Data security: Google's headache

And now a word from our sponsor:

Greater transparency around government requests

4/20/2010

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that "everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Written in 1948, the prinicple applies aptly to today's Internet -- one of the most important means of free expression in the world. yet government censorship of the web is growing rapidly: from the outright blocking and filtering of sites, to court orders limiting access to information and legislation forcing companies to self-censor content.

So it's no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography. We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activites hisotrically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship.

We are today launching a new Government Requests tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world. for this launch, we are using data from July-December, 2009, and we plan to update the data in 6-month increments. Read this post to learn more about our prinicples surrounding free expression and controversial content on the web.

We already try to be as transparent as legally possible with respect to requests. Whenever we can, we notify users about requests that may affect them personally. If we remove content in search results, we display a message to users. The numbers we are sharing today take this transparency a step further and reflect the total number of request we have received broken down by jurisdiction. We are also sharing the number of these content removal request that we do not comply with, and while we cannot yet provide more detail about our compliance with user data requests in a useful way, we intend to do so in the future.

As part of our commitment to the Global Network Initiative, we have already agreed to principles and practices that govern privacy and free expression. In the spirit of these principles, we hope this tool will shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests for censorship and data around the globe. We also hope that this is just the first step toward increased transparency about these actions across the technology and communications industries.

Posted by David Drummound, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

Google Blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/greater-transparency-around-government.html

Government Requests tool: http://www.google.com/governmentrequests/

Thang 23: We are the library gypsies!

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain
My followers I'll say it clear
I'll state my case of which I'm certain

I've lived a life that's full
I travelled each and every E-highway
And more, much more than this
I blogged it my way.

Some basic principles I've learned along the way:

1. Always check if your blog title has been used elsewhere. Oh dearie me, another Gigi's Thang at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuyCtuu-A5g
2. Keep a sharp eye on your privacy permissions and how much self-info you are giving to the public.
3. Keep copies of files on your home computer should the "Cloud" disperse abruptly.
4. Discipline to up-date Web 2.0 sites on a daily basis, but not have your working life taken over by the virtual one.
5. Librarians do have a thing for cats.
6. Keep a notebook on hand for recording all your usernames & passwords and guard it with your life!

My like-o-meter:

1. Blogger and iGoogle page with all their gadgets because you can personalize them and they do provide a one-stop-shop platform. iGoogle is like a monitoring centre whereas you can express more thoughts on Blogger with interactions from others.
2. Facbook I find less attractive looking, but it may be easier for fans to comment on. I've used the "Note" tab to display my blog and I have a Twitter tab along with the Wall, Photo and Video. How do the other libraries do the Box and Discussion tabs? I think it a good idea to encourage dicussions as a means of discovering what your readers want.
3. Twitter I like as quick bits of information that could draw people to more in-depth sources.
4. RSS Feeds and Delicious can be very useful, but you do need discipline as some 23 Thingers have mentioned since you can get overwhelmed with such delightful information to bring on a headache!
5. YouTube and podcasts are addicting and bad for my health (I'll stay up until the wee hours of the night watching & listening). If you develop the skill of making these they provide an additional eye-catching method of educating (like the SSL induction video).
6. Flickr and Picnik are fairly easy to learn and don't take over your computer like Picassa (grrr). I use Flickr to store photos for blogging purposes.
7. Office 2.0 and wiki's are great ways of collaborating if you aren't a control freak. Particularly Office 2.0 since those who are working from different computers can always have access to their works in progress. Must keep aware, though, of potential big Brothers searching through your files, and that if the "Cloud" collaspes, you're screwed (keep back-ups at home).

My groan-o-meter:

1. Linkedin: I wasn't willing to provide so much information unless I was looking for a job. A student doing a DPhil thesis on the informal means of scientific collaboration found that scientists preferred setting up blogs than using Linkedin. They saw it as just for job hunting.
2. ThinkFree: too slow, too fiddly with several windows to open, and not free (only free 30 day trial).

