Where Are All the Single-Edged Swords?

David Gorski, on Science-Based Medicine, has a detailed post about the internet as a means of conveyance for consumer health information.

The super short version is that, as we're well aware, it's awesome and wonderful that huge amounts of good medical information and patient support are available to anyone with an internet connection--and it's kind of terrible that huge amounts of wildly unreliable medical information are available to anyone with an internet connection.

In our library skills classes for the medical students, we try to point out reputable consumer health sites with solid information that doctors can suggest to patients (good old MedlinePlus!), but sadly not everyone can have a librarian following them around on the internet pointing out key markers of an authoritative site.

Not just yet, anyway. That's totally part of my vision for a brighter future once I run the world, though.

Back!

After a hard day of moving and having no access to the internet yesterday (it was eerie and disorienting, and I had to strike a careful balance between taking deep, soothing breaths and hyperventilating), we are in a new apartment with our network set up.

Aaaaaaaah...that's the life.

I quickly enjoyed this post on Rough Type about one under-noticed sad aspect of the cessation of the Encyclopedia Britannica's print edition: the fun juxtaposition of terms on the spine, telling you which entries start and conclude a particular volume.

Now, although there is much more web-related material to catch up on, I have to go read a library book that's coming due soon. Or unpack some more, but you know I want to try to finish that book.

Speaking of Privacy...

And as long as we're on the subject, many of you will probably have received Google's friendly email notice about their new, Google-wide privacy policy, covering all Google sites.

Identity Woman has a review, and is not a big fan. I think she makes a good point:

I think in one way she is right the people like her - who went to college and have mainstream white collar jobs are on these fora with their real names

...and therefore, it won't be a huge deal to a lot of such people (like me).

On the other hand, if you are a person who has online interests that are significantly different from your offline life, or different sorts of online interests that you like to keep separate, it could at the very least be something of a hassle to have everything you do online mashed into one easy-to-access package.

Hm.

Grrr of the Day

It's always comforting if people on the internet have had the same annoying problems you have with, say, installing software programs and making them talk to each other.

Ideally it's even helpful, if they can tell you what they did to fix it. But when you see a lot of comments like "I don't know what I did, but it works now"--I'm not sure that's either comforting or helpful.

It at least implies that the problem can be fixed, which is good. On the other hand, it suggests that the solution remains a mystery, which means I could be fiddling around with the problem for 20 hours before I unwittingly stumble across the answer, or might potentially never stumble across it at all, and that's bad.

Hmph.

Stupid internet. Be more helpful!

StealthNet

Go Make Me a Sandwich has a guest post offering a nice introduction to internet anonymity (crucial tip: be extremely paranoid).

It mentions metadata! Not the sort librarians apply to records, though. The type that software and gadgets automatically add to your documents and photographs (autometadata?). The post notes that metadata is not necessarily bad, but can be trouble in the wrong situation:

Pictures, for example, store all kinds of juicy things as EXIF data, including in the case of some phones and cameras, geolocation. Office documents, pdfs, spreadsheets; all sorts of things can hold data that can identify you. This junk is called Metadata. Not a big deal (it can even be personally useful) until you’re posting information, say, about unethical practices about your boss on your anonymous blog and your employer uses metadata from a posted .docx file to find out it was you. Oops. Now you’re fired. Or worse.

Again, this is not librarian metadata, but I'm all for spreading awareness of metadata in general, so cheers to the mention that, if you're not worried about anonymity, it can be useful.

Yes! Use it to organize and manage your data!

Also, be paranoid. Besides the metadata note, which yeah is probably not the interesting part to anyone but me, there are helpful tips on passwords, anonymous browsing, thoroughly erasing files, and more.

It Was Good Enough for My Grandpappy

I'm intrigued by this limited-copyright/open access argument on Got Medieval:

There really is no better argument against the industrialized world’s continued extension and re-extension of copyrights and the academic tendency to bury everything behind paywalls: it’s dooming us to a world in which the only facts easily marshaled by the masses are those that years and years of critical work has already supplanted, a world where the cutting edge is perpetually the same old rusty edge from 1920-something.

Do we want the masses--all of us out here writing things on the internet--to have access to recent information when publishing our turpentine-fueled rants?

I dunno. That rusty 1920-something edge has been slicing so well for so long. Current information is for suckers.

