Attitudes Towards Social Media Non-Users And Some Interesting Privacy Watchdog Sites

I have a team of students (very bright students, of course) who have been taking a hard look at social media and the risks of both being involved and the risks of not being involved.

They have come across lots of data (Key Finding:  It is highly likely that social media people LOVE to talk about social media (High confidence)), but we have not been able to find out one thing:  Do people who use social media sites (like Facebook and Twitter) think that people who don't use them are weird? I don't necessarily mean weird in a pejorative way (though I am certainly interested in that interpretation).  It could be just sort of a reaction, like when someone says, "Oh, I don't have a Facebook account" and someone else would automatically think, "That's weird."

So, before I talk more about it more, answer the Swayable below:


Here's what I think we'll see:  A small but significant percentage of those that answer the question will say, "Yeah, it's weird."  If I could gather details, I would guess that there would be a fairly strong correlation between those that think it is weird and age (with younger people thinking it is weirder, obviously).

What is really weird, though is that we can't seem to find anyone who has asked this question before.

Changing the subject a little (but not much), I also wanted to highlight two sites, one old and one new, that provide an interesting insight into the subject of privacy in the age of social media.

http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/

The first is the wonderful What They Know courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.  This site lets you explore the privacy settings of some of the most popular apps for IOS and Android phones.  You can see a screen shot of part of the site at the right but you owe it to yourself to visit the interactive and a bit disquieting site.

The other site, Privacyscore (See screenshot below), is new but seems like it would be particularly valuable to anyone who searches the web (i.e. everyone).  The site can tell you, based on its own rating system, on a scale 1-100 (where 1 is very bad and 100 is very good), how private your activities on that site really are.  So, for example, Google.com scores an 85 whereas Bing scores only a 74.   Of particular interest to heavy web users or researchers are the Firefox and Chrome add-ons that will display a site's privacy score in real time as you search.

http://www.privacyscore.com/

How To Improve Your Open Source Search Skills -- One Day At A Time!

If you scratch the surface of the web you will find a ton of articles, websites and videos about how to search for information more efficiently.

Not that this makes any difference.

Students, according to the Project For Information Literacy, "while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research." The report goes on to say, "Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research."

There are a number of reasons to be worried about this. Many people tend to focus on the over-reliance on Google as the search engine of first resort. While some of that logic is true (for an interesting and illuminating experiment that makes the point, I recommend this site...), I find the inability to use even Google very well to be one of my largest concerns. I mean, if you are going to rely only on Google, you ought to be incredibly good at finding stuff with it.

The best way, in my mind, to get good at finding stuff with Google is to practice doing it and Google apparently feels the same way. The Wizards of Mountain View are now offering a game that is designed to use "your creativity and clever search skills". The premise is simple. They ask a question and then you use Google to find the answer. The game is called "Google a Day". You can try today's challenge below:

I can easily imagine this as an icebreaker in a computer equipped classroom or as a homework or extra credit assignment. Leave your own ideas in the comments!

Pump Up Your Google Search Skills (YouTube via Digital Inspiration)

Digital Inspiration featured this excellent short video on getting the most out of your Google searches featuring Matt Cutts, a senior engineer at Google. The video starts out with a number of well-known tips but quickly gets to some stuff that I did not know Google could do. Even if you are an expert, this is a good 5 minute refresher course on getting the most out of Google.

Geographic Analysis Of World's Top Social Networks, Search Engines (Oxyweb via Digital Inspiration)

Digital Inspiration pointed yesterday to a very cool map put together by the writers at Oxyweb that shows the top social networking sites by country. You can see the map below (click on it to get a full sized version).

I am color blind so it is difficult for me to make out, but it appears that MySpace is only the most popular social networking site in the US and that Facebook has really good penetration in the Med. It also appears pretty clear that you need to be on Orkut in Brazil or India and something called "V Kontakte" appears to be very popular in Russia and parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Oxyweb has been building this map for the last three months so you can examine some trends as well.

The map of search engine popularity is a little more predictable with Google holding the high ground almost everywhere. The exceptions are very interesting, however. Again, click on the map below to go to the full image. Once you are done, check out the Oxyweb blog. It is fairly new, but with content like this, it looks like it is going to be worth following.

Is Keyword Searching Dead? (Radar Networks Via TechCrunch)

TechCrunch points to a very interesting presentation on the future of search on the web. The article, quoting extensively from a Radar Networks presentation (see below) on the future of finding stuff on the web, makes some very interesting points. Both the article and the slides below are worth the time to read them.