The following portion corresponds with the Flickr Photostream display (hopefully) on the left.

What can we expect of libraries in the future? Beautiful old libraries will be given over to the tourist trade with all the dust, cobwebs and old dons removed and automatic aerosol dispensers strategically placed to squirt out essences of leather binding, brass and wood polish.

There has been a proliferation of new libraries of fantastic architectural designs that are revamping the concept of "library". No longer just a repository of fusty books; they are Idea Shops, Information Centres, community centres that provide child-care, theatres, cafes, lounges with a view, offices, computers, computers, computers! How about computers powered by tread-mills; keeping our readers fit and our environment green.

No longer will librarians be glued to their reference desk. Desks will be too hot to stay put. We need to be on the go, like the lady with her mobile desk, ever vigilant for a confused and puzzled look: "May I help you?" Or if the budget gets too tight for full-time librarians, how about Courtesy Nodes dotted about the Human-Information Interaction Zone.

Of course, Cloud computing with their database warehouses could put pay to analog libraries. The virtual library would be accessible from your personal living space (the chair/computer set-up is just perfect for my style of horizontal reading). However, that wouldn't mean the end of the librarian career. We just need to be more creative and colourful in our approach. There will be people who would miss the human-touch of knowledge and thus I suggest Librarian Gypsies who travel the length and breath of Britain reading the "Cloud" for their customers.

Anthracothorax: Sadness of the end, warmth in communal support- Web 2 future joy. #ox23

Thank you Oxford 23 Things organisers.

Thang 22: We're almost there

That was fairly easy and it made me want to remove some gadgets and rearrange them. Since I had added Channel 4 news to my feed I really didn't need the three other news feed so that is where my Delicious went to. My facebook box is now working since I created an account, but I don't like the Whats on your mind? since you can only see what you are typing for the first line. For some reason there is no scrolling capability so if you type in more than one line you just have to hope it looks alright (like writing on paper without looking).

I've changed my theme from snow covered mountains to misty spring, but the weather in Scotland makes me feel I should return to the snowy mounts!

Thang 21: Been there done it

Thanks to Penny I already added on the Flickr Photostream gadget a few weeks ago. One problem I encountered was no pictures showing up; then we realised that my privacy permissions were too strick. Once I changed the permission to public viewing for some of my pictures up they popped on my Blog (bottom left-hand side).

I hadn't noticed the Feature, Most Popular and More Gadget options to the left. Instead I just typed in what I was looking for in the search window. So even when you've been-there-and-done-it you still learn something new.

I've also added a counter, but its been counting more my viewing of my own blog than others. I would like to change it but cannot for the life of me remember how I found the last site of free counters, especially since it had a nice discreet butterfly counters.

Thang 20: Not so free ThinkFree

Well, I was able to do the same article in a similar format on both Google Docs and ThinkFree. I was even able to download the essays as PDF onto my desktop with both; however,
ThinkFree could be a bit or a lot slower than Google Docs, in particular the fact that it has to open another window for editing the text and downloading the Java script.

You do get about the same amount of storage: 1 GB. However, another downer about ThinkFree is it ain't free. What you get is a 30 day free trial, but eventually you will have to pay. This I gathered from the FAQ's in Thinkfree Help.

http://help.thinkfree.com/views/jsp/user/help_center/contents/userFaqView.jsp

Thang 19: even more!

Here is my questionaire on Hot-desking (an issue close to my heart): do you want it or do you don't? A nifty little program which has already given me one result in the automatically generated spreadsheet. I also provided a power-point presentation about the issues around Hot-desking to help my survey victims develop their opinions. Again the presentation program was very easy to work out with enough variety of background them to serve its purpose. I went for very loud as you can see below:

My favourite of the hot-desking styles. It matches my favourite position when reading:

Thang 19: Privacy or Patriotism

Google Docs was quite easy to use and I was able to edit other people's documents with no problemos. I can see its use for collaborative work though I would eventually store the final work on my own computer and use WORD for the final touches. My main reason is privacy protection as my short essay explains on "Google and the Patriot Act" done on Google Doc:

Two years ago Simon Avery wrote an article in the Globe and Mail about the dangers of the U.S. Patriot Act skulking about the internet jungle:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/article675014.ece

The article begins with some worries expressed by members of a Canadian university that had signed up to Google's Cloud Service (which only took 30 days to set up and was for free versus investing $1 million for another commercial product that would have taken months to establish). You may wonder why these professors were against a freebie which offered the latest in software capabilites to their students. The problem was the country that Google Inc. is based in: the United States of America.