Unless it's about movies or cell phones or something vital. Then we need to know the very latest.

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I'm a Simple Collection of Letters

danah boyd (also known as zephoria online) has a very interesting post on apophenia about identity, and ownership/protection thereof, on the internet.

She has gone by zephoria for years, but apparently recently had her Tumblr account with that name closed so that the name could be given to a company also called Zephoria.

She makes good points about domain name 'squatting,' or people who buy up names they don't have any particular connection to but think will be in demand, and then try to sell them to other people who have a real interest in them.

There's also the phenomenon of people buying site names related to people or things that they don't like (say, a political opponent, or a cause one despises, or an archnemesis) and then making a whole site trashing that person or idea.

Ha! When someone goes to myarchnemesis.com, they're going to get information on what I want to say about that person, not what that person wants to say about him- or herself!

The post talks about how social media sites have made online names even more important, since your blog-commenting ID or Twitter name really can be who you are online. It might obviously be of some concern if someone else uses the same name, even if there's no malicious intent. It dilutes the brand, after all.

And eroding your identity in spaces where no one may know your offline name, your face, or anything about you other than what you post, may be more of a problem than if there's another guy in the office named Bill. There are probably plenty of things in the physical world that distinguish you from the other Bill, but distinguishing between two people who use the same internet name could be a lot harder.

Still, what does that mean in terms of who 'should' get to use names? Is first-come-first-served the best way to handle it? Should companies get to take names away from individuals? (Tumblr gave the name back in this case.) Is it fair to set aside certain names for the use of the well-known corporations or people most likely to be associated with them?

I have no answers, but the questions are interesting.

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Fun Fact Indeed

I was intrigued to find, via Fannie's Room, that the Communications Decency Act means "Technically, it is illegal to be anonymously and intentionally annoying on internet."

You know, given the rampant hate-comments and threatening emails that better bloggers than I get every day, I somehow suspect that some people may be slightly breaking that law.

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The Pursuit of Everything

I see on LISNews that "Finland became the world leader in Internet access by making broadband every Finnish citizen's legal right and ensuring that every citizen will have access to a 1Mbps broadband connection."

Nice.

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"To the Internet!"

I see on ScienceRoll (original story in the Sun) that the husband of a pregnant woman who went into labor did a Google search on his mobile device and helped deliver the baby based on tips from wikiHow. Now that's using technology to answer an immediate need.

The ScienceRoll post argues that this man should have called a health professional (dialing 911 or the UK equivalent) instead of doing a web search. I'm all for ready access to health information, but I do see that point: the internet is great, but presumably a live person would have been more helpful if there had been any complications.

Fortunately there were none, and the mother and baby were fine.

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My Ire is Leveled

A curse on you, slow internet. I hate when I write a long, newsy email and then hit 'send' and the screen just whirs and eventually dies, taking my carefully crafted sentences with it.

I hate you, slow internet! I hate you! [Shaking an ineffectual fist.]

Party Online, Everyone!

In case you were worried about the carbon footprint of your internet use, the Official Google Blog has helpfully provided this post on Energy and the Internet.

It calculates the amount of electricity used by a Google search and expresses common items, including among others a glass of orange juice, a load of dishes (in an EnergyStar dishwasher, of course!), and a cheeseburger, in terms of the number of searches you could make for the same energy cost.

Quite a few, it turns out. The average monthly electricity use of a U.S. household is equivalent to 3,100,000 Google searches, so internet use is probably among the least of your energy use concerns.

An obvious note is that this calculation (at least explicitly) describes only the energy cost of searching Google on the internet. I'm not going to deny I spend a fair amount of time doing that, but I also spend a lot of online time doing other things.

It is impossible to determine, based merely on this post, whether those other things might use more energy. Watching TV shows, searching databases, downloading articles, uploading attachments, writing blog posts...the amount of energy required for these activities is not noted here.

I'm not really saying it should be, it's Google's blog and they don't have any obligation to break down the details of any activities they don't want to, but this does somewhat limit our ability to point to this as justification for declaring "woo hoo, party online everyone, internet use is completely unproblematic from an environmental standpoint!"

Although we might as well declare it anyway, just because we like to issue grand statements.

TechCrunch and Stephen's Lighthouse noticed this before I did.

Seriously, AP?

