PurpleCar

If you haven’t heard of all this mess yet today, let me sum up:

Harriton High School, one of the richest high schools in the country, has been named in a lawsuit for using webcam-activation software on school-issued laptops to spy on a student. It’s come to light that all 2,000+ laptops issued (for which the students paid insurance) had been set up with remote-activation webcam software. This means that the school district could turn on the webcam in any laptop at any time. It did so in the case of Blake Robbins and used evidence obtained from the laptop in Robbins’ possession to bring about disciplinary action against Robbins. Robbins parents are now suing the district, seeking class-action status.

Here are some articles on the subject:
Ars Technica
New York Times
Philly Inquirer

One of only three International Baccalaureate Diploma Programs in the Delaware Valley (i.e. western Philadelphia suburbs); student/teacher ratio of 16:1; extensive AP programs) and honors course offerings; 94 percent of graduates attend four-year college; two-time recipient of Department of Education Blue Ribbon School of Excellence Award. The school district of Lower Merion township, in Montgomery County, PA, has an annual budget of $175.2 million. The school district serves mostly privileged upper middle class and upper class kids.

Here are a few of my questions, as a former systems admin:
How efficient is this webcam tracking system? If a real criminal stole the laptop, he or she would have the harddrive wiped clean before attempted resale, so the webcam- remote activation software would be wiped with the rest of the files on the drive. Basically, this software was installed with the intent not to catch hardened non-student criminals. It was installed to catch fellow students stealing other students’ laptops. Intentionally spying on minors without guardian consent is in violation of the wire tapping act. Plus, I’ve met a few of these students before and I’ve seen the laptops. They informed me they had to pay insurance on them. Why track them if there is money to replace them? Doesn’t this kind of action put students at risk of retaliation and violence? Just let the laptop go and replace it! This kind of spying also opens up the school district for lawsuits, obviously. It will definitely be a landmark case, however it plays out.

Did Blake Robbins, the student against whom evidence gathered from the webcam, steal the particular laptop? Did the webcam get activated upon request of the victim of theft? Harritons’ website is suggesting this in their statement.

Did the school district ever inform parents of the possibility of remote-activation of webcams? Did each student and parent give informed, signed consent for this potential action? (Everything I read says NO. A clear Terms of Service would have helped the school district in this situation).

This smacks of amateur administration to me. When I worked as a systems administrator, the Fortune 500 I worked for issued laptops to the sales force. The support staff could access the laptop remotely, but only with the user there to click through the permission screens. As soon as the user rebooted the machine, the permissions would have to be granted to the support staff again. Also, we had very, very clear policies of appropriate use of the laptop and software, including email. As an administrator, I could go into anyone’s email. Absolutely any email account in the entire company. Did I? No, of course not. Having the keys to the kingdom also means having the knowledge of the policies (Plus, who has time? I’m not interested in your emails to your mom. My team was busy enough trying to keep the manufacturing lines up and the grid healthy).

I actually got into a bit of hot water once, when a very high-ranking manager came to me, asking for access to his employees accounts. A “bad email” (i.e. racist jokes) was being sent around to his whole manufacturing site. He called me and asked me to track the emails. Together (him remotely) we paged through some email accounts.

I was too inexperienced to have the wherewithal to tell the supervisor to contact my supervisor or my boss’s boss who was equal in rank. I told my boss what happened and I was on the verge of being disciplined. They took mercy on me, because I was new. Eventually I’d come to say “No” constantly to all sorts of high-ranking CEOs in the company, but it was a lesson hard learned.

My point in telling you this story: it’s the tech administrator’s job to know what opens up the company to potential lawsuits. The installation of this webcam software without a very clear Terms of Service and informed consent was just plain stupid. If you are a techie at all, you know about the wire tapping act. You also know that the law doesn’t much care about who “owns” the camera. Your job is to know how to design the infrastructure to protect the company.

I must hold out hope for humanity by imagining that a lowly techie at Harriton High School knew the score, probably spoke up, and the non-technical department heads ignored the warnings. (I can’t tell you how many times that happened to me, telling my boss or others about a weakness in the infrastructure, me being ignored, then a few days later watch it all crash down. After a while, you just don’t even get angry anymore. You just do as you’re told and go home at the end of the day.) It’s hard for me to think that there was not one person in all of the sickeningly-well-funded Harriton school district’s employ that didn’t have 1 clue about the potential mess remote-activation of camera software would bring, no matter what circumstance. I can’t stand to think they’d ALL be that stupid.

And yet, here we are.

