Showing posts with label blurring. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blurring. Show all posts
Wednesday, 17 February 2010
...and following some more blogs!
Jane has helpfully pointed out a very easy way to subscribe to feeds - I can just use the URL of the site I want to subscribe to. I was looking for the RSS feeds, but not all sites have them. So, I am following a couple of blogs that I like in my Google Reader: Shapely Prose and The F-Word. This does raise some of the issues I mentioned in my last post about blurring the personal and the professional - these are blogs I normally read in my spare time so I shall have to be disciplined about not reading them at work!
Following blogs
I've just realised that clicking "Follow" on other people's blogs adds them to my Google Reader subscriptions - for some reason I thought that would be something different.
I think I was a bit confused about what "following" meant in the Google world because I read an article recently complaining that Google have set up something called Buzz - which automatically creates a public profile including information about who you "follow" - which is determined by who you most often exchange emails with. The main issue is that it makes private information public without requiring the person to actually do anything - you can opt-out if you choose, but if you do nothing the default is that the information about who you email is made public in the form of a list of people you are "following". They have since changed this: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/189329/google_apologizes_for_buzz_privacy_issues.html
This does raise interesting issues about social networking generally, and the relationships between the different kinds of tools we use. There's been a blurring of personal and professional, public and private information, and a lot of it seems to happen because the software is available rather than because people actually want it. In particular having all of these tools owned by one company - so that Google has access to a whole range of information and can choose to combine different data sets - blurs everything even more, so that people have much less control over their information. Google's main intention seems to be to make everything as automated as possible - they are very good at predicting what you are looking for and finding it for you, so that you don't have to do much work. But removing the work also often involves removing the control and the choices, as with this "Buzz" feature which saves people the effort of choosing which information they want to be made publically available.
I think I was a bit confused about what "following" meant in the Google world because I read an article recently complaining that Google have set up something called Buzz - which automatically creates a public profile including information about who you "follow" - which is determined by who you most often exchange emails with. The main issue is that it makes private information public without requiring the person to actually do anything - you can opt-out if you choose, but if you do nothing the default is that the information about who you email is made public in the form of a list of people you are "following". They have since changed this: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/189329/google_apologizes_for_buzz_privacy_issues.html
This does raise interesting issues about social networking generally, and the relationships between the different kinds of tools we use. There's been a blurring of personal and professional, public and private information, and a lot of it seems to happen because the software is available rather than because people actually want it. In particular having all of these tools owned by one company - so that Google has access to a whole range of information and can choose to combine different data sets - blurs everything even more, so that people have much less control over their information. Google's main intention seems to be to make everything as automated as possible - they are very good at predicting what you are looking for and finding it for you, so that you don't have to do much work. But removing the work also often involves removing the control and the choices, as with this "Buzz" feature which saves people the effort of choosing which information they want to be made publically available.
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