Week 13 Reading Notes

On the Media: The Privacy Show

How do you balance convenience with privacy?  How do we live with the idea that we are always being watched?

The internet is a copy machine – anything you put online can be copied and circulated indefinitely.

We are very vulnerable to government surveillance and for-profit investigation. This may be the defining bargain of our times.

Facebook users talking about “copyrighting” their own content – turned out to be a hoax. Trying to be hopeful – not doing too much work to protect one’s privacy.

Far less than 1% of users actually voted on the Facebook privacy policy when asked for their input. People tend to think they are in control (in the case of the “copyright” hoax). When we use Gmail (or any third party provider) Google owns that data. Their terms and conditions say they won’t use it for ill, but they are not held to hard laws.

Email is subject to search without warrant after 6 months?

We have no control over our data once it’s on the internet – chats, Facebook statuses, emails, etc. Your online life could be targeted for any number of reasons.

Password is a dangerous illusion – a single point of entry can be attacked from many different points.

Convenience over security – that is the trade off we make online.

Eric Schmidt (Google) – “if you’re doing something you don’t want anyone else to see, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it”

-       Grossly underestimates the need for privacy – not just about keeping “secrets”.

Fear that data mining may unearth data that could be used to discriminate against groups. However, some believe that this risk is worth taking to prevent terrorism. It seems that laws should be put in place to keep companies/government from using this information for ill – but how could this be done? Does this require too much trust on part of the individual? How can we be confident that our information won’t be abused?

Kind of frightening that after receiving a subpoena for releasing information to the government (under the Patriot Act) one can’t even talk to a lawyer!

License plate readers – your whereabouts at any point in time could be logged.

My Turn: Protecting Privacy Rights in Libraries

Respect for patron privacy is a fundamental value long recognized in the library code of ethics

-       This is something I think it vital to the mission of libraries but is becoming more difficult to uphold under the Patriot Act. This reminds of an article I read about a library in my former home of Bellingham, WA. The library there was approached and demanded to release information about people who checked out books about Osama Bin Laden.

But sometimes children and youths must deal with serious issues -- like child abuse, alcoholic parents, or health questions -- and they need good information. We want them to be comfortable getting that information in the library. That's why the Vermont Library Association advocated for privacy protection for patrons of all ages.

-       very interesting – protect the library records of children from their parents?

The Bennett case raises important questions: Why didn't the officer obtain a court order before going to the library? Why did five police officials waste valuable time trying to intimidate librarians into violating a legally binding policy? And after leaving the second time, why did it take the police so long to secure a court order when a judge is always available?

-       These are very valid questions. I hope I don’t face anything like this when I’m a librarian!

Individuals must be able to seek information about any subject without fear of judgment, criticism or scrutiny of others. Freedom of speech is meaningless without the freedom to receive information; they are the underpinnings of a healthy democracy.

Immersion: Metadata and its role in privacy

This tool is a very interesting way to visualize your email network and see whom you communicate with most. If this metadata is open to anyone they could paint a very clear picture of the people you are closest to, even if they can’t read the contents of the emails.

Week 12 Muddiest Point

I don't have a muddiest point from the lecture this week.

Week 12 Reading Notes

John Blossom: What makes social media tick: seven secrets of social media. Content Nation.

-       Book developed through collaborative Wiki – very interesting!

-       Social media as a tool that helps people to publish influentially

o   Web 2.0 is user-generated content, social networking, everything that encompasses the movement that enables regular people to become influential creators and contributors to web content

-       Social media defined as : any highly scalable and accessible communications technology or technique that enables any individual to influence groups of other individuals easily

o   Includes wikis, weblogs, other collaborative tools

-       “social networking” does not cover every component of social media

-       social media is a peer to peer medium – really about connecting people with information

-       Aggregation and filtering: the processing of amassing collections

o   Includes cataloging and “tagging” to give social media content some sense of organizations

§  Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc.

o   Widgets and mashups as a way to package and give context to information created and disseminated through social media channels

-       Social media and self-marketing: social media gives users the opportunity to establish markets between individuals

o   Not as much need to rely on intermediaries – individuals can market themselves/their products and ideas directly

§  Is this like Etsy?

-       Social Media secret: its about understanding what people are looking for – to influence others and in turn be influenced by them

o   I think this would be a useful secret for all organizations/companies that employ social media to keep in mind – it is NOT just a broadcasting tool, but a tool for communication and reciprocal influence

-       Social media essentially allows people to collaborate more effectively and participate in greater participatory culture

o   This does not immediately guarantee a utopic society

-       Content is inherently defined by its social values

o   The value that one finds in content is therefore contextual – depends on the audience and the means by which they are experiencing or interacting with content

o   This becomes harder to define with the proliferation of information through social media

§  Information is divorced from context, harder to define the “where” and “how” of a particular piece of content

·      Like when we get news from Facebook – the news we receive is removed from its original sources and possibly filtered through many other individuals before it gets to us. How does this effect the content?

o   Aggregation is an important tool for creating value in social media publishing

§  The categories and tags bring meaning to mass amounts of content

o   Production and publishing models are changing in response to social media developments

-       While social media is a publishing model, its major goal lies in the creation of marketable relationships as well as the dissemination of marketable content

Charles Allan: Using a Wiki to Manage a Library Instruction Program: Sharing knowledge to better serve patrons.