Let me know what you think in the comments.
-Christine Cavalier, PurpleCar

The pdf of the actual lawsuit:
robbins17

UPDATE: Feb 19, 2010: The Associated Press reports that the FBI is now looking into criminal charges against the district. The webcams were activated 42 times in the last 14 months supposedly in search of stolen or missing laptops. article here. Also, this video says that Apple released a statement about a bug in the intel-based macbooks that caused the webcam recording light to come on even though the camera wasn’t recording. NBC10 has a bit more to say, including the name of the assistant principal involved. The main question: if only 2 tech admins had access to turn on the webcams, how did the assistant principal get access? (Probably she strong-armed a tech into giving it to her, or she stood over the shoulder of the tech and watched while she/he carried out her commands, much like the email scanning situation I was in that I mentioned above).

CNN has more, citing quotes from Doug Young, the school district’s spokesman:

“Doug Young, a spokesman for the Lower Merion School District, said the district would only remotely access a laptop if it were reported to be lost, stolen or missing.

Young said if there were such a report, the district first would have to request access from its technology and security department and receive authorization. Then it would use the built-in security feature to take over the laptop and see whatever was in the webcam’s field of vision, potentially allowing it to track down the missing computer.

Young said parents and students were not explicitly told about this built-in security feature.

To receive the laptop, the family had to sign an “acceptable-use” agreement. To take the laptop home, the family also would have to buy insurance for the computer.

In an “acceptable-use” agreement, the families are made aware of the school’s ability to “monitor” the hardware, he said, but it stops short of explicitly explaining the security feature. He termed that a mistake.

Young added that mistakes might be made when combining technology and education in a cutting-edge way.”

Wow is this district in hot water or what? There are some lost careers here for sure. Unfortunately, the poor lowly techs – who should’ve known better and should’ve refused – will face criminal charges most likely, when this all comes out. Ultimately, they are the ones who broke the wiretapping laws. Take heed, fellow admins: know your limits.

And Mr. Young’s last statement is ludicrous. Oh sure, “mistakes might be made.” Yes, mistakes might be made when combining technology and dressing rooms too. Or combining alcohol or cars. How about combining idiots with security design?

Flippantly saying “oh, you know, we’re trying, and it’s all new to us” trivializes the matter and further violates and betrays the students and families in the district. It really is no excuse. He’s trying to garner public sympathy by playing on the same old fears of any new media and technology.

The family speaks: ABC6 News Apparently, Blake Robbins was “dealing” Mike & Ikes (mute your speakers before you click that link, jeez!). In the news video, listen to what the father says about worrying about his daughter being photographed when exiting the shower, then see Forrest’s comment below. This case will come down to child porn, especially if the feds are involved.

UPDATE: Feb 22, 2010: Evidence that the admins were stupid, and the administration should listen to its student leaders: http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_stories/20100222_Laptop_camera_snapped_away_in_one_classroom.html The computing staff lauds the security system in this article, and there’s a link to a webcast about it. The systems administrator goes on and on about how great the camera shots are, without any sense of the law or the possible implications of using this feature with minors. Wow. Just, wow.

UPDATE: Feb. 24th 2010: More he said she said. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/breaking/news_breaking/20100224_L__Merion_spying_case_figure__I_did_not_snoop_on_kids.html

This techrepublic blog has a great round-up of tech articles about the software, LanRev, and some other similar apps, as well as commentary about the implications. http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/itdojo/?p=1559

Hop on over to iProng magazine to read my interview with podcaster and author of the popular 7th Son trilogy. J.C. Hutchins.

Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley [Pantheon Books, New York 2008]

Hear ye, you wordsmiths of the web, you purveyors of pages, you iterators of information: Welcome to Elsewhere, U.S.A., a state of mind in which you are constantly moving; You are slinging nothing but ideas and giving up your leisure time to do it; You are working from home but are always available to the company via your Blackberry (which you are using to schedule your babysitters and manage your children); You hold the fear of the layoff or of lost earnings if you dare close your laptop long enough to have a McMeal with your family; You love your loft space or your recently-converted suburban bedroom/home office, until, of course, you get a look at your neighbors’, after which you shall work more feverishly than ever to stave off the envy and hopefully get that promotion or new account that will allow you, too, to put in the latest in soundproofing technology and remote-control window shades. Your very personality is being pulled apart by millions of messages. Welcome to Elsewhere, that constant state of motion and distraction that takes you anywhere and everywhere but here.

