetabytes per per­son per year (mostly music and video)
libraries don’t have to curate and man­age that — it stream to you
text words per pseron per year = .1% of that total
the good news is that the amount of read­ing per per­son per year has gone up by 3X since 1980 (pri­mar­ily due to inter­net access); hap­pen­ing online, not print
so need to develop new skills and new literacies

showed Google Books
can click on the places in a book and travel to all of them
can actu­ally reca­pit­u­late Huck Finn’s jour­ney down the river

LoC has 10 ter­abytes of text data or .01 petabytes
he has 2 LoCs at home
an exabyte = 50,000 years of DVD or 10 bil­lion copies of The Econ­o­mist (there aren’t enough trees in Alaska to print them all)

we’re sup­port­ing this renais­sance of access to print cul­ture at the same time we’re expand­ing online con­tent
1.5 mil­lion out of copy­right books that can be printed for $8 each

do you care about all of this as long as you can get to the stuff that you care about?
what Google is try­ing to fig­ure out is how can I read your mind from the cou­ple of words you gave me — which pages you want to see of theirs out of all of those exabytes of data?
it’s not just text anymore

men­tioned Hans Rosling’s TED talk about visu­al­iz­ing sta­tis­tics
men­tioned Baby Names Voy­ager
Google bought soft­ware to add visual sta­tis­tics to Google Docs
the cool part is I can type my name and see when my name peaked
is this a book? no. is it a visu­al­iza­tion? yes. but it’s also inter­ac­tive. where/how do I cat­a­log this?
these kinds of inter­ac­tive doc­u­ments allow you to under­stand in ways that were not pos­si­ble before
showed what hap­pened to names that begin with vow­els dur­ing the 40s and 50s — “the val­ley of the vow­els“
the answer to what hap­pened is in the hard con­so­nants
no one knew this until they could see it in this visu­al­iza­tion
our notion of what con­sti­tutes infor­ma­tion and librar­i­an­ship is changing

how do peo­ple search now?
sup­pose you’re Google and you get the query “jaguar” — what do they want?
one of the dif­fer­ences about being Google though is that you’re at a ref­er­ence desk where a bil­lion peo­ple a day ask the question

what about “iraq?” today, it’s the way; 15 years ago, it was prob­a­bly antiq­ui­ties
Google sees queries shift­ing a lot
“lat­est release Thinkpad dri­vers touch­pad” = I know exactly what they want
“ebay” = in the top 10 most pop­u­lar queries in Eng­lish per day
“google” is also in the top 10 queries per day — why?? are they try­ing to cause the recur­sive melt­down of Google’s servers?
there are 20,000 ways to mis-spell “Bri­tany Spears” (and they all want pic­tures of her)

one of the inter­est­ing things they do is use machine-generated algo­rithms
they don’t have to mis-spell a new celebri­ties name 20,000 times — their users will do that for them
that’s how infor­maiton works now

he goes to peo­ples’ homes a lot to talk to them and watch their behav­ior
showed a video clip of some­one search­ing at home for which celebrity has won the most Oscars
(she was pretty con­fused with the results she was get­ting — didn’t real­ize she had moved into the “Google News” sec­tion)
she has a grad­u­ate degree, runs her own web­site, and has her own tv show
the equiv­a­lent of watch­ing some­one look­ing at a text­book in the library and won­der­ing why she’s sud­denly look­ing at the news
this is why he has a job
he sees prob­lems in the world and tries to fix them

weekly sta­tis­tics:
3.9 vis­its per user
9.4 searches per user
11.2 search clicks per user
4 min­utes dura­tion
29% query refine­ment rate
they’re not spend­ing a lot of time in “the stacks”

66% of their users have less than one query per day
aver­age query length is less than 3 words
the “very con­fi­dent” peo­ple in a Pew study search mul­ti­ple times per day (34%)
suc­cess makes them search more often
92% feel con­fi­dent in their search­ing abil­ity
you don’t get good doing any­thing less than once per day (for four min­utes, no less)
55% call them­selves an “expert searcher” (despite how lit­tle I use the system)

they’re happy when they get a result from a search
peo­ple think of exper­tise as being socially-normed
“all of my friends say I’m the best searcher” — you want to say you’re good
peo­ple like to take on tasks they can suc­ceed at
showed an exam­ple where the dif­fer­ence in the ques­tion was “ghost town” vs “aban­doned city“
the “ghost town” peo­ple didn’t do well search­ing and were unhappy — took them a lot longer to find the infor­ma­tion
librar­i­ans are syn­onym pro­fes­sion­als
“func­tional fixed-ness” — being stuck on a search term, not being able to think of a synonym