Part of the war against terrorism was the creation of the Patriot Act which made it easy for the U.S. government to snoop on it's citizens for security reasons. This was to exist for only a limited time, but has been extended since it reached it expiration date. The latest extension was just this February 2010 [ http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0301/Obama-signs-Patriot-Act-extension-without-reforms ].

"Using their new powers under the Patriot Act, U.S. intelligence officials can scan documents, pick out certain words and create profiles of the authors - a frightening challenge to academic freedom" is a quote from one of the Canadian academics. "For instance, a researcher with a Middle Eastern name, researching anthrax or nuclear energy, might find himself denied entry to the United States without ever knowing why."

Apparently Google has gone to court over just this issue: "The firm cites a court case it fought in 2006 against attempts by the U.S. Justice Department to subpoena customer search records." It may be a comfort to know that Google is fighting for our privacy, but scary to know that the U.S. government does see Google as a prime source of information with a great search engine to assist in their security scans. Google was not willing to reveal how frequently they receive such demands from the government to access customers' files and whether the Patriot Act had invoked against them.

For more information go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act

Thang 18, or Fight! Fight! Fight!

Although I don't have my Firefox open up on the Wikipedia Homepage like my husband does, I do find myself going there first for an answer. It is tricky trying to balance the ease of getting an answer (I'm amazed at how comprehensive it is) and accuracy. When writing an essay I will start with wikipedia for ideas and possible references, but I'll never quote and/or reference a wikipedia entry for fear that it would denigrate the quality of my work.

I've never looked at the history tab so I looked up something rather controversial: climate change and noticed that there had been an act of vandalism:" 16:06, 15 January 2010 ClueBot (talk | contribs) m (33,995 bytes) (Reverting possible vandalism by Jamesb1995 to version by Closedmouth. False positive? Report it. Thanks, ClueBot. (524884) (Bot))"

What could this act of vandalism have been? I clicked on the Jamesb1995 hyperlink and found:
(←Created page with ' == FART ZONE == Vandalize this page! [http://www.cooljunkofdoom.piczo.com CLICK!]') followed by:
‎ (←Replaced content with 'FART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!') See below:

This vandalism seems to have happened quite frequently so that:
"This article has been placed on article probation. Editors making disruptive edits may be blocked temporarily from editing the encyclopedia, or subject to other administrative remedies, according to standards that may be higher than elsewhere on Wikipedia. Please see Wikipedia:General sanctions/Climate change probation for full information and to review the decision." Democratisation of knowledge has its limits.

So are wikis a good way for a dispersed group to virtually get together and create documents such as library use guides; or would members with obessive-compusive tendencies drive the rest mad, Mad, MAD with frequent alterations?

Thang 17: Co-training of Lankester Reading Room Staff - Web 2: Oxford libraries

Co-training of Lankester Reading Room Staff - Web 2: Oxford libraries

Yippe Kai Yay! I managed to create a wiki-page on the C&RD Board. Above is the link. It was fairly simple to do just following Jane's instructions. The biggest difficulty was overcoming my fear that I was going to do something so terribly wrong that the whole C&RD Board would implode; but it didn't. Phew!