Dalton Conley, NYU sociologist, sounds the welcoming bell to you and me, the Weberati. We can do our jobs from anywhere with a decent internet connection. We work in information and produce ideas for a living. If we work for a manufacturer of actual physical products, we work far from the production line, most likely never experiencing a factory even on a training tour. We are today’s middle-class, white-collar worker. We work from home, we take our laptop on vacation, and we answer emails on our iPhones during the time-outs of our kid’s basketball game. We have this idea that if we just “get one more thing done” before bed, that our hours are well-spent, that our everlasting souls will be cleaned by hard work and that God will shower us with prosperity.

This latest book from prolific writer and academic researcher Conley traces the history behind the combination of work and leisure (“weisure”). Conley starts out the book unflinchingly nostalgic for the good ol’ days, when loyal IBM-ers were admired for their willingness to sing company songs and wear ties, as long as they had their nights and weekends free to play bridge and golf. Conley waxes on a bit about how leisure time was actually once meant for relaxation, instead of the multi-tasking work space it is today (I personally found this nostalgia to be a bit contrite, as Conley and I are both members of Generation X and only experienced those so-called halcyon days via our parents’ memories.)

Leisure and work are becoming mixed, says Conley, as companies like Google increasingly become one-stop shops for their employees. There is on-site laundry, showers, meals (which are free at Google, something Conley was amazed by), doctors, nurses, tax accountants and sometimes daycare. Practically any service the company can help you outsource will be available to you so you can spend more time working. You can “work from home” to spend more time with your kids, but your kids say you won’t look up from the laptop, and your co-workers can hear Rock Band II in the background of your conference call. Meanwhile, you notice your neighbor that holds the same job you do but for another company, has a new Mercedes in her driveway and you wonder how she earns twice your salary. You work harder and longer, ticking away any hours you aren’t working as lost income. You get so used to this state of always looking at the next thing you must do/have/say/be, you never look inward. You get splintered into many different roles, shattering your one individual into what Conley calls an “intravidual.” Nostalgia aside, Dalton has a point.

Still, even though I know Conley was addressing me and my fellow techie folk, I couldn’t help but be a bit offended by the characterization. The term “Blackberry Mom,” [cover/title, pg 1] is as offensive and marginalizing as “Soccer Mom,” and it should’ve tipped me off on the tone of the book. If you are in my Weberati crowd, you will probably be offended on page 56 when Conley calls open-source software “communism” without noting how open-source actually spurred innovation in the private sector. You’ll also probably (well, hopefully) be offended on page 73 when he treats the modern norm of working women and their influence on the workplace with this line: “You can take the woman out of the kitchen but you can’t take the kitchen out of the woman.” That’s really the only media bait in the book, though.

The book reads like a textbook, but the it deserves the effort just on the amount of information it contains. The Appendix alone, with its collection of intriguingly titled articles, is a fair exchange for the purchase price. Unfortunately, Dalton takes a while to get to his main point. The long introduction lays down loads of social history to set up the story. The first 62 pages lay thick groundwork for his theory of what is happening with the state of the working person today. He goes through American social history, namely the social changes brought on by the industrial revolution, and emphasizes the occasional example to demonstrate how our work/life balance and our politics have changed, like the dwindling participation in unions over the last 50 years.

The author’s purpose of the book isn’t found until page 63:

“WHERE WE ARE AT

So, we have gone from a country with high ceilings and fans to low ceilings and air-conditioning; we have gone from an economy where many workers serviced one machine to one in which each American has dozens of machines working for them over the course of a given day; we have gone from being a nation of wandering renters to ever more tooted homeowners; we have gone from a country that experienced race riots in the 1960s–during a period of economic growth spread relatively equally across income deciles–to a country of almost Third World levels of economic inequality, where solid majorities vote to repeal the estate tax. We used to enjoy our free time and left the Europeans to work more than us; now we have more kids to take care of than they do, even as we work significantly more hours.*

No one single factor–not air-conditioning or computers; not female labor force participation; not tax policy alone or immigration–has caused these dramatic shifts. In fact, it is probably a futile exercise to ask how much tax policy drove the development of computers, how much computers drive income inequality, and how much income inequality drives commuting distances. Better to take a deep breath and unfocus the eyes to try to take in the entire mosaic that makes up the social landscape of today.

I wish those two paragraphs and the citation were on page 1; they would’ve helped me parse out Conley’s academic prose. Although I appreciate the book being chock-full of information, as I read I kept wondering when he’d reveal his point.