Google is try­ing to con­vert peo­ple from the “ghost town” group to the “aban­doned city” group
they can see improve­ment over time

but the infor­ma­tion land­scape is so complex

Google launches about 10 prod­ucts per week, although more are invis­i­ble (tweaks to the algo­rithm, etc.)
but so far this year (and it’s only March 5), they’ve launched:
a really long list of things
these are all things that hap­pened to our infor­ma­tion land­scape in the last two months
new kinds of con­tent are com­ing online all the time
3D mod­els in SketchUp
“what’s a fly­ing but­tress? let me show” vs a 2D pic­ture in a Time-Life book

new kinds of query­ing infor­ma­tion
eg, Google Gog­gle — “Google, what’s that?“
“your cell­phone — it’s not just for typ­ing any­more“
“wait — when did cell­phones become stan­dard for typ­ing?“
tak­ing a pic­ture of a book gives you the meta­data about it (same for a bot­tle of wine, etc.)
you don’t have to type as much any­more
the way you inter­act with Google is changing

with Google Earth, if you fly to the Prado in Madrid, you can fly into the build­ing and even into one of the pic­tures; they’ll throw you out of the build­ing if you try that in Spain
get a level of detail you can’t see if you go there

Google Flu Trends
can tell when flu out­breaks are hap­pen­ing around the world by watch­ing for where queries are being made from
showed chart that illus­trates Alaska got it worse than other places and the out­break peaked in Octo­ber
any­one can run queries in Google Trends

how do you find Google Trans­la­tion Ser­vices? it’s not a book on a shelf
“when in doubt, search it out“
they’re work­ing rad­i­cally fast to change our world

Quan­tam ESP exper­i­ment
showed the old “psy­chic rab­bit” trick with play­ing cards
the point is that every­thing changes
you can’t pay atten­tion to every­thing
you’re smart — why didn’t you remem­ber all of the cards? because he told you to focus on one
there’s lots of stuff going on with your per­cep­tion and what you’re pay­ing atten­tion to

what have you noticed? what have you not noticed?
no one notices things like the lit­tle arrow that expands the map or lets you pan around the map and the “more” link
nobody sees these things — he has the logs to prove it
they’re focus­ing on what they’re try­ing to do
“per­cep­tual or change blind­ness“
showed the dif­fer­ence between a Google Map from 5 years ago ver­sus today
nobody noticed the results moved from the right side to the left
they change things all the time and nobody notices

how do we learn? how do we help our patrons learn?
it’s not like they’re ship­ping a new ver­sion of an OS — they’re chang­ing every­thing all the time, every day
and it’s not all nicely curated or indexed
that’s the growth rate we have to be think­ing about

“how do we help our patrons“
of the 4 Rs, the fourth one is really “research“
in order to write com­pre­hen­sively and deeply, you need to do deep research
it’s not just look­ing up a call num­ber — that’s just the begin­ning
this is no longer optional — now the whole cul­ture has to under­stand this, not just librarians

analy­sis from 40 inter­views:
every­body knows what a query is, what a result is
but no one knows what “search on page” and “search in results” mean
it’s not helped by click­bombs like the “mis­er­able fail­ure” search results
if you’re not on the inside with a mech­a­nism to under­stand how this stuff works, you think Google is mon­key­ing with the sys­tem, even though they aren’t; some­one else is
most peo­ple don’t under­stand “clas­sic search engine opti­miza­tion“
makes it impos­si­ble to have a coher­ent men­tal model for how the web works

with­out a detailed model, we’re “cargo cultists” (New Guinea)
when some­one tells you to reboot the router to get wire­less back, you’re a cargo cultist
“never click up there”

“I dunno how it works. I just type words, and answers come back to me… about any­thing… any­thing at all…” — stu­dent
within his realm, he was a good searcher
devel­oped vocab­u­lary and domain knowl­edge around expen­sive watches but can’t find the cap­i­tal of Alaska

when you’re in West­Law, you have to know how to make the oper­a­tors work
in Google, you have to know how to come up with good search terms

