WizGidget

Isn’t this a wonderful world we live in?  Probably most of my readers remember the time before the advent of the Information Age — before the internet.  I personally have had the honor of being on the leading edge of internet technology most of my career.  I’ve seen it grow from an intra-company messaging and file-sharing system to a worldwide network of communicating and sharing knowledge and information.  I’ve been creating web pages and “active content” (dynamic web pages) since about ‘92, before most people knew the Internet existed.

Some of this is really amazing.  Who’d have thought 50 years ago that we’d be communicating, sharing information and making friends easily and instantly with people from across the globe?  Even for those closer to home, it has formed a platform to connect with family, friends, and colleagues through email and various forms of social networking, including Facebook.  It has also been a great leveler of the playing field in the business world.  These days it’s about as easy for an individual to get their business in front of the world as it is for the big corporations.   Even many of the social networking sites were brainchildren of individual college students — Facebook was started by Harvard college student Mark Zuckerberg and his roommates.

Like duct tape, the internet has a light side and a dark side.  Through social media sites we can connect and share with our friends and family, and be more aware of what’s going on in their lives, and this can be good… but there are challenges.  One is what young people these days call “TMI” — too much information.  Too much information can reduce the significant to insignificance by burying it in fluff.   There are limits to my ability to assimilate information — and drinking from a fire hose tends to reduce my appreciation of the water.

There’s also the issue of accessibility.  Although more and more people are internet users these days, including many of our senior folks, I suspect it will be some time before the internet becomes as ubiquitous as the telephone.  This is expected: the telephone itself took awhile before it became the commodity it is today.

There’s actually two sides to this — by focusing on the Internet as a means of socializing, we leave out those who for whatever reason do not “imbibe”.  Email becomes an easy means to get information out for organizations like churches, but those that don’t use the internet are thereby excluded.  Probably the most insideous is  the loss of the personal touch.  You can’t hug someone over the internet.  You can’t really share in their joy or sorrow through two-dimensional 72 dot-per-inch photographs.  Spouse Ann talked about the connection between the nutritional value of our food and the love that is “baked in” in her blog entry What Nutrients are our Foods Really Missing (http://www.naturallyresilient.com/blog/?p=6), and this is a similar concept.  We can’t experience love online.

Next week: Windows Autostart.  Meantime you can read this and other Wizgidget articles at www.wizgidget.com.

Everybody’s talking about Facebook and Twitter these days.  Both of them refer to what’s become known as “social media.”  Wikipedia defines social media as: “a group of Internet-based applications… that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content…  a blending of technology and social interaction for the co-creation of value.”  That’s a fancy way of saying they are means of communicating with friends, associates, and potentially customers and the public through the internet. Facebook and Twitter are two forms of social media, but there are many others, each with its own focus — for instance there’s LinkedIn and Plaxo for professionals, Classmates for keeping track of school friends, and many more.

Facebook is popular these days because it’s become somewhat the standard for keeping up with friends and associates. Facebook facilitates connecting with others because it allows your “friends” to see your list of friends.  So for instance, if Mary has Jane in her friend list, and I’m friends with Mary, I can find Jane in Mary’s list of friends and invite her to become my “friend” in Facebook.  Jane must accept the friend request to complete the connection.  Facebook also has the ability to create photo albums, where you can upload whatever photos you want to share with your friends.  Facebook also provides a means of posting whatever’s on your mind either in your “status” or in your “wall.”  The “wall” is like having your own bulletin board where people can post and comment on posts.  The “Wall” and the status are the ways of communicating with your friends — when they check Facebook they’ll see your status updates and wall postings.

There’s lots of other nifty “widgets” that go along with Facebook, for instance, there’s an application that keeps track of your friend’s birthdays.  There’s also one that is an interactive farm simulation called “Farmville” that drives me nuts — and as you know I don’t have far to go.  Several of my friends have drunk the Farmville coolaid.  The problem with Farmville is that when they play Farmville, it posts things on their Facebook account that show up in the status updates.  For instance, “Suzie found a little calf and need help feeding it” or “Jane completed her collection and wants to share a collectable with their friends”.  The reason this drives me nuts is that I have enough on my plate already and don’t need to see the details of my friends’ game-playing.  I want to know what’s significant in their lives; I’m just not convinced Farmville constitutes significance.

You can get a Facebook account for free by going to www.facebook.com, and signing up.  I suggest using a throwaway email account (see the Can the Spam Part III article) for your facebook account.  Also, I recommend that you immediately go through your privacy settings to make sure you’re not publishing stuff that should be private, like your birthdate — month and day are ok; year not so much.