Conley does get to his point, eventually, but at times his logic seemed a bit dubious. I was taken aback on page 56 when Conley cited a 2005 study, using the results as a base for his claim that most people still work for the same company for over 20 years. This may be true for the Baby Boomers, but not for any of us under 40 right now. I’m in my 30’s and I don’t know anyone who has worked for any 1 company in their careers, not even my friends who are medical doctors. We are consistently told by career advisors that after 5 years we should be looking for another opportunity, lest we appear habitual, lazy, and unwilling to learn. We believe that the retirement age will be raised to 75, there will be no social security pensions, and we will have worked at so many different companies and had so many varied careers that we will have lost count. Looking at Conley’s one-company-for-20-years claim in detail, the facts become clear. The study, cited from Working Paper #11878 from the National Bureau of Economic Research (where Conley holds a Research Associate position), looked at retirement age workers (ages 58-62) in 1969, and found that they had worked, on average, for one company for 21.9 years. The study then compared their 58-62 years old counterparts in 2002, and found that they had worked, on average, for one company for 21.4 years. Conley claims that despite our hectic schedules and our 24/7 mobile offices, we’re still all working for the same company, just like the IBM Man in 1950. When we, the GenXers, get to be 58-62, my guess is that number will drop from 21.4 to about 10.6.  I’d like to see a similar study of people who are 42 years of age right now and see how many different places they’ve worked. Then I’d like to see the same data on people aged 32 today. 21.4 years at one company is a pipe dream for the average Generation Xer. Conley’s choice to cite this study to support his everything-old-is-new-again-but-we-work-more-than-the-IBMer-of-1950 was misleading at best. This slight massaging of statistics is common practice for academics, economists and media members alike, so it’s difficult to make a case against Conley for doing it. There are infinite ways of massaging statistics and relegating the details of data to footnotes in order to support your point, so when numbers are involved, caveat emptor.

Despite the nostalgia and the numbers games, Elsewhere U.S.A. and Professor Conley earn respect. Conley’s points about materialism and the ever-increasing gap between the classes are a sharp slap upside our credit-busting heads. Conley is, plain and simple, one of us, and he keeps us well informed of the changes in our lives that we are too busy to notice. Although Conley avoids Twitter, he knows the scene. He references some books that are well-known in the social media circles I run in (e.g., Anderson’s The Long Tail) and knows the pressures we face in an outsourcing, all-consuming workplace. He’s just as guilty as the rest of us, but he’s a sane voice in the fog of our all-too-modern, fast-motion lives.

Please listen to my interview with Dalton Conley about Elsewhere, U.S.A., where we discuss what he discovered about himself on his solo trip in Europe as a young man, how we are all becoming splintered into a thousand tiny pieces, and what these changing norms mean for all of us.

Employers are vetting out applicants online. The new adage is “Google them.” Some employers are stepping over the line of a simple web search to asking for an applicant’s password to social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace. This may seem like prudent vetting practice, but in fact it’s more troublesome and legally dangerous than it is worth.

After an uproar over privacy laws on the Internet, a Montana city government retracted their policy of asking for applicants’ private passwords for social networking sites. Personally, I think Montana was fortunate it was an uproar on the internet and not an EEOC lawsuit that caused them to rethink their policy. Collecting a mere applicant’s or even an employee’s privacy credentials is not only legally dangerous, but unnecessary.

Let’s think through the logic of this. Say an employer, “BigCompany,” wants to vet potential 17-year-old intern, “Sarah Genius;” they want to ensure she conducts herself in a manner that is becoming to BigCompany. BigCompany’s Human Resources staff, namely low-on-the-totem-pole tech “Pete BadApple,” conducts a simple web search and views what the public can see online about her.

Pete BadApple fancies himself an expert internet searcher. He finds every group Sarah Genius had ever briefly been a member of, every update she posted on MySpace, and every forum she ever lurked on. This is all just public information. Pete BadApple makes a note that Sarah Genius suffers from diabetes and kidney problems (information he assumes based on her group memberships). Pete BadApple uses Sarah’s passwords to log in as Sarah on Facebook. He concludes that Sarah is African-American, based on her family and friend connections. Pete BadApple had met Sarah Genius during the interview process (and found her to be quite cute, actually), and this information is jarring to him.

Still, Pete BadApple continues on, looking through Sarah Genius’s friend lists. Lo and behold, Pete finds that Sarah is a cousin of Huge MovieStar. Huge MovieStar has a private profile and is connected only to friends and family that also have private profiles. They are a tight-knit group and protect Huge MovieStar’s privacy fiercely. Well, Pete BadApple is logged in as Huge MovieStar’s cousin, Sarah Genius, so Pete can thumb through Huge MovieStar’s updates. He finds that Huge MovieStar, who is all over the headlines for being tapped to star as the Next Indiana Spider-Terminator, was newly diagnosed with Leukemia. The headlines have no idea about this, and the movie studio would certainly withdraw the offer if they knew. Pete BadApple is a little short on cash this month, so he calls and sells the story to a tabloid, sending screen shots as proof. Pete BadApple finishes his vetting process of Sarah Genius and emails his report to his boss, and then forwards a copy to his friend, adding pictures of Sarah Genius in a topless bikini, captioning the pictures with “Can you believe this chick is Black? She’s totally hot anyway!”

