Digital Musings

New Google Reader Feature criticized-Deemed as invasion of privacy!

Google has an incredible collection of user data. You trust Google with your name, contact information, address book, phone numbers and if you trust google with your eyes closed, your financial data as well. When you are online, almost certainly you would log in to your Google account to use their services better, so they have record of your online activity, which sites you visit, which ads you click on and which products you read about. This helps them target better ads and you see the ads are most relevant to you. There is no arguing, on the internet, which is such a huge place in itself, providing you with targeted content is a commendable job. Everyone has accepted it and many swear by it.

Privacy advocates have been opposing the Google-DoubleClick merger and Microsoft appealed to the US Senate panel to stop this deal from going through.As far as online privacy is concerned, you may not want to disclose your name for personal or business reasons, or not show your online activity to anyone else. You may like to share stuff with friends, but there are also things that you would rather keep private. So if at this moment Google jumps in and discloses one part of your account to all your contacts? Not even bothering to ask you, just lay it out in the open.

So How did Google breach your Privacy?

What I am talking about here is the new Google reader feature that allows you to share your feeds with your friends. I think its a good feature, if you have a network of friends, who read similar stories and news. Its adds a bit of Social Flavor to the Google reader.

But what if you are using a Google account that you have used to interact with several people, just for correspondence?
3 days ago I corresponded with “some guy” about”something”, that doesnt make him my friend, and since I have exchanged mails with him, Google assumes he is a friend and adds my shared data to his feed reader. In a way he is reading stuff he isn’t supposed to and gets an idea about my online activity! This is the major complaint by many Google Reader users.This invoked a lot of criticism from some readers.

Some Comments on the new feature:

The Google Reader Help started a thread, where the Google reader users vented out their anger. Felipe Hoffa has recorded some interesting comments in his Slash Dot Journal. I found a few amusing so I have listed them below:

“This is a terrible idea, and a violation of privacy, and it contradicts your own documentation”. “Please don’t turn the best feed reader on the web into the shittiest social network on the web.”

“Please fix this and let us OPT IN to who we want to share with. PLEASE. Don’t make me leave my Google Apps!!”

“I have parents, relatives, business associates, all who use Gmail, in my contact list, and the only way to not share with them is to remove the contact? That’s INSANE.”

“I find the “social networkization” of Google’s services unattractive, and unfortunately, I can’t really opt-out of them.”

“I’m complaining because the articles I shared with my wife are now shared with my entire contact list, with no warning. In fact, this is precisely the worst sort of violation of privacy.”

Whew! There may be many reasons why anyone wouldn’t want to share, stuff one subscribers to. The main reason for this very vocal criticism was that Google brought this feature in as a surprise, with no opt out option.

Google has a very good reputation dealing with the privacy of their users.Its number one on my “Internet’s Most trusted Companies List”. They have been known to fix privacy related glitches in a blink of an eye, and have always worked hard towards maintaining the user privacy. But a new feature recently launched by them, really rocked their boat.

Google has a very well defined privacy policy. You can read it here. It clearly states that, “When you sign up for a particular service that requires registration, we ask you to provide personal information. If we use this information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” Although Google hasnt actually violated privacy, because there isnt any defined rule under which this data falls, the closest description about sharing of your personal data in their Privacy Policy is here.

But The Google Team has come out with an answer, unfortunately after about a week of criticism, but things will get back to normal now. They have introduced a feature via which you can better manage who sees your shared feeds.

You can now share the various tags under which you have saved the feeds, or can choose to keep them private.

Also, you can now, clear all you shared items or, can move them to a specific tag, which you would like to share from now on.

This isn’t actually a privacy violation, except for a few people, who would not like to share items on their feed reader. And now with these new features, they can control, who can see their feeds. So I guess, Google actually saved the day by responding to these complaints quickly. Enjoy using the Google reader, Its one of the best online feed readers around!

Would you be concerned if the feeds you read are shared without your consent? Do you think Google invaded your privacy by making all you feeds public?

If you like this post then please consider subscribing to my Full RSS feed. Join the Discussions about Blogging and Social Networking in the Forum.Thanks for visiting!