Serious COOLINT: Amazing 3D Search Engine (Tianamo)

Tianamo is a search engine that is still in beta but it is worth a look if only for the 3D display it gives your results. You can sign up for access to the full screen beta version here but the excellent people at Tianamo have given me an embed code so you try it out right in SAM! Have fun!

Resource Round-Up (Link List)

Here are a couple of interesting or useful sites I have run across over the past week...

Finding Information On The Internet: A Tutorial. UCal Berkeley librarians, I love you! This tutorial is fantastic! It is a great resource for OSINTers and intel studies students.

Priority Planning Model And Worksheet. There are two kinds of people in the world: Those that use priority-planning-model-worksheets and those that don't. If you are of the first persuasion, you probably already have your own system. If you are of the second, you will read this post, commit to getting yourself organized, download the template, half-way fill it out and then lose it on the way to somewhere. Which means the main reason to click on this link is for all the other tips that Ian's Messy Desk has to offer including brief tips on 9 Key Steps For Preparing A Speech or How To Build Your Self-Confidence...

Email Based File Conversion. Converting documents from one format to another can be a pain, particularly when you are on the road. Digital Inspiration lists a number of services that will take your document or audio file, convert it and then send it back to you in another format. I have not tried these services out yet so if any of you have any experience with them (good or bad) please post it to the comments.

Resource Roundup (Link List)

I have run across a number of potentially useful sites recently. Here they are in no particular order:

FuzzFind Web Search. Fuzz Find is a new search engine aggregator that is still in beta. It only aggregates hits from Google, Yahoo, MSN Live Search And Del.icio.us right now. While Dogpile.com is still my favorite aggregator, I really like the way FuzzFind displays the results of the search and think that the unique "tuning" feature could prove useful. It is worth playing with right now and keeping an eye on for the future.

OFFSTATS. The University of Auckland Library in New Zealand seems to be offering a one stop shopping place for official statistics with multiple links to every country and an interesting feature that allows the searcher to narrow the focus. It is probably not as easy to use as Nationmaster but I can see it getting you closer to the primary source material.

ABYZ News Links. This is a very comprehensive site containing links to all sorts of regional and local news sources. I particularly like the fact that it explicitly lists in what languages the news feed is available. To give you a sense of the depth of the links, this site lists 24 news sources for the Maldives!

Newsroom101.com. This site has a ton of easy to do exercises to improve your grammar, spelling and punctuation. Designed for journalists (with the AP style in mind) the site is almost just as useful to intelligence analysts who have to learn to write in the concise style of a journalist. I also like the way the exercises are put together. If you get the right answer, the site doesn't bore you with the details. If you get the wrong answer, however, the site lets you know what you did wrong and why immediately.

Deep Web Resources. I have mentioned Marcus Zillman's very useful site before. He scans the internet looking for good sources and tools and then posts them to his blog and then sorts and saves them to various sites he runs. The amount of stuff he finds can be staggering and it is tempting to just start at the top and satisfice. I strongly recommend you did a bit deeper into this particular list as there are some interesting sites buried here.

Finding Key Words In Video/Audio (MIT)

MIT has posted a neat piece of web -based code designed to search its growing library of free lectures. There doesn't seem to be too many lectures of interest to the intelligence community so far but I only did a cursory search. The interface is worth a look, however, as it is very slick. I suspect that the database will only get better with time.

If You Like Music, You Are Gonna Love This Search Engine... (Songza.com)

Songza is a new service that advertises itself as a music search engine and internet jukebox. It is very simple to use; just type in the name of a band or song and Songza comes up with a pretty easy to navigate list of options. I could not always find everything I wanted and sometimes I got some pretty strange recordings (like the time the Beastie Boys did "You Have To fight For Your Right To Party" on the Joan Rivers show...click below if you want to hear it for yourself) but in all it was quick and efficient.

Where Songza really shines is when you take the songs to a playlist. Click on the song you want and it asks you if you want to play it immediately or share it or put it on a playlist. When you hit play, it begins immediately. I was able to build a fairly eclectic playlist in about a minute and enjoyed the music for about an hour. Time well spent.

Now if they can just match the simplicity of the search engine with a service that helps you find new music, like iLike, they are set.

Precision Searching And Source Reliability (Lifehacker and Hybridsem)

Finding info and determining if it is reliable are two essential skills for all of us really, but particularly for intelligence analysts. I came across these two very good articles recently on how to craft advanced search engine queries on Google, Yahoo and MSN (on Hybridsem) and on how to evaluate web based sources (on Lifehacker). Worth the read...