Lo and behold, somehow Pete BadApple’s report and email wind up in the hands of an EEOC lawyer and the local and federal law authorities that investigate child pornography. BigCompany now has a Big Problem.

Even if Pete BadApple was Pete GoodApple, the mere public web search may have brought up information that although public, should not be part of the vetting process. Pete BadApple should not have included Sarah Genius’s medical-condition support group memberships in his report. This information violates the law. The other concern is that every company has a Pete BadApple. Even Pete GoodApple can “turn bad” when faced with potentially money-making information about an applicant. Why put your employees in that situation and your company at risk?

Nowhere in this process should private interactions come into public view. When you vet a person’s background, you should worry only about what the public can see about that person. Of course, password protection and site security aren’t foolproof and one day private information may become public (although this is a very rare occurrence); we can understand why BigCompany wants to make sure Sarah Genius isn’t a closet freak. But just because the Internet makes it more possible than ever to vet out a person’s background, it doesn’t mean an employer should. Employers got along just fine before Facebook. BigCompany can better predict Sarah’s future performance by looking at her past performance than they can aptly predict her performance based on her private web page. In fact, Sarah’s private web persona is most likely very different than her work or everyday persona. If employers make assumptions based on the content of Facebook Walls, they will be likely passing up qualified candidate after qualified candidate (this is especially true when the hiring manager is a Boomer and the applicant is from Gen X or Y).

An applicant’s privacy is better left intact. If you are an employer, rely on the old-fashioned vetting methods like a credit check and recommendations, and add a regular web search of public pages. Ignore memberships in any public support groups or forums. Keep your company free of legal and civil complications.

What do you think? Have you run into a situation at work where someone’s online privacy was violated? Heard of any lawsuits about this type of thing? Let’s discuss in the comments.

If you haven’t already, make sure to go over to Facebook and make an account. Once you have an account, go to facebook.com/username to pick out a “vanity URL” for your Facebook profile.

A Vanity URL is a website application’s unique web address for your profile. Until now, Facebook’s URLs were a combination of odd symbols, numbers and letters that had nothing to do with your name. Now you can have a URL that is similar to your name or preferred username (if you get there in time OR if you have a very unique name).  My vanity Facebook URL is facebook.com/christine.cavalier .

Chris Brogan, a social media guy who is one of the area’s more prominent leaders, didn’t choose the URL facebook.com/chrisbrogan. In fact, he didn’t choose anything for several precious hours after the vanity url registration opened up, in which time someone else snapped up the name.  He was at odds with the effects of URLs, naming and applications have on his identity. As he says on his blog:

“It’s never about the sites and services. Never forget that. YOU add value to them, not the other way around. “

This is true, but I tend to think a name is the quickest way to find a person anywhere; Having the vanity URL as your name would be most prudent, especially since Facebook’s search engine is notorious for bringing up all sorts of flotsam when you are looking for friends. I oftentimes type a vanity URL in my browser’s address field, e.g. twitter.com/johnsmith, in the off chance I may just find the John Smith I want on Twitter.com with little effort. I want Facebook to work for me this way, too. I toyed with registering facebook.com/purplecar, but instead stuck with my name. I run the risk of someone else registering that vanity URL, because Facebook allows you only one. This was something I could live with, because eventually I will probably phase out “purplecar” altogether. I own my domain name, so perhaps I’ll move to that URL and make “purplecar” a quaint username I offer in chatrooms.

I digress.

Will life end because Chris Brogan’s vanity URL is facebook.com/dotchrisbrogan? No. Will your life end if you don’t rush over to facebook right now and sign up? No. But you will be online somewhere soon, and you will have to choose your tattoo like the rest of us. What will yours be?

-PC

Don’t bother with iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind by Dr. Gary Smalls and his partner Gigi Vorgan unless:

1. you are a Baby Boomer who is feeling overwhelmed with the web, and would like to commiserate with one of your own.

2. if you are internet addicted and in turn socially inept (there are a few pages of well-worn self-help advice on how to improve your social interactions and get off the web).

Interspersed in these split personality pages are a few references to fMRI studies about which areas of the brain light up when we are completing internet tasks. You won’t be able to pinpoint the studies, though, because the authors don’t use notations. No footnotes, no endnotes, just a list of references in the back of the book.  They do list their references but we have no idea which studies go to which fleeting mention.