Thang 16

So here is my twitter home page. I managed to give it a little personal touch. You might be able to see that I am following 6 tweeters and am being followed by 4 (which is actually 3 since I stopped following someone). I'm tweeting and @ing and I did a retweet from the Economist (however it wouldn't let me direct the retweet to #ox23, only to my followers I think, so I copied it and then tweeted it to ox23). I even did a Direct Message, but I won't say to whom ;-)
Below are some of my entries onto #ox23:
I was trying to setup a gadget on my blog that would allow people to tweet from my blog (including me), but none of the gadgets offered seem to work and one left my username and password up on the screen for all to see! Tsk, tsk, tsk! So I'll leave that option for now.

Thang 15

Picture taken by Jaro Nemcok

By golly, gee, oh my! What a palaver to come up with a username acceptable to Twitter! I looked to Wikipedia for inspiration which is why I have such a strange username. Anthracothorax is a genus of hummingbirds locally called Mangos. Anyway, I survived to post my first tweet: Anthracothorax Oxford 23 things that reach out to others: daffodils shudder.

Haiku works very well with Twitter though it under uses the 140 character allocation. Limericks would be better but I'm not so clever.

At first it was hard to find people to follow since many in ox23 haven't started the Twitter project, so I tried a couple of outsiders and they were a chatty pair. Too chatty! So I dropped them and connected with a couple libraries from the Web 2.o directory. Eventually I had some asking to follow me so I could then follow them. Quid pro quo.

Thang 14 : NOT ANOTHER ACCOUNT!!!!

Explore http://learn.linkedin.com/ and sign up for LinkedIn

Another account to sign-up for and maintain. Another USERNAME and PASSWORD to remember. ANOTHER PROFILE TO CREATE. AAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!
I feel a hot-flush coming on. I can't do it! I just can't do it!

So, instead, I just perused what LinkedIn had to say about itself and for me the page that bested summed up what LinkIn is really all about is below:

Just recently I read in the Economist that LinkedIn is quite popular amongst the professionals in looking for new jobs or headhunting personnel so I suppose in these hard-times one should Log-in, Blog-on and Tweet-out.

As librarians it may be a way of comparing notes with other librarians around the world (at least the ones who type in English even in American): what problems they are facing; what successes they have experienced; what new demands are being made of them. You could also check if a planned change of procedures had been implemented elsewhere and how it had succeeded or failed. Mainly, though, LinkedIn is a tool for professionals to develop their jobs and to make their abilities known to potential employers. It isn't a means of outreach to their clients.

Facebook, on the otherhand, is meant to be an informal and creative e-space conducive to chats on all sorts of topics. In some ways, our libraries are a bit too formal with their Facebooks, or they don't have the time to try and generate discussions amongst their fans and then glean information from the debates. It should be left relaxed, a wee bit subversive, carefree and fun to attract our readers. Leave the high-brow stuff for the official websites.

Thang 13

http://www.badgers.org.uk/brocks-world/taxid02.jpg

Wow! What a fight last night; two badgers in a noisey and vicious tussle. It may have been a male badger trying to force himself on a female, but she wasn't taking it. He would have been more successful if he used Facebook. He could have posted photos of his cosy den and share stories on favourite hunting grounds for snails and sweet corn. He could have revealed his sensitive side with poems about new moon nights with the hooting of the barn owl echoing through the whispering trees and how he dreams of romping through the fields with his cubs. And she might have said: Darling, where have you been all my nocturnal nights. Ahhhhh.

http://www.dmcphoto.com/Badgers_B.JPG

Looking over the Facebooks of some Oxford U libraries made me wonder why they didn't combine all their Twitter, Blogs, LibraryThing, Delicious, Webpages on Facebook; a one-stop shop for information. You could have a tab for each one along with a Discussion forum tab. Some are missing a trick in a lack of stories about the library and more photos. How about some library history? Tom Kirtly cartoons? I was wondering why 200 Peruvians wanted to become fans of the Education Library. Did it give them access to information which they couldn't do via the internet? Did they hope to discuss issues with professors and student at Education Studies in the Discussion tab of ESL's Facebook? There is an interesting story brewing here.

I'm now creating my own Facebook. It's been painful since I was expecting it to be like Blogger.

