New-Media Commentary

Thanks to Maggie's blog, I realized that today google began a search engine for blogs. At first this was exciting, because I had been wanting to find blogs that were of interest to me without continuously hitting the "next blog" button at the top right corner. Then, I realized just how easily mine would be found by others I didn't expect to read it (such as students, stalkers, stupid-heads, etc.) FYI, if you have your name on your blog, others can easily find it now. I thought I was clever by not having my full name anywhere. Nope, my blog came up right away on their search engine (having my first name somewhere and my teacher name in a different post was enough for the google crawler to seek me out). Friends, know your blog will be easily findable from now on. Edit yourself if you must.

Second thing to note sort of involves google again. A Chinese journalist has been imprisoned by the Chinese government for releasing state secrets. Now, the hullaballo is that Yahoo! most likely helped put him there. (Sidenote: One thing I have to say for Yahoo!--at least its news site is publishing all the press about them, good or bad. I was a little annoyed at Good Morning, America this weekend when one of the only newscasts I caught in the past two weeks was dripping with positive commentary on the new Disney theme park in Hong Kong. No mention of the protests outside the park that the BBC did a good job of covering. Guess that's the price we pay for ABC/Disney's mega-media-domination.)

One of the possible kickers for the journalist was that Yahoo! released his personal email records (like when he accessed his personal account) to the Chinese government. Now, the journalist, like many other "careful" employees, had been using a personal email account from his work computer--I'm assuming so that prying eyes at work couldn't read his mail. Yet, I'm sure he didn't expect Yahoo! to open up and give away his personal usage information, but it did. Now before you gmailers start saying "whew! glad I'm not an idiot who uses Yahoo!" . . . apparently, Yahoo! isn't alone in pandering to the Chinese government. Google and Microsoft have helped the Chinese government out as well (so that means all Yahoo!, gmail and hotmail accounts are fair game in foreign territory).

Hmmm . . . so I'm starting to feel a bit like I don't have any privacy on the 'net these days. I guess anything, no matter how personal, I type or paste on the Internet may be visible to everyone with a computer. Might as well start that porn site and get it all over with.