The book is ok, but it can’t decide which way it wants to go. As someone who is under 40 (Generation X) and considers herself a digital native (I had a computer in my house in the late 70’s), I found this book to be downright offensive at times.  The anecdotal examples of exaggerated technology-addicted situations were inane and sensationalistic with fear. It’s the typical refrain we hear constantly from the stereotypically selfish and self-focused “me” generation of Baby Boomers.

The “evolution” that the authors posit is just silly.  We all know that evolution doesn’t happen within a single generation.  That would mean that my children have a different brain structure than my mother because I grew up with technology, have been on the internet since 1988, and have worked deep in computer systems administration.  That’s not possible.  The authors should instead use “adapt” instead of “evolve.”  There should be more emphasis on what is known in academic circles as “brain plasticity.”  The brain is a wondrous thing and can utilize different parts in different ways.

If we are indeed seeing a new generation of socially inept people, it’s the culture of the internet that has influenced their behavior.  The tools haven’t morphed our brains down to the DNA and protein levels.  The culture is the thing changing because of the tools, but this is how it has always been.  Telephones, fax machines, cars and television haven’t changed that basic human brain structure that gets passed down from generation to generation. There is no true “evolution” happening because of the existence of lolcats (I’m sure the authors know this, and have just postulated an overblown theory to get attention for the book).

Unless you are in said state of panic about the internet and its implications, skip this book. The small self-help parts aren’t going to help you. Dr. Smalls probably meant for you to read them to your WoW-addicted daughter.

Formats Available: iPod/g1 Video (.m4v) | Audio (.mp3)
 

(If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, hop on over to Common Craft and watch this video.)

How to Start Using Twitter.

So you’ve gone over to Twitter.com and signed up.  Congratulations, you’re a Tweeter!  Now what?  What do you use it for?  How do you find people to follow?  How to get people to follow back?

First things first.  You must do the following 3 things when you sign up to Twitter:

1. Upload a picture (any picture will do, but one of your face is best.  G-rated helps too).
2. Fill out a bio, including Location.
3. Provide a URL, even if it is your MySpace page.

A picture, a bio, and a URL go a long way in making you appear to be someone who wants to join the community.  (I also advise new users to keep away from putting numbers in their username as this tends to look spammy.)

TIP: Don’t be afraid to change your bio sometimes.  I personally change my bio every few weeks.  It gives my followers some variety and a way to learn a little bit more about me with every tweak.  Still, I keep the common elements in the bio field (e.g. “writer” and “techie geek”).

OK, you’re all set up.  Now what?

Now you start following people.  To follow a person means that you subscribe to their feed; you see everything they tweet out in the public timeline.

Hopefully you know a person or two to follow to get you started.  If you don’t know a soul on Twitter, follow me!  If that isn’t enough for you (which, I can’t imagine), then start searching for people who share your interests.  You can do this in a few ways.

Search locally.  An ADOBE AIR application called TwitterLocal will show you tweets from people in whatever area you specify.   It doesn’t work that well but it does work enough for you to find some local people.

TIP: After you’ve downloaded the free AIR application, check out Twhirl and Tweetdeck for great Twitter interfaces.

Search Google with the following syntax to find a bunch of people to follow:  Term location site:twitter.com (replace “term” with “writer” “doctor” “juggler” or whatever you’re looking for, and put your city in the “location” part.  My favorite search is writer philadelphia site:twitter.com).

Twitter Grader allows you to put in your city and see the top Tweeters (I’m usually around #12 for Philly).  Follow a few that sound interesting.  Tweet them (type @ then their username, no spaces.  Type your message, then hit send).  Start conversations.  Most people usually follow back.

Twellow is a service that helps people find niches on Twitter.  There are so many of these types of sites popping up everyday.  Just look for them.

TIP:  Under the Notices tab in your Twitter Settings is the word “@Replies” next to a little pulldown menu.  [See picture].  Until you are very familiar with Twitter, I suggest that you set it to “Show me all @replies.”  This helps you find new people to follow.  If someone sends an @reply to someone else that seems interesting, check out the person they are @replying to.  Do this by clicking on the username or typing http://twitter.com/username in your browser’s URL (replace “username” with whatever came after the @ in the person’s tweet).  You may find that the person on the other side of the conversation may be just the kind of person you’re looking for.  Once you are comfortable with Twitter and have found enough interesting people to follow, then you can change this setting to “Show me @replies to people I’m following.”  Doing so will keep the noise in your stream to a minimum.

How to get people to follow back?