Go, go, go AstroBoy

One of the biggest problem with YouTube is you can't get off it. I was trolling through memory lane until 1 am this morning looking at old cartoon clips like AstroBoy. It was one of my favorite cartoon when a wee lass and then we moved into a different TV region that didn't receive the transmissions of the channel that hosted AstroBoy. My heart was broken (at least for a little while). I didn't know it was a Japanese creation. No wonder the characters' mouths moved out of synch with their voices.

Anyway, it brought back memories of other Japanese cartoons that were shown from time to time. One was the White Serpent but there was another more beautiful animated film from either the 1960's or 50's which I couldn't find. Any Japanese Anime fans out there? What I remember was the story of a young boy and his sister who may have become orphans or sold to a wealthy family as servants. The girl became very depressed and the last you see of her is walking towards a lake where you presumed she drowned and then from the lake rose a swan or geese that represented her spirit. The young boy went in search of his sister and went through various adventures. Does this ring a bell?

Thang 12

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKoB0MHVBvM

I've been entertaining myself with YouTube for a couple years. My very first search was for menthos mints in Coke (or Pepsi) and this vid was the ultimate in exploding soda bottles. Titled: Diet Coke + Mentos.

After this baptism into YouTube I began to look up old TV programmes, bands (in particular those performing in Woodstock), TV dramas I missed (before IPlayer and 4OD came into being), and favorite celebrities. I'm always amazed at what one can find on YouTube. TV stations must be adding stuff from their archives since we didn't have video machines in the fifties & sixties, but I can find Shirley Temple movie clips, The Andy Griffith Show (with Ron Howard playing the young son Opie), etc.

One of my favorite channel is Simon's Cat. A must for cat owners:

http://www.youtube.com/user/simonscat?blend=1&ob=4

The YouTube EDU didn't send me. I was surprised about the low number of University channels. The Open University one seemed the most interesting and developed which I may explore in the future. Perhaps it will provide the chemistry behind the Diet Coke + Mentos extravaganza!

Pod People can have passions

Oh my GAWD!
There's a David Tennant podcast site, Tennantcast!
The bad news is that my computer doesn't have a sound card. Drats! The good news for my boss is that I don't have a sound card and that all this iGoogle, Google Reader and Blogger are internet services so I can go home to drool.

I also included in my list of Podcasts "A History of the World in 100 Objects" and (attempting to appear as a serious librarian) "MIT Libraries- Podcasts on scholarly Publishing". One of the pods is titled: "Mackenzie Smith on Endnote v. Zotero". I will have to see how this compares with Roger Mill's WISER session. Then I will return to Tennantcast. Allons-y!

Thang 10 of the nomads

Nomads: are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location (according to Wikipedia).

Are we becoming nomads in search of work and these social networking tools are proving to make our new nomadic lives easier; or is the social networking turning us into restless nomads? With all this Cloud Computing gear I can jump on my camel and surf the dunes while reading the latest antics of my friends on my Netbook, letting them know where I am using the GPS on my iPhone as I listen to the "Lawrence of Arabia Suite" by Maurice Jarre on my iPod (at the moment all these devices are virtual in my case).

I managed to network with a couple Oxford librarys: History of Faculty & Zoology library, and with Imperial College Library. Hey Presto! I have an additional 386 bookmarks instead of my previous six (no wonder I'm feeling restless). Working in the main science library in Oxford, it would be useful to see what the various departmental science libraries consider interesting and important websites; and not only those libraries in Oxford, but in other university science libraries around the world! Ah Ha! I'll be the Ghengis Khan of info sweeping through the cyber-world with my horde of Cloudi-Nomads hoovering up a googolplex of data ... or I could just keep my sanity, keep my network to a select few and avoid the RSS feeds!
http://images.travelpod.com/users/johnnynomad/latin_america.1143520560.img_7541.jpg

Delicious Thang 9

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 ...
It's delightful, it's De.licio.us, it's de-lovely!
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 ...

First, I was so happy NOT to need another password. I opted for using my Yahoo login. Perhaps that would become a problem should Delicious move to another platform like Google.