6 kinds of knowl­edge & skills needed to search:
– pure engine tech­nique (choos­ing good terms, dou­ble quotes, etc.)
– infor­ma­tion map­ping (reverse dic­tio­nary, con­tents of domains, Wikipedia, etc.)
– domain knowl­edge (med­ical knowl­edge, plumb­ing knowl­edge, etc.)
– search strat­egy (know­ing when to shift strate­gies, move from wide to nar­row, pre­serv­ing state, etc.)
– assess­ment (how do you assess the cred­i­bil­ity of a resource? a lot of this is tied up in domain knowl­edge, which 16-year olds don’t have)
– site-specific knowl­edge (know­ing how a site works, is laid out, etc.)

basic skills:
– Control-F to find
– tabs (how to use effec­tively to orga­nize search)
– key­word query choice (effec­tive choices; low/high fre­quen­cies terms)
– tac­tics (when to focus on par­tic­u­lar resource)
– strate­gies (how long to pur­sue a tac­tic; when to switch; how to dis­cover)
– under­stand­ing what you find (read­ing for under­stand­ing SERPs; not “overreading”)

teach­ing research skills
– want peo­ple to under­stand the world and do research so they under­stand the world
– not just web search skills
– author­ity assess­ment
– crap detec­tion
– stay­ing on task
– dis­cov­ery
– note­tak­ing
– data inte­gra­tion
– rep­re­sen­ta­tion construction

find­ings:
1 — very uneven indi­vid­ual level of search skill (every­one showed at least one “deep” skill; every­one showed at least one mis­taken under­stand­ing; 90% wished they knew how to search bet­ter, but only 10% will take a class)
search behav­ior pat­terns
users don’t know the names of parts or rec­og­nize them (includ­ing URL, site, query; it’s hard to search for things you can’t name; don’t want to click on that because it might bring up porn)

2 — com­fort level is VERY impor­tant
users choose famil­iar over scary
peo­ple tend not to explore things they dn’t know
they worry about find­ing porn
they worry about hav­ing unkonwn things hap­pen when they click on strange links
– edu­ca­tion is acci­den­tal
– peo­ple are not good reporters of their own behav­ior (“I don’t have a tool­bar; I don’t do image search”)

3 — peo­ple don’t know much about Google as a whole (an oppor­tu­nity for librar­i­ans)
they don’t know what’s pos­si­ble
a CTO who didn’t know how to find Google Maps to find a pub in Palo Alto
a PhD cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist didn’t know about Google Scholar
– tar­get site knowl­edge is critical

where do we go next?
– there is a big, big, big need for help — it’s not all intu­itive; they can’t yet do mind-reading
– huge range of men­tal mod­els among users
– users, for the most part, have lit­tle idea what’s pos­si­ble in web search or how to use it effec­tively
they’re learn­ing acci­den­tally from peers or from librar­i­ans
we’re look­ing at an information-illiterate pop­u­la­tion
no one else is show­ing them

- show them the shape of the infor­ma­tion land­scape
– teach your patrons
– make time to con­tin­u­ally edu­cate your­self (you’re now enrolled in a per­ma­nent edu­ca­tion process; if you miss it for a cou­ple of years, good luck catch­ing up)

every­thing is shift­ing and mov­ing faster, so make time for con­tin­ual self-improvement
“be the Lewis, be the Clark” — com­mu­ni­cate this stuff to our patrons
be the core of dis­cov­ery for patrons

The con­cept of “Library 2.0″ has been around long enough now that we’ve gone through all the stages and argued it to death, as noticed by Andy Wood­worth in a post titled Decon­struct­ing Library 2.0. That’s a good thing, and you should go read his thoughts on the subject.

No mat­ter which side you of the debate you come down on, you can prob­a­bly prove your case. Me? I agree with Andrew Burkhardt when he notes, “The time has come for libraries to be social on the web. Social is the new nor­mal. It has become main­stream and peo­ple expect it. Library 2.0 is not dead, it has just become bor­ing and com­mon­place. And to quote Clay Shirky, ‘Tools don’t get socially inter­est­ing until they get tech­no­log­i­cally boring.’ ”

In his paper Par­tic­i­pa­tory Net­works: The Library As Con­ver­sa­tion, Dave Lankes said that “libraries should focus on the phe­nom­ena made pos­si­ble by the tech­nol­ogy,” not the tech­nol­ogy itself, which I think is a pretty good way of think­ing about “Library 2.0.” Maybe that’s where we are now, which would be a great way to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion, hope­fully with­out the moniker. I think sev­eral of us thought that’s what we were doing, but it didn’t come across that way.

