Spokeo

So a friend of mine posted this on Facebook today:

There's a site called Spokeo.com that's a new online USA phone book w/personal info from pics on FB or web, your approx credit score, home value, income, age, etc. You can remove yourself by first searching for yourself. Then click on your name and copy the URL. Go back to the main page and scroll to the bottom and click on the Privacy button to remove yourself.   This is real checked it out myself.

 I went to the site, searched myself, and sure enough, there I am.  You can search by name or by email address.  I found a lot more about myself when I searched by name; you might have to try different variations of your name, like with and without your middle initial, for example.  But it's there:  cell phone number, facebook, map to my house, address, everything.  The pictures they had of me weren't me, and I don't know where they came from, so their information is sketchy, but it's still too much.  

I ran Snopes on the site and their assessment is that it's a data mining site and that once you actually give them your email, which you have to do to remove your name, you've confirmed your email address and they can sell it.  By that point I'd already removed my name from Spokeo.  I went back to Spokeo to see if my name was still there, and it isn't.

I'm not sure if I did the right thing by deleting myself or not.  Snopes says it's like Wack a Mole - it'll pop up somewhere else. Probably true.  We live in a scary time, folks!

"Fishy" Solicitation from the White House

Via Memeorandum, National Legal and Policy Center, NLPC, has uncovered a move by Team Obama to capture your postings on the internet. WTF?

From the NLPC post:

The information to be captured includes comments, tag lines, emails, audio, and video. The targeted sites include Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and others – any space where the White House “maintains a presence.”

In the course of investigating procurement by the White House New Media office, NLPC discovered a 51-page solicitation of bids that was filed on Friday, August 21, 2009. Filed as Solicitation # WHO-S-09-0003, it is posted at FedBizzOps.com. Click here to download a 51-page pdf of the solicitation.

Doug Ross has some excellent commentary on this and I'll point you over there. Be sure and note that this is the fourth attempt in less than a month by Team Obama to manipulate the internet - we had the "fishy" website, Obama's potential to "seize the internet" in time of emergency, the David Axelrod spam regarding Obamacare, and now this.

A comment at the American Spectator post about this noted that the internet is public domain and they can capture whatever information they want to capture. The question in my mind, though, is WHY. Why do they want this information? And what are they going to do with it? Is it really the place of the government to do this?

It's Orwellian and creepy.

Mystery Science DNC

I am such a nerd-with-no-life that I had a huge time last night watching the Democratic Convention streaming over Fox News on the internet. I am a long-time fan of Shepard Smith and when I heard he was going to be streaming (no script) live (no telling what he will say) on the internet (no rules) I had to tune in. When he plugged the stream during the Fox Report as "Mystery Science DNC" I knew I could not miss it. I always thought Mystery Science Theater was hilarious!

And sure enough, I was not disappointed. During the big speeches last night, Hillary's included of course, Shep and his panel turned their backs to the camera, donned aluminum foil antennae, and commented throughtout the speeches. At one point Shep even resorted to whistling "God Bless America" underneath part of Hillary's speech. And at no point were they hateful or disrespectul of any of the speakers. In fact, Shep would interject with e-mails from folks watching the broadcast and if they were hateful or rude he would chide them harshly. Fair and balanced!

I will tune in tonight for "Mystery Science DNC" as Bill Clinton gives his speech. Shepard Smith without a script and unrestricted is always good entertainment. Plus he's cute as all heck.

The Reading Debate

There was an interesting article in the New York Times last month concerning what it means to read in the digital age. As an English teacher, I found the article rather intriguing. The focus was on how kids these days are reading and the debate about whether reading online is really "reading," the point being that reading online is not the same as reading in a traditional book for example. That seems obvious, but obviously traditional books have a clear beginning, middle, and end whereas online kids surf from link to link to link. No wonder attention spans are shrinking.

I'm not knocking reading online. I read all my newspapers online and I read lots of magazine articles online. What intrigues me is the debate around it and also the potential. The naysayers contend that reading things like MySpace and FanFiction is the equivalent of "empty calories." I can see this side of it; surfing from one link to the next requires a shorter attention span, yet on the other hand, so much information is so much more easily accessible than it was before the internet.

As a teacher, I find sites like The Orwell Prize and The Samuel Pepys diary both innovative ways to get kids to read literature. The diaries of both George Orwell and Samuel Pepys are posted online daily as a blog. I don't know too many high school kids these days who would pick up the multivolume Pepy's diary but they might read it online. As both blogs come out daily in single date entries it goes back to that short attention span thing, but at least kids would be reading. Both sites, of course, include hyperlinks to more detailed information.

In the New York Times article, there was a quote from historian David McCullough: “Learning is not to be found on a printout. It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.” I like the stodginess of McCullough!

Since I am an old fogey and did all my college research in books (remember those old green Reader's Guides?) , I'm just a purist for books. I love the crisp pages and the smell of ink. I adore musty, moldy old library stacks and could get lost in them for days. I like being able to touch the words. But I also think that internet reading has something to offer kids and as a teacher I see it as a tool to be used rather than a scurge to discourage.