It was fairly easy to get set-up plus to add-on the bookmarklet in a round-about sort of way. The actuality was less straight-forward than the instructions since there was no initial use of the term "bookmarklet" and some other weird things seemed to happened, but mission accomplished.

Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 ... Oh go away!
So where was I, yes the bookmarking. The group may have noticed three contribution from me:
BBC- Virtual Revolution (about social networking over the internet)
BBC- A History of the World in 100 Objects (Daaa-Aaah-aaah-Aaah)
Gigi's Thang

For myself I also de-marked: Allotment UK, Metcheck.com UK, and the B.D. Owens Library website (a university library looking at converting its collection into e-books). I think I even managed to share a bookmark, but haven't received a response back.

The biggest positive for me (having to work from three computers) is the ability to access my bookmarks from one site instead of discovering that my Favorites on one computer is missing an item which is on another (which one) computer. No duplication needed (unless the Delicious system suffers a major breakdown losing all the bookmarks stored around the world).

The tagging is a different thing to get use to. When I first moved to England I found it difficult working out how the British Yellow Pages categorised things, but eventually I learned to distort my American way of thinking to fit the British YP paradigm. Now I would have to skew my mind into infinite dimensions to anticipate the many ways people may have tagged something I am interested in. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!
Number 9, number 9, number 9, number 9 ...

Picnik revisited & the thwarted Sweetcorn massacre

After seeing some of the interesting effects that Picnik did on other's photos I returned to the programme and the scales fell from my eyes! I had only focused on the initial editing options and never noticed the other tabs like Create. With such creative possibilities at my finger-clicks I felt a story bubbling up.

Last summer my husband & I decided to rent an allotment. Not one of the posh one that the Osnians hoe to perfection, but one on the margins of West Oxford, a part of the AAA: the Anarchist Allotment Association. Here we live in harmony with the weeds, the bees and the cabbage butterflies.

Though the AAA is an annexe to the Osney Allotments, we are so out of sight and soil-poor that we are pretty much ignored. Occasionally they send an inspector to encourage tidier plots and discourage the building of ramshackle sheds. Old-timers raise the alarm-flags to give us the chance of escaping through the hedgerow and over the stream since you cannot be encouraged without a face to face confrontation. Leaving notes of remonstration is hopeless, what with the wind blowing them away or being eaten by the cabbage butterfly larvaes.

Our new life was going diggingly well until a threat in the night: badgers! We had planted a patch of sweet corn that was coming to ear and the badgers could smell their sweetness wafting through the warm September air. First it was one plant knocked down, a few days later, another; they were tasting the ears to see if ready for the feasting. Drastic measures were required.

It was too late to build a fence strong & deep enough to keep the badgers out, so instead we dug-up and transplanted the corn to our patio many steep steps away from badger land. It worked and our sweetcorn continued to ripen in their new refuge bringing a happy ending to my tale.

YUM!

Thang 8

http://www.fndc.govt.nz/services/community-facilities/libraries/teddy-bears-picnic/tEDDY-BEARS-pICNIC-PICTURE.JPG

This picnic seems more engaging than the Picnik programme for editing my pictures. It didn't do much more than Paint or Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I managed to download Picasa 3.1 which seems to offer the ability to make collages of photos and I'm hoping to do overlays. I will keep you posted.

Thang 7

My Friend Flicka, any oldy moldies out there who remember this TV show?

(humongous url listed at end of message)

It inspired the title of my flickr page. Interesting is how the system selects what it thinks is the most appropriate salutation for your page. I, apparently, am a cowgirl.

So I spent hours uploading a few pictures and a couple videos from the Luminox performance in March 2006. I had four videos but discovered that for the freebie flickr account you are only permitted two videos a month. I wonder if you can keep the previous videos or will they be replaced by next months video uploads?

Then I grouped them in sets (versus folders). I had thought that by giving each photo a tag I could have them automatically grouped, but the tags only helped in pulling out particular tagged items which I then had to physically drag into the new set screen.



