"You mind if I show this to everyone in the world?"

I went to a friend's party a while back and took some video and photos. When I got home, I wanted to email him the video, but it was 400mb. I thought about putting it on YouTube, but there were lots of people at that party and lots of children and I don't think everyone wants images of their kids splashed all over the internets.

But that's me. Lots of assholes post everything. That's how we get into trouble. Some other dick tells everyone. Who said, "Hell is other people"? Oh, yeah, that guy.

So I burned a DVD of the party video but I haven't mailed it to him yet. Because I suck.

But that had me thinking about what we share. Voluntarily or involuntarily. What we give and what is taken from us. And right now we're concerned with what we give, our privacy choices. But I'm thinking about what is taken away.

I might want to have a whole batch of little effings one day. And what will I have left to leave to them when I go? 13,000 blogs posts? 22,000 Twitter followers? The internet provides the opportunity for us to redefine our legacy to our children: can your kid inherit your Facebook friends or Twitter followers? What is a list of followers worth? Can Twitter sell the list to companies for targeted advertising? (uh, oh, don't get sidetracked...)

And we've learned recently that all these little fuckers on the web steal whatever they want because copy/paste delivers no consequences. Why should they behave any differently than they do in the real world. When our library is filled with kids, it's inevitable that someone will "lose" a phone.

So how do we protect our internet property?

I know I hate this latest trend, but I don't see any way around it. I hate when I copy something from a site and it carries all this hidden text along with it that I need to delete. Because the web site runs a trackback or automatic attribution script that automatically adds the site info when you copy it. And when I want a small snippet for a blog post, I need to delete that crap because it gets in my way and it breaks my train of thought on what I was trying to say. So it pisses me off.

But I thinking that an automatic attribution script is the way to go from now on. Because if I don't claim my property now, how will I be able to claim a violation later?

I know that people use Creative Commons, but I don't understand what that's supposed to do for me. It doesn't seem like it offers any real protections.

So I just did a search for "automatic attribution script" and found this article explaining Tynt.

Tynt does this for lots of news sites. It adds that script that I hate to remove each time I copy something from a site using it.

So I'm gonna submit this post before I decide to add this script to my blog. I don't know if I really give a fuck. I have so few fucks left to give.

I'm working so fucking hard at the library and just seem to keep falling farther and farther behind. There's the work I need to do, the work I'm asked to do and the work I'd like to do, and the work I'm asked to do almost always takes the top. Then when I really need to do what I need to do, and someone asks me to do something, and I tell them to fuck off, I feel terrible.

I have no fucking time.

Clearly, I have the same amount of time as everyone else, but I can't seem to make it all work like it used to.

I should also mention that Flickr attributes copyright info to photos that are copied, or something, but I didn't really read up on that for this post.

Another mention is that we continue to give our content away (our FB, blog, Twitter posts, photos, videos) just when corporations are moving towards a tiered internet, with pay and free content. Maybe we should begin protecting our content a little better.

Social media was made for this...

So I saw this last night on Twitter:

karianneholt knock knock

And it seemed to me, at the very moment, that the ultimate purpose for Twitter and the design of all social and collaborative tools was to tell "knock, knock" jokes.

And I replied, "Who's there?"
"Ice cream soda."
"Ice cream soda, who?"
"ICE CREAM SODA PEOPLE HEAR ME."

So that put me in the mood to collaborate and I asked Twitter, and by association, the entire English-speaking world, to reply to my tweet and contribute to my blog:

"tweet my next blog post. reply by lunch and I will combine all into my blog. please, I am lazy. themes are libraries and/or key lime pie."

And I sort of expected three responses. I hoped for ten, and I got one:

RovingLibrarian
@effinglibrarian I had a gentleman ask if we had the newspaper The Village Voice. He wanted a recipe for key lime pie. I swear! 2 days ago

So you can say that my part of the experiment was FAIL, but the first part, the knock knock joke part, where I was a participant, that was FTW because the communication was dependent on previous and future messages which is something I rarely see on my social media rounds, which I admit are cursory and infrequent.

Anyway... back to it.

The Library is the ONE Place Where You Shouldn't Need to Worry About Your Privacy.

Unless you do something illegal. Or if you are stupid.

I just downloaded the free version of Blown to bits : your life, liberty, and happiness after the digital explosion by Abelson, Ledeen, and Lewis.

And as a pdf image, I can't search it, but I did a quick check for the word, "library," at Google and guess what? I didn't find it. Meaning that "library" appears, but not as a threat to privacy.

I see that the ALA is promoting the first-ever Choose Privacy Week, May 2-8, 2010. And they seriously believe that we, the users of the Internet, still have some privacy left that we have a choice to hang on to it.

I wrote about this a couple months ago, and quickly forgot about it. But now I'm reminded about how librarians want to incorporate social networking applications into every aspect of the library, from sharing book titles to commenting on library services. And I think that people already have more than enough places to lose their privacy that I feel that libraries shouldn't join them.

The ALA Privacy page says that libraries should be "moderating a community dialogue" on privacy. Well, I'm doing it right here:

Social networking sites might trick you into giving away your privacy, and search engines may track every search you type, and your cell phone will reveal every place you travel, but the library never tells.

Read. Look. Watch. The Library doesn't tell. Unless you look really foolish doing it. Then, yes, we will fire up Twitter and tell everyone. That's a promise.