-       I actually collaborate on a Wiki to manage and support library programs through ACLA so I’m interested to learn more about this and bring back new ideas to our organization.

-       Facilitates information sharing, collaboration in the creation of information resources, and distribution of the workload in library program creation

-       Users can be invited to a created Wiki; they each have equal editing rights

-       Wikis could benefit librarians working in instruction programs because it could facilitate the sharing of resources, reduce the risk of duplicating work, etc.

-       East Tennessee State University – an example of Wiki use in instructional programming

-       Wiki can also serve as a centralized resource collaboration tool

o   This is how we use the Wiki at ACLA – to support collaborative programing/share ideas among countywide member libraries

Xan Arch: Creating the academic library folksonomy: Put social tagging to work at your institution.

-       Social tagging helps with the organization of information on the Web

o   Is this model transferable to libraries, or will it cause some major complications to librarian’s bibliographic responsibilities?

o   I see how it could benefit library users – they may be able to generate tags and subject/keywords that are familiar to them

o   But I fear that it may not lend itself to the standardization that is necessary to organized bibliographic record keeping

-       Folksonomy – a taxonomy created by ordinary folks

o   Users create their own controlled vocabularies, subject headings, keywords, “tags”

o   Could it be used to help librarians create indexes to quality internet resources?

-       May bring “gray” literature to light (the materials or information that are not easily found)

-       PennTags at UPenn – example of library using social tagging

-       Risks include “spagging” (spam tagging), inevitable variation of tags  

o   This seems like a huge concern to me. How can libraries properly organize information with such wide variation?

o   It seems like users would need some instruction before they could run with social tagging to mitigate these concerns. Based on just this short article, I’m not convinced that social tagging could be effectively applied to libraries. I would like to see more examples of its use.

Jimmy Wales: "How a ragtag band created Wikipedia". TED Talk.

-       “The ideal encyclopedia should be radical” – this seems to be what Wikipedia is all about

-       Had a vision that all people should be able to access knowledge stored in encyclopedias for free, as well as to contribute their own knowledge

-       Assembled volunteers, gave them tools to collaborate

o   Truly amazing that Wikipedia is managed solely by volunteers! There must be something intriguing about collaborating to create a pool of knowledge that inspires volunteers to participate.

-       Owned by nonprofit – Wikimedia foundation – core goal is to get free encyclopedia to everyone – empowering people with knowledge,

-       Uses free-licensing model – users can do anything they want with the content

o   A way to bridge the “digital divide”?

-       Strives to remain impartial, unbiased

-       Over 600, 000 articles in English (as of this video)

o   Only about 1/3 of traffic to the site is to the English pages

-       Only one actual employee – software developer

-       How is Wikipedia as good as it is (quality-wise)?

o   Vandalism is fixed quickly by volunteers

o   Elements in quality control – neutral point of view policy

·      Social concept of cooperation

§  One tool to monitor history of a page – can view IP addresses of editors

§  Nothing in the software that enforces the rules

-       The wiki model really is the way Wikipedia works

o   There is a lot of passion and influence by the social norms of the Wikipedia community

-       New project: Wikibooks project to create textbooks

o   Freely-licensed textbooks – is this REALLY the next big thing in education?

Week 11 Muddiest Point

I do not have a Muddiest Point from the lecture this week.

Week 10 Reading Notes

Introducing the Extensible Markup Language (XML)

·      XML was created as a way to make web documents more interchangeable.

·      The starting and ending points of elements are clearly marked.

• The language looks similar to HTML to me but a bit simpler.
• DTD – Document Type Definition
• XML DTD seems to keep users from making small mistakes, such as skipping a step when entering headings.  
• HTML doesn’t check for this – one would find out only after they wrote the code and tried to view it!
• XML doesn’t need DTD – it assigns a default definition for unspecified components.

“XML allows users to:

• bring multiple files together to form compound documents
• identify where illustrations are to be incorporated into text files, and the format used to encode each illustration
• provide processing control information to supporting programs, such as document validators and browsers
• add editorial comments to a file.”
•  I like how clearly this information is presented. I can see the value and purpose of XML.

“XML is formal language that can be used to pass information about the component parts of a document to another computer system.”

• This is a very important thing to remember – XML is not a standardized coding method.
•   “XML is based on the concept of documents composed of a series of entities.”
•  “XML provides a formal syntax for describing the relationships between the entities, elements and attributes that make up an XML document.”
•  “XML sets out to clearly identify the boundaries of every part of a document.”
• This makes XML stand out from HTML.
• Overall, I think XML sounds easier to understand and use. XML seems more flexible and customizable than HTML, although HTML is still a strong foundation.