Posted in Google, News, Online Services, Social Networking | 6 Comments »

Social Bookmarking and Networking: Do you have the correct approach?

Everybody approaches Social bookmarking in different ways. For some bookmarking websites are an invaluable resource to save important links online so that they can access them from any computer, for some its a way to share some cool links and websites with their peers and for some its just a way to get some traffic to their blogs.

When I first got into blogging and was introduced to this fascinating trend, all I saw and read, pasted all over other blogs is bookmarking brings you traffic, use all the services, get a lot of friends in your network and viola its raining traffic. And being a new blogger, I took the advice. I started with great spirit and made a lot of friends on various networks, it worked out quite well. I have received most of my traffic and subscribers via this channel.But, the charm seemed to wear off after some time. Less people wanted to join in my network and the not many interacted, which isn’t much fun, if you are on “Social” site.

Now why did this happen, traffic was steady but the activity on my profiles was way down as compared to before. I thought what might be the reason, and then I realized what I was missing. Many people have been on these sites for quite some time and are smart enough to understand whats going on. As the time passes and your bookmarks are seem you can either be labeled as an active users - who get a good response from the community, a traffic greedy webmaster - who are ignored after sometime or the spammer - who is either blocked, ignored or removed from the community.

The whole point of social bookmarking is not just using it to get petty traffic but to share your knowledge, your reach and expertise on a subject. If you read a lot about technology or gadgets or blogging or any other niche and you bookmark some really awesome stuff that you encounter on the internet, your peers would appreciate this effort and reward you by joining your network, or sending traffic to your blogs.

To be frank I was initially shown the wrong way and approach. Its after using these networks for sometime I realized where I was going wrong. And believe me, if you do it right, you actually get to learn a lot. After I understood the approach and changed my stance and started bookmarking meaningful and useful stuff, I got a good response from my friends on these sites.

The two ways of going about sharing stuff you find on the internet:Just for Fun and Learning more about your interest.

Just for fun Approach:

First is just for fun. There are many sites that are for fun like online flash games, comic strips, funny videos and pictures, jokes etc. These are something that you can share with your friends while enjoying the great resource the internet is. Some of the sites that are good to share this stuff are:

1. StumbleUpon
2. Leaptag (now a Facebook application)
3. Tumblr
4. Twitter

Now since I have labeled them for just for fun doesn’t mean everyone uses them for fun, some use these sites for saving and sharing important stuff. These are the sites that I would use for sharing some fun stuff with my friends.

The Serious Approach:

The second approach is saving some really important stuff for future reference as a part of a research or study or just for more knowledge on a specific subject. Some really good websites to save this stuff and share them with specific users are:

1. Del.icio.us
2. Furl
3. Netvouz
4. Linkagogo

These sites are excellent to store your bookmarks and organize them in different folders and tags. They also provide an option to share it with friends, and if you want to keep some bookmarks private, we have than option too.

So its my advice to the new bloggers and Social sites users out there to start using these sites correctly as they are a great resource for those who understand the importance of collective knowledge. These sites are a road map of the web, based on the recommendations of people who have traveled it extensively. So either you can learn a lot from others and extend your knowledge while sharing it with others or just keep on bookmarking your own site till its ignored by everyone or worse banned from these networks.

So whats your approach?
Are you a Greedy webmaster hungry for traffic, a spammer or a active user who is valued a lot in these communities?

Posted in Blogging, Online Services, Popular, Social Networking | 17 Comments »

New Feature in Google Reader: Share Feeds with friends on GTalk

Do you use the Google Reader? Do you have a lot of friends on G-Talk? Then you  might find this interesting. Today when I opened my Google reader a new pop-up came up telling me now its possible to share my feed items with friends on GTalk. I have been using the Google reader for quite some time now and I have seen it evolving and integrating features like getting its own search option, providing the feed count via Feedburner ( a good feature to track number of subscribers to ones blog) and Google Reader International versions ( French and Japanese).