Last of all to become one of the elites, the Oxford 23 Things group. It was a nerve wracking night as I awaited confirmation, so it brightened my morning duties by discovering all was well. However, I was a wee bit alarmed when I found that by clicking on my flickr account name below the pictures I sent it brought up my entire photostream (I had selected the private privacy setting for all my pictures). After hearing muffled squeals of horror, Konnie bunny pointed out that I was logged in as myself so she checked and found she could only look at the pictures I sent and not go into the rest of my photostream. Which was a relief since my collection of Elmer Fudd pictures would have been distressing to her. I've ensquared my photos in the picture below.

URL for My Friend Flicka picture above: http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://horsefame.tripod.com/img/mffrear.jpg&imgrefurl=http://horsefame.tripod.com/Flicka1.html&usg=__XbGQLk1qVC28RxM0umINycgylvg=&h=300&w=238&sz=15&hl=en&start=6&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=RbwMTUTtN087UM:&tbnh=116&tbnw=92&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dmy%2Bfriend%2Bflicka%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26sa%3DG%26um%3D1

Emails, Blogs, RSS Feeds, oh my!

There is a tale by Aesop about a conversation between a fox and a cat (somewhere between the growls and the hissing). The fox was bragging about having over a hundred ways of escaping his enemies, but the cat had only one: climbing a tree. Suddenly they heard the baying of a pack of hounds. Up the tree went the cat while the fox began to muse over the possible actions he could take: should I run down the stream to lose my scent, nah too cold today; what about over the hill and through the narrow culvert, a bit messy and I just licked my coat clean; I could pad around this tree and place my scent on the trunk so they will notice cat up above and get distracted while I make my get-away... By the time he decided on his plan of escape the hounds were on top of him. The cat watching from his safe perch purred out: "Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon." http://aesopfables.com/

This tale keeps popping up in my mind (like the annoying Microsoft Word paperclip) as I learn a new Web 2.0 function. So many ways to communicate but which is the better one for the type of information you wish to broadcast? And what about copyright issues? Have I been naughty in displaying the images I have captured from the internet onto this blog, or am I reprieved by displaying the URL from which the image was found? [the image for this post came from http://www.squidoo.com/thefoxandthecat]

If I have a message or want to share an article, I can send an email to the particular people I have in mind. A blog could share this information to more people than I would have thought necessary, which could be good or a whopsie moment. My husband said that setting up a New Books blog with RSS feed would be useful, but it would only be useful if people subscribe to it which will require some advertising. Should we publish the same information in many varied Web 2.0 ways, or tailor the web 2.0 to the information?

Reading for 6 more weeks

This may be a good book to read as the sleet and rain pelt your windows. It is a diary of weather that had affected events and people in the past. So for today, February 2nd (Candlemas or Groundhog Day) there is a blurb about how Groundhog Day came to be: "If Candlemas Day be sunny and bright, winter will have another flight; if Candlemas day be cloudy with rain, winter is gone and won't come again... British emigrants to America adapted these to create Grougndhog Day... The theory (which may have come from medieval Europeans who studied hedgehogs at this time of year) is: if an intelligent rodent emerges from his burrow and sees his shadow today, he returns underground forthwith, as winter is set to continue."

This was also the day of Queen Victoria's funeral in 1901; apparently a "bitterly cold and gloomy" day which echoes a quote by Frank Skinner at the beginning of the book: "You can spend your whole life trying to be popular but, at the end of the day, the size of the crowd at your funeral will be largely dictated by the weather."

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Groundhog day

FLASH NEWS!
Punxsutawney Phil has predicted six weeks more of winter (or else he partied too much the night before and just wanted to get back to his warm den).

Editing or deleting posts

Some of you may have worked this out already because you have techno-eyes and can see the obvious on a computer screen. For me I seem to work it out in a painstakingly slow way like Helen Keller in the movie "Miracle Worker".