Usually people will follow back once you follow them.  If they don’t, don’t worry about it.  There’s way too much emphasis in the social media world about number of followers.  Follower numbers are not trustworthy; as cool as Twitter is, spammers abound, which send follower rates through the roof but make those rates totally bogus.  Don’t waste your 140 characters per tweet on desperate pleas for followers either.  Just Tweet out things that interest you: links, quotes, musings, etc.

TIP: Under settings at the very bottom of the page is a checkbox next to Protect My Updates.  Don’t check this box.  If you protect your updates right away, you won’t get any followers and it will be nearly impossible for people to have conversations with you.  Private tweeting is more of an advanced Twitter function and requires a little learning curve.

Don’t follow thousands of people.  To start out, try about 20 people on for size.  See how the timeline suits you.  See if people are following back.  One of the biggest mistakes that I see constantly is the Major Follow Move.  Newbies start on Twitter then click follow buttons all up and down the timeline like a squirrel hoarding nuts in November.  DO NOT DO THIS.  That’s a dead give-away for “spammer.”  In fact, the spammer Major Follow Move had gotten to be such a problem that the Twitter.com staff have now put a 2,000 person cap on new follows.  You can’t follow more than 2000 people if your follower::followee ratio is too out of whack.

So, as people follow you back, follow more people.  Grow your network slowly.  You can always watch the humongous public timeline if you’re bored (Japanese kids are writing novels on Twitter, so be forewarned if you want to absorb the world’s public tweets).

Last but not least, the big question:  What the heck do I use this for?

Great question.  Once you are familiar with tweeting, you’ll have learned that the simple answers to “What are you doing?” don’t really elicit intellectually stimulating conversations.  I don’t use that prompt much anymore myself.  Telling my followers “I’m getting my roots done” doesn’t really keep my anyone interested.   As a freelancer and stay-at-home mom, I use Twitter as my water-cooler, my board room, my lunch table, and my happy hour.  I send out questions to the group that sometime roll into heated debates among many users.  Sometimes I retweet a funny link someone else sent me.  Just wing it for now.  You’ll get into the swing of things.

TIP: Search the internet for 3rd party tools that work with Twitter (it’s ok to give your password to the apps, just make sure your Twitter password isn’t the same as your banking or email or any other password).  The Twitter search functions may help you figure out what you want to do with your account and who you may want to follow.  Check out this wiki to get started.

Twitter is one of those litmus tests in life: what you put into it will be what you get out of it.  Find your people.  Start connecting.

And try your hardest to avoid addiction. 

Here’s the Better Philly video segment. It’s definitely a very cursory introduction and it is geared toward stay-at-home moms:

Second video, learn about Joey Fortman’s bubble tweet:

Increasingly, my group of early adopters and the public at large are finding the need to further define and categorize the general term ‘media’ in order to communicate effectively.  For example, many of us are familiar with the term “traditional media” and know what that means.  We’ve heard the term “citizen journalism” and somehow know that this is traditional media made by a non-professional person.  But these two terms aren’t enough to describe the different types of media that are emerging.  We need more detailed terminology.

Here are some of my ‘in-progress’ definitions of different types of media to help define our growing world.

Basic Terms:

Media: any form of communication: speech, video, audio, pictures, art, written words, animation, webcast, etc.

Content: any piece of consumable media posted on the internet.  Used in reference to one instance or the whole of a person’s or group’s work.  E.g. “I read her blog.  I really like her content.”

Content generation: the act of making consumable communication for the web.  Eventually this term will be generalized to mean the act of making any media.

Content generator: Any person who makes media, but currently it refers almost exclusively to blogging and videoblogging people.

Consumer: Any person who reads or watches media on the internet or off-line.

Media snacker: colloquial term (sometimes derrogative) for people who visit many media sites to read or watch small amounts of media quickly.  E.g., clicking on a website and reading only headlines or post titles, then moving on to another site to do the same.

Various Types of Media:
Traditional media: (also known as Mainstream Media, initialed as MSM): the content that comes from recognized news sources like newspapers, TV news channels, etc.  Traditional media is generated by large or small organizations that hire professional journalists and video crew staff to generate content.  That content is then mass-distributed on a regularly timed schedule.

Citizen media: media that serves a political or journalistic purpose.  Citizen media may be the product of citizen journalism.  Usually produced and distributed on the internet on no particular timed schedule. [Citizen journalism: when “regular” people (i.e. unpaid or untrained journalists) report on current events.  The citizen journalism is the investigative action, the citizen media is the content generated when the investigative action is finished.]

Public media: this is media that the general population generates.  Public media doesn’t serve a specific purpose like citizen media.  Public media can be consumed and/or interacted with by masses of people.  This can also be called “Common Media.”  E.g., YouTube.