The hard part, though, is that Library 2.0 doesn’t really replace any­thing. Like so many library ser­vices, the oppor­tu­ni­ties these new tools afford us are in addi­tion to every­thing we’re already doing, which causes prob­lems, because we don’t get addi­tional resources to imple­ment them. To serve as many of your users as pos­si­ble, you have to be in as many of the places where they are as pos­si­ble. That prin­ci­ple has been the phi­los­o­phy behind this site from day one, eight years ago. That means being out in your com­mu­nity phys­i­cally and dig­i­tally, and that’s one of the pieces of L2 that I think was never ade­quately explained.

We’re already pretty good at get­ting out from behind the phys­i­cal ref­er­ence desk. We know how to do it, and we know how we could do it bet­ter given more resources. I worry that this is less true in the online world, and that’s where I always hoped L2 would help. As much as I sup­port, love, and advo­cate for user-centered plan­ning and design, my big regret about the whole “move­ment” is that it hasn’t focused more on how L2 helps staff.

So that’s what I tend to con­cen­trate my own pre­sen­ta­tions on — the prac­ti­cal ways in which these new tools can help you. I’ve been a big pro­moter of RSS since 2002, and I still don’t under­stand why libraries don’t use it more. Yes, one of the ben­e­fits of syn­di­cat­ing con­tent is that your users can sub­scribe to it, but equally impor­tant for me is that it allows me as an orga­ni­za­tion to get my con­tent off my web­site so that it’s more vis­i­ble where my users are. Most impor­tantly, it auto­mates that process so that I don’t have to spend pre­cious resources man­u­ally updat­ing a mul­ti­tude of sites, inevitably for­get­ting about one of them. The fact that I can syn­di­cate lists of new mate­ri­als from my OPAC any­where with­out human inter­ven­tion? Priceless.

Why should your library have a blog? There are many ben­e­fits, but my biggest rea­son is because it gets your cur­rent news and announce­ments in a syn­di­cated for­mat, the dis­play of which you can auto­mate any­where. You can eas­ily recy­cle your con­tent to Twit­ter, Face­book, else­where on your web­site, and more. Talk about a great way to get out into your com­mu­nity — how about dis­play­ing your cur­rent news on the vil­lage, park dis­trict, school, or a depart­ment web­site with­out any ongo­ing effort on your part? That’s a huge win-win in my book. And as some­one who man­u­ally gen­er­ated archives for daily posts before there were “blogs,” let me just sing the praises of auto­matic archiv­ing for a moment. If you’re not using a blog for press release-like infor­ma­tion, do not pass go. There’s a bet­ter way that makes you more effi­cient and has all of these ancil­lary ben­e­fits with cher­ries on top.

Being able to offer inex­pen­sive options for chat ref­er­ence so that you can con­cen­trate on imple­men­ta­tion rather than bud­get? Win. Being able to embed that chat win­dow on your web­site, in data­bases, on Face­book, etc., with­out a huge effort? Win times one mil­lion. Putting imme­di­ate, syn­chro­nous access to a librar­ian back into the cat­a­log by embed­ding a chat win­dow there? Win times infinity.

Hav­ing easy-to-use alter­nate announce­ment chan­nels where you can also talk with and hear from your users (eg, Twit­ter)? Full of win. Same thing with social book­mark­ing (deli­cious — all of your library’s book­marks in one place, search­able, embed­d­a­ble), social pic­tures (Flickr, where you no longer have to worry about resiz­ing images), wikis (cheap intranet pos­si­bil­i­ties), embed­d­a­ble sub­ject guides with syn­di­ca­tion (LibGuides), and more. They all have the poten­tial to make your job eas­ier. How often does that happen?

So, Andy is right to ask ques­tions about Library 2.0 and reflect about its impact, as are the com­menters on his post. For me, though, one place L2 has failed is in mak­ing staff under­stand that these tools can offer big ben­e­fits for them, not just library users. If we’re adopt­ing tools to make our­selves more effi­cient (which I think is the best way to eval­u­ate imple­men­ta­tion for staff), then that counts as suc­cess in my view. If it reaches new users, offers new ser­vices for exist­ing mem­bers, or makes things bet­ter in gen­eral for users at the same time, then we’re really doing some­thing right. That piece is more dif­fi­cult to mea­sure, which makes the L2 debate some­what moot, since no one can really prove or dis­prove it. But when done well, Library 2.0 should help you in your job, too.

