Internet

What’s in Your Internet Closet is a Hump Day Hmmm


I blog, therefore I cannot work in the Obama White House. I also Facebook and have been a member of numerous on line communities from soap opera fan site and widow support groups to parenting sites where I discussed all manner of reproduction minutia that would make the skin literally crawl off anyone assigned the task of checking out my cyber-trail. 

In addition to outing one’s own behavior, good, bad and pornographic on the great WWW, a person coveting a position on the President-elect’s second coming team will also have to cough up the goods on his/her spouse and all their grown children (no word on the age at which they will be considered grown but as any parent can attest, children can be an embarrassment at nearly any point in their lives).

I have blogged so extensively about my life for the last decade I can be certain that I will 1) never get a job with Obama and 2) possibly just never be viably employed again given the work world’s obsessive need to know what I do on my off hours.

I guess I can see the Obama people’s point. Their guy is going to have a tough time as it is. He doesn’t need to worry about what his “people” have been up to on the ‘net. And while I don’t believe it is fair play to dig up blog posts or comments from years ago to try and tarnish a person’s reputation, because this implies we are all set in stone and incapable of growth or change, I can understand an employer’s side of things. Blogging and other social networking is like the tattoo your mom or dad told you not to get because you would regret it someday. But they were old and uncool and you knew better, didn’t you? So now, Lola or Chad is history you can barely recall – because of the amount of alcohol you were consuming back then – but the tat you got in their honor is still there, faded and starting to visibly sag. If only you had listened to your unhip parents. 

The same can be said, of course, for that post you wrote about having sex with that guy you didn’t really want to have sex with or the time you twittered about the pub crawl – while you were mid crawl – and provided photos to boot. Or maybe those pictures are on your MySpace or Facebook page, tagged for all to correctly identify you.

And let’s not forget the mommy bloggers out there who are ruining their children’s futures with every stroke of the keypad.

A full confession for Team Obama includes among other things: all websites, every alias and a recap of every time you flamed someone or went off on a Keith Olbermann rant. Flaming alone would get my resume circularly filed. Soap opera sites are dog eat dog, people.

My worst peccadillo was replying to a post on the widow board about whiny people. The author felt indifferent to the point of  being cold to non-widoweds problems and resented having to listen to them because they were trivial. I replied that this didn’t bother me as much as widowed who did the same thing (whined about little things) because the non-widowed didn’t have a sense of perspective (actually people who have experienced great tragedy in general have this sense of what is really important – well most do). I was chastised off the board while being reminded that only the widowed are allowed to elevate mole hills to mountains – so there. Probably my least shiny moment. One day I might let that go. But not today.

So what’s in your Internet Closet? Publish porn much? Frequent Yahoo chat rooms just to pick ideological fights? Have an alias persona on Facebook? The President-elect would like to know, so he can disqualify you.

Life in the New Sweatshop


Last week’s Newsweek contained an interesting little article comparing user generated content sites to sweatshops. As I read it and then thought about it, I had to admit that it is true. For little to no compensation ordinary folk like us are, for all intents and purposes, creating the content that draws others to countless sites on the Internet and makes millionaires out of the owners who do little more than pat us on the head for our contributions by throwing us a few new apps here and there.

This week the industry bigwigs are meeting and playing in Sun Valley, Idaho to, among other things, try to determine how to make “mo’ money”.

The big questions?

  • building or buying digital industry leaders
  • designing the business model for generating revenue online
  • how to exploit user generated content and social networking sites

Apparently user generated material is what attracts people to the Internet but so far no one has figured out how to really turn us into slave labor. We aren’t poor Asians who haven’t any choice but to make Nike runners for $2 a day or Mexicans eager to make Hersey’s kisses for a fraction of what the company was paying Canadians in Ontario. For the most part we all have day jobs and view our blogging and networking as an outlet that we pay for via our Internet providers. Silly us.

The Internet thus far is not turning people into the same types of mindless consumers that say television does and this is a problem.

The other problem is that as content generators we are still relatively free of editorial restraints. At least as long as Net Neutrality exists but the powers that be are on that problem too. Although there seem to be plenty of us willing to write product endorsement/reviews for freebies being under the illusion that their opinion carries as much weight as the product link in their posts.

So how does it feel to be a virtual serf?

Save the ‘Net! – Net Neutrality is in Danger


I have been meaning to blog about this and got a bit of a push while reading over at Under the Mad Hat recently.

Apparently there are a couple of big problems with Internet and the WWW as we know it today. First is that it’s basically unregulated which makes me wonder why Republicans aren’t falling over themselves to protect it. Until I get to the second point, an unregulated Internet is not a profitable Internet. At least not for ISP providers who could make a heck of a lot of money if they were allowed to two-tier their bandwidth. Doing so would allow them to sell the broadest and fastest band to those who could afford it and leave the rest to well – us. Finally, a neutral net allows we who use it to do just what we are doing now. Writing and sharing and meeting and bringing a whole new meaning to the idea that it is truly a small, small world.

So find out more about the campaign to protect what we have. Here (if you are in U.S.) and here (if you live in Canada).