What Do the FBI and Tinky Winky Have in Common?

A recent posting on Press Control Shift , made me wonder if there are remnants of the Hoover era still in the FBI? Will Big Brother always be watching us?

A recent Washington Post article reported that the FBI has been conducting political surveillance on the websites of civil rights groups, including the ACLU and Greenpeace - notice both are liberal groups. These groups are peacefully exercising their right to speak to their members and assemble.

In an attempt to see what the FBI is looking at I went to the Greenpeace website. The website, which includes pretty pictures of rainbows and dolphins, has three main news stories:
1. Obviously that the FBI is watching them!
2. The new Harry Potter book that recently hit bookstores has a new bad guy- the publishers who want to print the book on ancient forest paper and kill more trees!
3. The European parliament has banned the use of toxic chemicals in children's toys including Teletubbies!

that's right the FBI is watching a site whose main news includes Tinky Winky!

What makes me more nervous than the thought of never knowing if the FBI is watching me (not that I have anything to hide), is that the public is not outraged by this! In a time when we are appointing a new Supreme Court Justice, the public should be thinking of these issues because during the next decades the main cases facing the Supreme Court will be privacy related. Be careful Big Brother might be watching you too!

FINALS FINALS FINALS!

Stay Away from my Ipod!

A posting on Out of the Way entitled Podcasting Pioneers made me look further into the new Podcasting Project the Democratic Party is using to try to spread their message. The Project was written about in a U.S. Politics and World News article "House Democrats Become Ipod People."

"Struggling to get its message out in a Republican-dominated Congress, the House
Democratic Caucus has plugged into the nation's growing infatuation with MP3
players to market its message to the technologically inclined masses, initiating
a project in "podcasting." The minority's Web sites are now set up to
allow individuals with devices such as Apple's iPod or other MP3 players
unfiltered versions of speeches, radio addresses and press conferences. Users
can also search Apple's iTunes service for the Democratic messages."

I know the Democrats are trying to use the latest technology to try and get out of the current hole they are in, but if people won't watch you on C-SPAN my guess is they are not going to download your podcast. Even though Al Gore invented the Internet (just kidding), people are not going to go running on the National Mall listening to Nancy Pelosi's latest complaints about the Republicans on their ipods. If the White House can't get the public to watch a presidential press conference or the State of the Union, why would people have them take up room on their MP3 players?

I think it is admirable for the Democrats to be trying new technologies to try to spread their message, but this one will not even work in the politically observant Beltway of Washington. It is time for Democrats to get back to basics to spread their message and not hop on whatever new computer craze comes our way.

Busy With Finals!

Corporations are Taking Over

Well if you did not believe that corporate America was taking over the World, I think you will now! I read Phil's posting "Comcast and After Downing Street" and could believe that Comcast could actually get away with purposefully censoring someone's email.

The posting states that Comcast Cable Company was preventing anyone using its email services from receiving an email with "www.afterdowningstreet.org" in the body of the email. At first I thought that this must be some sort of mistake from spam software, but after reading various websites it is clear that this was not a mistake.

Now if the United States Post Office chose not to give people specific pieces of mail the country would go nuts. If a direct mail piece from President Bush did not get delivered the Post Office would be under federal investigation. But of course because the forbidden email was information about the War in Iraq that does not favor the president, nothing has happened.

I think corporate America really is taking over our world!

Are We Encouraging the Lowest Common Denominator?

Well it is not a big surprise to anyone that teenagers are often misperceived. Not all teenagers drink, smoke, or are obsessed with sex, but now we can add a new one to the list - not all teenagers are good at computers!

Our favorite guy Jakob Nielsen wrote an article "Usability of Websites for Teenagers" discussing the common misconceptions about teenagers using the Internet. "Teenagers are not in fact superior Web geniuses who can use anything a site throws at them. We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users in our latest broad test of a wide range of websites."

Nielsen states that teen's poor performance are caused by 3 factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level. In order for teen's to like your site, he suggests using less text, cool graphics, interactive features, and large fonts.

Now I think implementing these strategies is the worst thing that could happen to teenagers. The reason why teenagers often do not like to read text and and short attention spans is because they are lazy. Catering websites to this laziness is not going to force them to improve. As these teens get older, websites are going to need to be dumb downed for adults.

There's No Place Like Detroit!

Not for a Class Blog...

A recent article on ESPN.com "There's No Place Like Detroit" FINALLY states what I have been saying all along! There is no place like Detroit...and everyone else is just jealous!

"Beginning this week during the Major League Baseball All-Star festivities, he city of Detroit will be brutalized by sportswriters from across the country. The maiming and name-calling and dissing won't stop until the completion of Super Bowl XL.

Beating up on Detroit is easy. As the center of the free-falling automotive industry, known chiefly for crime, high unemployment and urban blight, Detroit is an easy target. Motown's 30-something mayor wears an earring, zoot suits and, if you believe the whispers, throws a house party that would make Snoop blush.

Yeah, making fun of Detroit is about as trouble-free as cracking a fat joke on Kirstie Alley. I've done both. It's really nothing to brag about. But the truth is, especially when it comes to sports, Detroit is as good as it gets."

My Favorite quote from the article is "Detroit is the big, sweaty woman squeezed into a size-10 dress, daring anybody to suggest her body ain't booming."

Who Knows What You Are Up To?

Kids who once thought writing about dating, drinking, and partying on their blogs was only going to be seen by their friends need a reality check. Parents across the country are learning about what their teenagers are up to by reading their blogs. According to the Pew, Internet and American Life Project, 1/5 of teens who have access to the web have a blog compared to 1/10 of adults with access have blogs. Some teens are now realizing that what they choose to write on the Internet can have a price.

Today an article appeared on CNN.com "Bloggers learn the price of telling too much"discussing how people are using what others say in their blogs against them. They discuss the example of conservative politician Alan Keyes daughter, whose blog about her life as a lesbian gave her father and his campaign headaches when he was running for U.S. Senate.

These examples are going to become more and more common. Today people are providing personal information all over the Internet. Everyone I know has their screen name, hobbies, favorite movies, books, and quotes on the Facebook or Friendster. Some people go as far giving their mailing addresses, phone numbers, dorm rooms on these sites. A recent article in the GW Hatchet talks about how incoming freshmen are even trying to use the Facebook to choose their roommates.

We need to realize that anything we put online can be read by anyone...and I mean anyone! So if you don't want your mother, boss, grandmother, or 3rd grade boyfriend to know you are doing it, don't put it online!