Citadel of the Blogs The Inbox of the Internet (really)

Google has been criticized recently for its invasion of privacy at the “Street View”. In its defense, Google will argue on the basis of the APEC Privacy Framework. This is underpinned by nine principles: preventing harm; integrity of personal information; notice; security safeguards; collection limitations; access and correction; uses of personal information; accountability; and choice.

Google argues that the APEC privacy framework emphasizes what true “harm” comes from the practice, as opposed to Canada’s PIPEDA or the European versions, which they saw “focuses on abstractions”.

(excuse me while I reach for the vomit bag)

Just a few quick notes about somethings I discovered about my blog recently.

First, the easy one: someone said wordpress didn’t let you embed videos in it. I have no idea why they said that; just plunk down the “embed” code from Youtube, for instance, and voila! video kills the radio star.

Second, I have started writing a bi-weekly column for the student newspaper at this university. Topics will relate to “information literacy”. To archive these, I wanted to create a separate page for them rather than just loosely through this blog. Creating a separate page was easy. But then I wanted the convenience of just blogging the post. So I wondered if there was a way to channel the feed of a category to another page. While this is a relatively simple feature for some bloggers, in my case it was fairly labour intensive.

I use Wordpress and I never toyed with the category feature before. But it turns out that you have to use permalinks to channel feeds in Wordpress. I think this is because the default categories use php in the URL with the question mark prompt. RSS feeds really don’t like question marks, apparently.

So I discovered two things:

I can use the category names via permalinks to channel a feed so long as I added [ /feed ] to the end of the URL (e.g. http://gravesnet.com/taxonomy/tags/japan/feed for the japan category)

But this didn’t solve my problem entirely. It would allow people to follow these categories in their reader. But how could I display this as a static page?

To solve this, this was my workaround:

1. turn on permalinks (basically, go to Options/Permalinks enter this in the “structure” field: [ /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ ] and enter this in the “category base” field: [ /taxonomy/tags ])
2. create a newsletter at FeedBlitz
3. so long as I add [ /feed ] to the end of the permalink, feedblitz creates a newsletter of only this category
4. go to FeedBurner and use feedblitz’ RSS feed to activate feedburner’s headlines OR use the permalink with [ /feed ] at the end (both create RSS feeds so either works)
5. take code of this headlines feature and put it on my stable page

the bonus is that people can either view the page in their RSS readers or subscribe to an email newsletter via feedblitz. which is something I have now added to my main blog page. should’ve had it before, probably, but as I say I never got around to fiddling with this or categories.

voila! I now have a main blog where I will continue to post about whatever interests me. then as I create an article for the paper, I simply categorize it as “information literacy” and it will automatically be displayed on the separate page in headline format in reverse chronological order (aka, blog style, newest on top). that way, students who want to follow the tips but are not interested in the rest of my blog can simply subscribe to that feed alone.

believe it or not, this was the simplest and most elegant solution to my problem. thank you feedblitz/feedburner!

I should probably explain that adding headlines to a stable page was something I have wanted to do for two years now. instead of having the root url be my blog (gravesnet.com) I always wanted it to be gravesnet.com/blog or something and then just feed the headlines of the blog into the root page — sort of a “what’s new” section. but wordpress certainly never let me do this. and I was stumped until it occurred to me that I could use two separate services to achive this goal of mine.

believe it or not I have feedblitz to thank for this: they actually use feedburner to display their own blog headlines! brilliant. [check the credit under their “latest feedblitz headlines” section on FeedBlitz’ main page).

As courses start again for another year, one struggle is learning the target vocabulary to ask the right questions in them. If you’re on the Net, you may find Google’s define operator useful. Just type “define:”—without quotes but with the colon—in your search bar and put the word you want to define after the colon. It is a handy way to find definitions on the net. If Google fails, try OneLook. If the word is out there, it will find it.

For stand-alone dictionaries, Windows users might like WordWeb or iFinger’s Merriam-Webster’s dictionary. WordWeb (free) lets you look up a word in any program by holding down the Control key and right-clicking on it. It lets you select Canadian English if you prefer and provides synonyms in the pop-up window. iFinger’s Merriam-Webster’s dictionary (also free) lets you double-click on any word and a definition opens at the top of any open window. While the definitions can’t compare to WordWeb, it does allow you to type in a word on the fly.

Mac users with OS X can access the built-in Oxford dictionary by highlighting a word and right clicking on it. The trouble is you have to highlight the word. Some Macs let you hover the cursor over a word and type Command-Control-D but this isn’t featured on my Mac.

Remember, when Google doesn’t work, most people don’t have a Plan B. Librarians have lots of Plan B’s. They know when to go to a book, when to call someone, even when to go to Google. Just ask.

Proofpoint, Inc. found that 32.1% of surveyed companies with 1,000 or more employees hire staff to read or analyze the contents of outbound email. 38.8% of larger companies surveyed (those with more than 20,000 employees) employ staff for this purpose. Additionally, 16.9% of companies surveyed employ staff whose primary or exclusive job responsibility is to read or otherwise analyze email content.

This is pretty staggering to my mind:

-More than one-quarter of surveyed companies (27.3%) have terminated an employee for violating email policies in the past 12 months. 45.5% have disciplined an employee for violating email policies in the past year.
-More than one-quarter (26.3%) of surveyed companies report their business was impacted by the exposure of sensitive or embarrassing information in the last year and 33.8% investigated a suspected email leak of confidential or proprietary information.
-29.1% of the largest enterprises (20,000 employees or more) reported that employee email was subpoenaed in the last 12 months.
-48.7% of respondents said they are “concerned” or “very concerned” about Web-based email (such as HotMail or GMail) as a potential conduit of confidential or proprietary information.

People sometimes suspect this is happening at the university where I work. But I don’t think so. It infringes on academic freedom too much, firstly, and Canada’s broader sense of privacy protection, secondly.

Last week I posted about Harper’s secret dealings on re-patriating spent uranium. An issue for Canada since we are the largest producers.

Now I find that the federal government revealed it had closed-door consultations on plans to force Internet service providers to turn customers’ personal information over to police without a court order.

That’s pretty shocking — a court order is a standard these days. I don’t see how we can expect to hold American companies up to this standard if we ourselves don’t abide by it.

Hello Canadian PATRIOT Act.

FOLLOW-UP Sept 17/07
It appears that this information was limited to the “envelope information” which I posted about before in relation to Google & Privacy. I state that it is okay with email but is fuzzier when applied to IP addresses and URLs.