I hope we see more arti­cles and pre­sen­ta­tions about that, instead of rehash­ing point­less and divi­sive debates about names, gen­er­a­tions, and “sides.”

Or, if you work at cer­tain com­pa­nies, you do. Or could.

I had some inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions about pri­vacy at ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing, which got me think­ing about which com­pa­nies prob­a­bly know the most about me.

I’ve thought about my own “walled gar­den” a lot and worked through what I’ll share pub­licly, pri­vately, and pre­tend pri­vately. Most things I share pub­licly, and you can see a list of many of the sites I use on my Friend­Feed account. It’s not dif­fi­cult to piece together infor­ma­tion about me by track­ing these sites, but over­all I’m more care­ful with spe­cific things like loca­tion information.

The rou­tine I’ve worked out is that Face­book is my only truly pri­vate post­ing area, although I do occa­sion­ally post some pic­tures for “friends and fam­ily only” on Flickr. Since I still don’t trust Face­book to not re-publish or claim own­er­ship of “pri­vate” con­tent (like pic­tures and videos), I don’t post any­thing orig­i­nal there except sta­tus updates and com­ments on friends’ updates. Even then, I don’t kid myself that those things are truly pri­vate (they’re the “pre­tend pri­vately” I men­tioned above). That’s why I’ve become a lot more selec­tive about who I’ll friend there, and why I post some Foursquare loca­tion updates there (rather than on Twitter).

So if you can find out so much infor­ma­tion about me pub­licly, which com­pa­nies know the most about me? It’s been a very thought-provoking exer­cise to come up with the fol­low­ing list. I tried to rank the com­pa­nies in order of how much daily infor­ma­tion I think they’re accu­mu­lat­ing about me, but it’s tough to decide if “what I’m eat­ing” equals “what I’m watching.”

• Cell carrier/cellphone maker — they know my loca­tion at any given time, plus all of the data that goes through my phone (and I don’t have a land­line, so every­thing goes through my cell)
• Cable com­pany = they know what I watch on TV and what I surf on the net
• Bank = they know most of the places where I spend my money
• Credit cards = they know a lot of places I spend my money
• LISHost — hosts my web­site and email, which would include a lot of receipts for online purchases
• Google = knows most of the things I search for and many things I read (via <http://reader.google.com/”>Google Reader); even though I don’t use Gmail, any email I send to Gmail users is in their archives
• Ama­zon = knows about a lot of things I pur­chase and read (includ­ing via my Kindle)
• Face­book = knows a lot about what I say about myself via sta­tus updates and who my friends are
• Friend­Feed (now owned by Face­book) = aggre­gates a lot about what I say about myself pub­licly online, plus which con­ver­sa­tions and peo­ple I watch on the site
• Net­flix = knows a lot about what I watch
• Foursquare = knows some about where I am/go
• Flickr = knows a lot about where I am/go, who my friends/contacts are, and what inter­ests me
• Twit­ter = knows my net­work and who I inter­act with the most
• Health care provider = I’m lucky that I’ve been rel­a­tively healthy, but my provider(s) know about any problems
• Deli­cious = knows a lot about sites I’ve vis­ited and want to remember
• Dopplr = knows my trips and some of my friends
• Ever­note = knows about some things I want to remem­ber, although I haven’t put much per­sonal infor­ma­tion there yet
• Illi­nois Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion (IDOT) = I don’t drive nearly as much as I used to any­more, but IDOT knows when I go on tollroads

Obvi­ously I’m okay with what I share pub­licly, and in many respects, there have been enor­mous ben­e­fits to doing that, but I have very lit­tle con­trol over what these com­pa­nies do with the infor­ma­tion they’re col­lect­ing about me, and I don’t trust any of them. I think the only com­pany I do trust is LISHost, which hosts my web­site and email (thanks, Blake!). How much do I really care that Face­book keeps my sta­tus updates for­ever, whereas my email provider keeps my more pri­vate mes­sages? And how much do I worry that my pri­vate email still goes through my cable provider’s net­work to get to LISHost?

I’m try­ing to rec­og­nize which com­pa­nies are col­lect­ing ambi­ent infor­ma­tion about me, with­out me proac­tively post­ing any­thing. I’m sure I’m miss­ing some, though. If you’ve thought through this your­self, what’s not on my list?