Blog Post #3

Are You Protecting Your Dirt?

Normally when you think of Internet regulation, you think of the government attempting to control the flow of information and what is online. However, people need to regulate the Internet as it pertains to them.

Do you want people to dig up your dirt? I doubt so; most information posted on social sites is intended only for friends and family. “It's public, and there is a false sense of security surrounding these sites perpetuated by the environment itself,” says Ken Rogers, senior management recruiter at Trader Publishing, in an article about how online profiles affect job searches.

The United States is as Neil Swidey described “A Nation of Voyeurs.” Employers google current and prospective employees. People google their dates or significant others. Students google professors to find out dirt. Everyone searches someone every now and then.

According to a recent poll conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 26.9 percent of employers report googling potential employees.

In order to prevent all of your dirty secrets from being aired (think Miss USA and former Miss Nevada), guard yourself and self-regulate your information online.

Here are some simple tips for information posted on social networking sites:

• Do not post your full name and contact information.
• Swidey wrote, "once information gets online somewhere, it spreads so fast that it's virtually impossible for it ever to be private again."
• Use privacy settings to your advantage.
• Only allow certain people to access your profile.
• Don’t post embarrassing photos or photos of you doing illegal things.
• If a friend posts the photo, ask him to take it down. If they don’t, at least untag yourself in the photo.
• “You shouldn't broadcast or share any information that you wouldn't want to share with your parents, or that you would be ashamed of should it appear on the front page of the newspaper. Follow that and you can't go wrong,” Rogers says.

For stronger privacy settings, you can create an online profile without revealing your true identity. In David Weinberger’s “A New Small World (Small Pieces Loosely Joined),” .Zannah is someone’s web identity. She could have personified .Zannah with herself in the quizzes and lists she wrote, or it could be a created identity.

.Zannah shows how to share information and connect with other people without giving others an entryway into all your personal information. She had a homepage linked to her blog; however, her location and description was, as Weinberger described, still fairly discreet.

Why protect your information at all? To prevent ex-boyfriends (or ex-girlfriends like Amanda in Swidey's article) from getting back at you. To try and prevent cyberstalkers. To help prevent identity theft. To make sure there aren't monsters in the closet when applying for a job.

Yes, there is only so much you can do to protect yourself online. But taking preventative measures is better than believing nothing can happen to you.

Blog Post #2

Intellectual Property

Intellectual Property is the material of the Internet. But how can this owned knowledge or expression, as Charles Mann describes intellectual property in “Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea?” be prevented from being copied? Can copyright even truly exist on the Internet?

As the Internet has grown to include more people, intellectual property can reach more people. Businesses could see this as a potential to expand and profit more, but technology is prohibiting this from happening.

File-sharing sites such as the old-school Napster and the newer Kazaa and LimeWire have allowed people to share their music, software, movies, pictures, among other items with users across the world without regard to copyright limitations.

According to Mann sites like these and DVD-R and CD-R burners have caused industries to lose billions of dollars. For example the Motion Picture Association estimated a loss of $2.5 billion due to piracy in 1998.

But, some people say that these businesses already make enough money, so it’s okay to reuse the material over the Internet. Others such as John Perry Barlow from the Grateful Dead said allowing people to free access will increase their want to buy the original material.

Barlow's idea of allowing free intellectual property is becoming more common among aspiring artists and even popular ones like Radiohead. MySpace pages have blossomed many careers in the music and even acting business.

For example, iTunes offers a free download of the week for artists. One week the single was “Bom Bom Bom” by Living Things and within a few weeks, I heard the song at the base of commercials. Or just a few months ago, Cobbie Calliat’s single “Bubbly” was the giveaway for the week. Within two weeks, I heard the song playing on top 20 formatted radio stations.

Mann wrote, “Copyright should not impede artistic efforts to explain or times. Nor should we let it interfere with the relation between producers and consumers of art.” All the talk about how to regulate and prevent people from copying innovative material takes away from the uniqueness of the Internet.

It allows people to link something they like over and over to more and more people, creating an even larger target market for businesses. Review those two musicians and see where their careers are now – the music isn’t free anymore, but people are still buying it.

The media are just upset consumers are not directly buying everything from them anymore.