Private Media: public media that has been hidden from public view.  E.g., private sets on Flickr.

Corporate media: any media that is made for or used solely by a business.  E.g., training videos.

Ad media: any advertising media, including viral media.

Viral media: media that appears public (that may be public or corporate media) that gathers the attention of many consumers.  Media usually isn’t considered ‘viral’ unless it has garnered attention internationally and has been seen by hundreds of thousands of consumers.

Technology

Social media: This is a confusing term.  Social media isn’t media as defined above and should not be listed under the category of “Various Types of Media.”   Social media isn’t media, it is technology.  Social media refers to an ever-growing set of communication tools and website and mobile applications on that focus on sharing public media and connecting people who share a common interest in that public media.

Social site: a website that concentrates on forging connections between people.  A place where people can share media.  E.g. Myspace, Facebook.

Live stream: a technology that allows a person to generate content and post it practically simultaneously on the internet.

As I said, this is a list in progress.  Let me know what you think.  If you know of a phenomenon that has yet to be defined, please comment and we will think up something together.  If you take issue with my definitions or want to tweak them, please comment.  This is a collaborative effort from this point forward.  Thanks!

Here I still sit, straddling the fence between two worlds.

Social media mavens are usually high achieving business people who love marketing, technology and the fast lane of constant connectivity. Writers are lone warriors, working alone for hours a day, with fierce determination at times and horrible block and depression at others. I’ve been drifting between the tech/business and the writer/academic worlds for my entire adult life. Just recently, I’ve noticed that they are slowly beginning to meet. Well, “meet” is putting it nicely.

Most writers don’t have any clue what social media and ‘web 2.0′ are. They have never heard of Chris Brogan (who seemed to call everyone I know last night) or CC Chapman or Jeff Pulver or Twitter or Qik or Seesmic. Writers, then, are like most people. Still in the dark as to what is coming.

Social media mavens don’t have a clue, in general, of what is going on in the publishing industry. They don’t read books much. They are on-line, but they haven’t moved over to reading entire novels on a screen. Younger generations are more accustomed to this, but social media people would rather listen to a podiobook than go to the library to pick up page book.

Here is one example of a fence skirmish between the mavens and the writers I witnessed recently. Back in November, I wrote a post for my NanoWriMo friends about Book Trailers, mini-movie previews for your written novel (not a movie trailer for a feature-length film based on your novel, but a trailer for just the actual novel). I see it as a great development and marketing tool. It’s combining two arts, film and novel-writing; it could be a new way to get people excited to read. What’s not to like?

But a writer’s group I joined last week in Yahoo has some genuine curmudgeons insulting the new art and practice of the Book Trailer. I didn’t jump into the discussion; I can sniff out unchangeable minds in a listserv like a police dog screening for coke. I’ll allow them their culture and stay perched on the fence (the view is usually pretty clear from up here anyway).

If I thought the writers would listen, I’d say that a more relevant and useful discussion would be to address concerns about the reading experience. For example, let’s chat about casting. Many writers purposely avoid describing their character’s physical characteristics so the reader (i.e. ‘user’) forms their own mental picture. A trailer may hinder the novelist’s intent to engage the user’s imagination. We can also chat about plot twists and spoilers. A trailer, in using film’s unique way of portraying human nuance and slight communication, may give away basic plot structure. We could talk about human psychology and storytelling in film and novels for hours on these questions alone. But to get to these discussions, more writers have to approach the fence. Right now, it’s mostly back-turned resentment. On both sides.

As you know, I’m a big fan of social media, blogging, vlogging, and technology in general. But the mavens need to take a step closer to the fence, too. Writers study human nature. They tell tales that give insight and into our past, present and future lives. They speak to our spirit, our very core of existence. Just because you have your own .tv channel doesn’t mean you have the skills to produce that magic that comes from consuming a great story or poem. Reach out to some writers in your village, whether it be a webtown or hometown. Appreciate their talents, and they’ll adopt your strategies and include you. Social media stories will show up in literature that will be more relevant to your lives (which is why the soul seeks out art). I am writing my novel with social media in mind. I’m not the only one.

Writers, get involved. Get into blogging and podcasting, even if you are just consuming it. You belong in this social media wave even if the mavens wonder why you don’t “produce content.” It is up to writers to come out of their shells and accept new media into their space. Listen to the new stories and see the new art around you. These people can inspire you, get you work, and market your book.

Neither side is evil and neither side is sinless. But together, I think we can raise the level of literacy across all platforms and cultures. And, as we all know, more literacy means more peace.

I’m out. Gotta keep riding this desperado fence until I find a place I can call home.

Love. Literacy. Peace.

-PurpleCar