Dangerous Intersection (and a post to MEDLIB-L) alerted me to this possibly disturbing action by the Associated Press to limit use of their content.

According to the alarmed post at the middle link there (a post at WebPro News), the AP is trying to outlaw linking, and could be preparing to sue Google and other search engines for returning AP stories as search results. Which seems a little backwards--don't people click through and read news stories they retrieve as search results, thereby giving precious eyeball time to the content creator?

I'm not sure I see an outright threat to the very practice of linking in this story (hence my rampant linkage here), but I am not an expert, so it might easily be there.

A story from the New York Times (via WebProNews again) suggests that, in fact, one part of the concern is to make sure that search engines return the original AP work to searchers, rather than a version posted somewhere else. Which I can see being a concern, but telling search engines which results they have to put first is problematic.

There's also some copyright concern (oh, copyright!--we meet again!), as there's a question of whether or not posting snippets of works owned by other people/organizations is Fair Use. News aggregator sites have operated under the assumption that it is, but the AP, if it really wants to crack down on use of its content, may wind up challenging that.

I certainly can't feign surprise and horror that the AP wants to control its work and make some money. I too enjoy receiving credit for the works of my fabulous intellect, as well as money. 

Webverse-changing new crackdowns, though, that does make one wonder and doubt. Could this change the internet as we know it? For the worse, even? 

Time, I suppose, will tell. Time and copyright law. So we're doomed.

Ghastly Technical Problems

The internet is down in my apartment. 

I cannot sufficiently stress the horror that is this moment, knowing I must go home and face the blank void of non-connection. I'd stay in the office all night, but then I would have to face the grumbling void of an empty stomach, which is slightly more horrifying still.

Is this notebook-like device even good for anything without the web?

We're going to get with Verizon tech support. Wish us luck.

Update: Whew!

The problem was relatively easily solved. The internet lives!

See, Here's Your Problem

I have identified a glaring flaw in the internet, which is that I can't do other things and surf at the same time.

I mean, I can do some other things, but not to the extent that is possible with other forms of media. For example, I can be listening to music while typing right now, or while otherwise educating and/or entertaining myself on the web, but I cannot be darning a sock.

Which I could be doing if I were watching TV, as long as it wasn't something with subtitles that I had to watch nonstop, or if I were listening to the radio, or having someone read a book out loud to me. (Yes, we used to do that when I was a young'un. One person would read, and the others would sit around and sew, or draw, or knit, while listening. It was heartwarmingly wholesome, I can assure you.)

Don't get me wrong, I love the internet to pieces, but I can't help but notice that there's a hole in the pocket of a pair of trousers that I've been meaning to patch for weeks, and I haven't done it yet, and I think it's partly because I go to the computer for my news and socializing instead of turning on a less interactive information/entertainment machine that would leave my hands free.

Or maybe it's also because patching holes in pockets isn't the most fun I could imagine of a Friday evening after a hard day's work, so I've been avoiding it. Hmmm. 

Nevertheless, for arts-and-crafts type people who like to work with their hands, the internet must be a less appealing option than it is to me, who hasn't handcrafted anything in years. 

All the more reason to hurry up with that internet-directly-into-the-brain thing. Then I could get my mending done and keep up with my blog-reading!

Reflections on Search

Stephen's Lighthouse recommended The Google Dilemma several days ago. I finally got around to reading it, and heartily concur with the recommendation.

James Grimmelmann writes a very readable, interesting piece about some of the issues associated with how search engines organize the web for us, looking at some examples, including:

• Google bombing (getting enough people to link to a page using a specific phrase that it becomes one of the top results for that term) and whether these results are legitimate
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• Controversial sites and whether they should be allowed to stay on results pages even if they get there through these types of link manipulation (the 'yes' argument is summed up as "the computer did it"---the algorithm that ranks results should not be interfered with, and if enough people are linking with certain terms, Google isn't going to mess with the rankings)
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• Link farming, the ways that it can mess up search results, and whether it therefore makes sense for Google to interfere with the rankings in these cases (after all, these are not real people linking to sites)
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• How OK we are with it if some sites are kept off results pages in certain countries due to local laws (is it understandable or repellent and cowardly that Google's Chinese site censors search results according to China's laws?)
  

It's a very interesting look at search engines and how they shape our view of what's out there on the web (and why something needs to shape that view since the web, unmediated, is basically unusable chaos).