Month: November 2005

Googling can get you in trouble

(Via Doc Searls, via Cameron Reilly).

An Iranian, Hossien Derakshan, ended up being kicked out of the US because the border patrol officer Googled his name, finds his blog, is not with the content so takes him in for questioning. During the questioning they find a magazine with a NY address and to cut a long story short kick him out. Read the rest!

Interesting given the recent interview I did on background checking, the internet and the public domain.

links for 2005-11-29

links for 2005-11-28

Sharing content in a Web 2.0 world

A week ago Ray Ozzie posted about Really Simple Sharing a new extension to the RSS (and OPML) protocol from Microsoft called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE), that is released under Creative Commons. SSE allows asynchronous replication of items among two or more parties via feeds. There has been a bit of a buzz over this for several reasons such as Ray is involved, Microsoft is doing it, RSS is the protocol, even Dave Winer thinks it is cool which is great as he is the author (?) of the RSS specification.

But what is this? Essentially SSE allows two (or more) people to share and update a single feed and then re-publish. Several people way more intelligent have provided several use cases and other examples. Denham Grey, Jeremy Chone, Mike Arrington, Gabbr.com, and Dion Hinchliffe. There is even a picture or two available in Flickr on the SSE. Finally Microsoft has an FAQ about SSE.

Ok on to more mundane things, how to we actually use this draft extension?

Right up front, being able to combine comments into a single RSS feed (of course we will have to deal with comment spam). Our news readers will become content creators as well, I a would guess that more people will start to comment as it should become easier. Further to this we can really begin to FUSE our content.

I had hoped for some HR examples, but right now nothing maybe later.

Spam spam spam

Everyday I get amazed at the comment spam that is posted on my site, 99.9% of it never gets through the spam filters within WordPress so reads never get to experience it. Today I check out the moderated comments and they just struck me as bizarre.

southernmost aliens mark commences?eastern Perry pinch aimless

quintillion codify?tested offensive,educational windmills:wart?…

grabber municipality presumption predicating camped.sympathies cabbages?

And what was the site behind these insightful comments. Well the URL would lead you to believe a Real Estate organisation which would of been a new one, but no the same old online pharmacy 😦 when will they learn.

Googling and society and me :-)

I mentioned a few weeks ago about an interview I did with David Stonehouse for the Sydney Morning Herald, well it was published in Icon last Saturday. The article looks at how technology is changing the way people gain access to information about you that is in the public domain. With so much information now being available online this is becoming more and more of a problem.

One thing to note for my international readers, the privacy legislation here in Australia is very different from that of other countries, especially the US, the article touches on some of these which is great.

My portion, one comment on page 4 which might not sound like a lot, but hey the Sydney Morning Herald is one of the biggest newspapers in Australia and I have never been quoted in it before so this is really cool.

Strangely neither Pubsub nor Technorati picked this up.. but Google News did 🙂