I’ll cover Facebook privacy in a future article. Meantime you can see this and other articles at www.wizgidget.com.

We haven’t discussed spam in awhile, so maybe it’s a good time to revisit that topic.  I described how I’ve cut my spam from a torrent to an occasional drip in the Can the Spam series.  Even so, there’s a need for dealing with the occasional spam that gets through.  As always, you can see this article and comment online at wizgidget.com

Many of the current computer security programs available today have spam filters.  I use CA’s internet security suite which includes a spam filter in addition to the antivirus and antispyware features.  I don’t use that one though, because I was already using an “open source” spam filter called “SpamBayes“.  SpamBayes uses a “bayesian filter” where “bayesian” refers to statistical methods named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes (ca. 1702–1761).  Most spam filters work similarly to SpamBayes in that they have to be “trained” to differentiate spam from good email.  They do this by building a dictionary of words and phrases that have the “look and feel” of spam.  The spam filter is trained by giving it a folder with good messages (usually your inbox) and another folder that contains confirmed spam.  The more messages of each type, the better.  Also, as life goes on and you mark messages as spam that the filter didn’t catch, it “learns” the new spam and gets better and better at catching the spam, and not catching good email.

There’s a couple things that are needed to make this all work well.  One is that it does require diligence: it’s not a set-and-forget kind of thing.  Spouse Ann used to have problems with the SpamBayes not working very well.  The problem was that she was rather sporadic in her email habits — she tended to go through her email only once a week.  Because the forms of incoming spam are always in a flux, that meant that the spam was changing faster than SpamBayes could learn it.  It worked fine for me, but I was going through my email at least daily.

Another potential problem is using the spam filter to delete emails that aren’t really spam.  Let’s say you subscribe to a newsletter, and then you decide you don’t want the newsletter anymore, so you start marking the newsletter as spam instead of doing the better thing and unsubscribing.  Now the filter is being told lots of “normal” words and phrases are spam, which dilutes the real spam words and phrases.  It makes it harder for the filter to reliably distinguish spam from good email.  This can also cause problems for other people depending on your email provider.  AOL, for instance, registers what emails its customers are marking as spam.  If they see too many hits coming from a given internet address (like 173.201.16.100), they start blocking email originating from that server.  Many websites are run on shared hosting servers that use a common address, so if one of them is blocked by AOL, then all of the sites on that server get blocked.

Last week I’d mentioned that a free email account was a good idea as an alternative for using company email.  A catch is that some companies block access to webmail for security reasons.   The way I get around this is to use a smartphone – one of what’s becoming a bewildering array of cell phones that have email and web capability.

Many free email accounts have some form of spam control.  I’m not sure if this is a benefit or a detriment, because spam filtering is at best a sketchy proposition.  Spam filters occasionally mark good email as spam, which means you still have to go through and pick out the good emails from time to time — it’s just one more thing to fool with.

One thing you should never do with an online email account is mark email as spam that isn’t really spam.  For instance you may be getting an email newsletter and decide you don’t want to receive it anymore.  The temptation might be to simply mark it as spam, and let the spam filter delete it for you.  The problem with this is that some email providers, notably AOL, then begin to mark not just the newsletter, but the email server where the newsletter originated as a source of spam – for ALL their customers.  This is poor practice on AOL’s part IMHO (in my humble opinion), but regardless it causes undeserved headaches for the list manager.  I’ve had legitimate email blocked because the web hosting provider I was using happened to also host other domains that were having email marked as spam by AOL members.

A potential disadvantage of a free email account is that it isn’t necessarily secure.  Most free account providers are fairly security conscious, but they aren’t perfect.  If you pick a password for your account that is easily guessable (think dictionary of common words, names, or phrases) your account could be hijacked and used for nefarious purposes.

I personally have accounts with both Yahoo and Gmail.  I got the Yahoo account before Google came along, mainly because it came with the Yahoo instant messenger (IM) account.  I use YM (shorthand for Yahoo IM) as well as AIM (AOL IM) frequently to communicate with friends and clients – it’s convenient for short conversations that don’t necessarily require them to stop what they’re doing to talk with me.  I went ahead and paid the extra to get the Yahoo! Plus account because at one point I was needing a webmail interface to use with my business email for when I was working with a client that would not allow net connect for my laptop, also I needed to be able to download my yahoo email to my Outlook email application and my smartphone.  Nowadays the gmail account could do the same things for free, and my hosting service includes a webmail interface.  Sadly I already have too many clients “trained” to use the yahoo account.  Fortunately it’s only $20/yr.