I was trying to edit a post I had already published and realised when you called up the New Post page there was an underlined sentence at the bottom of the page: Return to list of posts, which once clicked brings up a list of all your posts with the options to edit or delete. Eureka! Later I realised that one of the tabs at the top of the New Post page, labelled "Edit Posts" takes you to this same list of posts.

If you wondered how to access the original blog-site

So the Google Reader provides us a list of the blogs we have subscribed to and in the main page we can see the latest blog entries; but what if you want to go to a particular blog's homepage.

When you click on a particular blog in your navigation panel on the left side of Google reader, a new window with the latest blogs pops-up. At the top of this window is the title of the blog followed by >>. Click on the >> and call out with an authoriative voice "Open sesame" and the blog's homepage opens up.

Thang 6

First of all I noticed on the Google reader that all my following links are RSS feeds. But of course ya Do Do!

After this brief moment of awakening I went through a flurry of subscriptions so my Desert Island Blogs are:

• 23 Things (not much choice there but an easier way to find it now)
• Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 (a blog to supplement a book with the same title by Peter Godwin)
• Information Literacy Weblog (blogs on IL from around the world)
• Physics and Maths info@ Imperial College London Library (a library my husband uses and raves about so good to see what their up to)
• Channel 4 News
• Pew Center on Global Climate Change (so far I've listed my classical music of blogs)
• Hegehogs without Borders (now for the pop music fun. These intrepid hedgehogs, Jessica & Tim, began their world travels in 2005 starting with Argentina. I wonder of Gosia's(Techno-Babe of the RSL) travel plans were inspired by these footloose twosomes.)

Thang 5

Yo dude: task com-ple-ted!
I have been wondering how I move from my iGoogle homepage, to my blogs and now to the Google reader. What I had done was to bookmark the 23 Thing page and the dashboard page of my blogs, but now I discovered "My Account" on the iGoogle homepage which makes life a whole lot easier.

What one can do with a blog

After a wee bit of fun with my blog I began to wonder: "Self, what else is there to do with me blog?" and the answer was in front of my eyes while perusing the 23 Things Blog. Members of my team have been asked to attend OUCS courses and then teach the rest in the team what they had learned. My first idea was to set-aside Wednesday afternoons for the team to meet and learn, but there were moans coming from the ranks of "too many things to do so little time" and why not make use of the Web 2.0 technology. Which one to use? Of course! Do what the 23 Things team is doing. Place the training on a blog. So thus was created the Lankester Rodeo Blog: for training of the Lankester room staff on the bucking broncos of databases and e-tools. I learned one additional aspect of blogs and that is setting the permissions so only my team can access it and are co-authors (instead of just followers). Okay, make that two things I learned.

Hopefully, in drafting our blog training sessions we will learn more about the e-tools we studied at OUCS as well as passing on the knowledge to our co-workers.

Minke Whale is the crooner

The gurgle was never so beautiful

Who is singing this love song?

Why do I feel like someone is watching me?

I have followers! Fortunately they aren't the type to ask for my autograph over and over again, nor to pester me while I have my croissant in Maison Blanc. A discrete band of followers they are. Time to join the bunnies for carrot tea.

That Blogger Thang

As you can see: Blog done and dusted.

Thang 2

Ta Da! I went for 10 gadgets. I'm not particularly happy with the Art for the Day gadget. It is the artistaday option. I originally had the Artega option but it went offline today. Charlotte has pride of place about the clock & calendar although she hasn't woven any words of wisdom yet. A list of things to do. Brillant! BBC News cause it's the best. LATimes and the New York Post to weep over the foibles of my country-persons. Wikipedia for those crucial questions like what does Thang mean (a slang word meaning "thing"). Finally the weather so I have something to talk about in the Common room during lunch.

Thang 1

Eureka! I've done it and I can even remember my password.
The Terms & Condition seem a wee bit worrisome. Hey Ho.

Blog, blog, blog

Well now I'm a real blogger. The instructions for setting up a blog was a bit tricky since I had once been a member of a past blog which came up instead of Screen 2: Name your Blog. I finally clicked on Create a Blog and Screen 2 finally came up. Thus goes my first blog.