Uche Ogbuji. A survey of XML standards: Part 1. January 2004.

•  I wasn’t able to access this article from the given URL or through an Internet search. I was directed to IBM’s homepage but could not navigate from there.
•  From searching IBM’s website using the title, “A survey of XML Standards: Part 1”, I was taken here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-stand1/index.html.
• Could you provide us with a working link to this article?

Extending Your Markup: An XML Tutorial

• “XML is important for presentation, exchange, and management of information.”
• XML is a semantic language; it allows authors to specify meaning in a document.
• XML allows for more explicit annotations.
• An XML document starts with one prolog and contains one element.
•  Elements can be nested – this is like HTML!
• Attribute values must be in quotes; tags must end with either “/>” or be otherwise closed.
• This is also found in HTML.
• DTD describes the structure of an XML document. They can be terminal or nonterminal.
• DTDs were also designed to standardize data exchange between users.
• Namespaces allow for clarification. For example, they can clarify the difference between an email address and a postal address.
• Tagnames within a namespace need to be unique! For example: mybib is used to define the author in the example.
• However, namespaces and DTDs do not always work well together.
•  XML extends HTML’s linking capabilities.
• “href” refers to the URI with a fragment identifier.
•  “XSL” is “extensible style sheet”.

W3 Schools: XML Schema Tutorial

•  “An XML schema describes the structure of an XML document.”
•  I see this more clearly as I work through the XML tutorial on the W3 schools website. XML schemas also make it easier to define data patterns, validate if one has entered elements correctly, and to convert data between different data types.
•  I’m looking forward to the practical application of XML schema in class on Monday!

Week 9 Muddiest Point

My Muddiest Point this week has to do with authoring webpages with HTML. I saw that in Assignment 5 we must create a website with 4 pages - could we review how to make multiple website pages in class?

Week 9 Reading Notes

W3 School Cascading Style Sheet Tutorial

*CSS is used to control the style and layout of multiple Web pages all at once.

Very interesting! I’m excited to see how this works, but a little nervous since HTML and website authoring are totally new to me.

*It is amazing how CSS is used to control so many elements of a webpage – background colors, images, fonts, links, etc.

*This is a very cool tool to use to practice HTML and CSS. It's easy to see your changes since they are displayed immediately!

CSS tutorial: starting with HTML + CSS

*I’m still so amazing that you can save a plain text document with the extension .html, then click on it and view it as a Webpage. To someone who is totally new to HTML, this is pretty cool.

*Important to use separate files for HTML and CSS – this makes it easier to use the same style in multiple webpages.

In HTML, hyperlinks are created with <a> elements, so to specify the color, we need to add a style rule for “a”. To differentiate between visited and unvisited links, CSS provides two “pseudo-classes” (:link and :visited).

* This stands out to me since we discussed the <a> tag for hyperlinks in class.

To put the CSS into a separate file: Cut and paste everything that is inside the <style> element from the HTML file into the new window. Don't copy the <style> and </style> themselves. They belong to HTML, not to CSS.

* Very important thing to remember!

 Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web, by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos

*CSS gives the web designer more control over how the page appears that HTML can; however, CSS and HTML work together to display the page.

*You can make a CSS style sheet using a dedicated editor, but you would often want to go back in and tweak it by hand to give the page individual style.

A rule is a statement about one stylistic aspect of one or more elements. A style sheet is a set of one or more rules that apply to an HTML document.

·      So CSS helps to bring further detail to HTML elements!

A rule consists of two parts:

• Selector - the part before the left curly brace
• Declaration - the part within the curly braces

The selector is the link between the HTML document and the style. It specifies what elements are affected by the declaration. The declaration is that part of the rule that sets forth what the effect will be.

A declaration has two parts separated by a colon:

• Property - that part before the colon
• Value - that part after the colon

The property is a quality or characteristic that something possesses. In the previous example, it is color. The value is a precise specification of the property. In the example, it is "green," but it could just as easily be blue, red, yellow, or some other color.

*I like the way CSS style sheets are designed with brevity in mind – this allows them to load faster and cuts down on the time required to write one by hand!

*In the previous CSS tutorial, we glued the style sheet into the HTML document by using the style element. It is interesting that are several ways to link the CSS and the HTML document!

CSS was carefully designed so that all content should remain visible even if the browser knows nothing about CSS.

*Very useful thing to incorporate into a webpage, since not everyone’s computer/browser behaves in the same way.

*Interesting how CSS is even used to manage the space in the margins/around text. I wouldn’t have thought about this as being a controllable element.

A fundamental feature of CSS is that more than one style sheet can influence the presentation of a document. This feature is known as cascading because the different style sheets are thought of as coming in a series.