If you are new to this whole sharing business, let me explain it in brief. Google Reader automatically creates a public page for any items that you mark as “shared.” You can also choose to create public pages for your starred items, or for items you have marked with a particular tag. If you decide to share some feeds with your friends, all you need to do is click on the share link at the bottom of the post and the icon turns orange indicating that now the feed is being displayed on the shared page, and is visible to friends on your Gtalk list. To view which posts have been shared till now, you can click on the shared items link (on left sidebar of the reader) and it would display your public page, with the shared posts.

Also, you can decide while setting up the sharing feature, which friends can see the public page. If its shared, it doesn’t mean everyone on the list can see that page. If you like you can share information just with your close friends or co-workers. If you want a fresh start you also have an option to erase previous sharing history. How about that?

This is an interesting feature and can be put to good use, if you have a decent social network, especially on IM clients.
I had written about growing one’s social network through IM Network some time back, and I was able to get acquainted with some really famous bloggers like Daniel from DaliyBlogTips, Fred Peters from Newestonthenet and Maki from Dosh Dosh. Also I have a lot of fellow bloggers who share a lot of stuff common to our niche through various social networking sites. However if one is on IM, you would get to share stuff in real time.

I just cant stress enough the importance of being on top of things in your niche by being the first one to blog about a certain topic. Yesterday I wrote about the Yahoo Shortcut WordPress plugin, immediately after it was released. Now that post ranks 11th in Google results along with blogs like Weblog Tools Collection and Read Write Web and I have received more than 300 unique visitors to that posts already.

Now a days, the RSS feeds have penetrated almost every aspect of the internet and now they are making their way into Instant Messaging, the original social networking tool. I have always been an IM fan as I like to do things in real time. So I guess this would be quite useful for me to share stuff with my fellow bloggers.

Can you think of any other use this can be put to? Would you start using this feature?

Posted in Google, News, Online Services, Social Networking | No Comments »

New rss service in town.

rssHugger is a new service developed for blogs who want more exposure for their Rss feeds and help them reach readers who are interested in their niche. You can get your rss feed listed on rssHugger and it would get its own page. According to John Chow, this website is being dubbed as the technorati without the spam, as every blogs entry would be manually reviewed.

The initial plan was, one would get a 10 year listing for $20 and if you blog about the service then the same page would be available for your blog for $10. However on advice from John Chow, rssHugger is now letting any blog which posts about them, to get your own page for free.

From the rssHugger blog itself :
The community has spoken, and we have listened! We have removed the $10 registration fee. Write a blog post reviewing rssHugger and get a 10 year listing absolutely free! We feel that in order to allow the smallest blogs that write quality content to join, we needed to offer a free solution.

This is actually an excellent idea as now the service would get good exposure and has a great chance of going viral. If you own a blog and would like to get listed, you can write about rssHugger and get more exposure for your blogs feed!

Update:

Collin the man behind the website rssHugger personally checked my blog and the feed and then approved it.  He commented on my blog to let me know my blogs feed is a part of the

system. You can find my rssHugger feed page here.
Join in and get your own page now!

Posted in Blogging Tools, Online Services | 6 Comments »

Get an early Invitations to new Web 2.0 beta services that are “Invite” only.

Nowadays we have seen a lot of new Web 2.0 betas coming up which let you join only on an Invite only basis. The invite only culture started with “Gmail Invites” and has been followed on since then. Using the Invite only option is a good thing for startups in many ways. Startups love this, of course. They create scarcity around a desired service and that creates buzz. These “beta invites” are targeted towards a certain group of people who would give the appropriate feedback for their service (mostly tech Savvy guys). These new members are then given some additional invites, so that they can invite friends or blog readers who share a similar interests.

Getting in early has some advantages. One gets to test the service and provide feedback.Bloggers can blog about this and this is exclusive as no one else has actual access. Active new users are given extra privileges and given some invites to share with more people. A blogger or a website owner can send out invitations on request to his most active users. Your readers would remember you for that and participate more actively in your blog.

Sometimes, however getting these invites is quite tough. If one know the founder(which is quite unlikely), or one of the early joiner(this is also rare),then you can get an invite.

If you want to stay ahead in this and grab some early invites, there are two ways of doing that:
1) Join this group on Facebook. This group is for bloggers who want to try out new web 2.0 beta services early on and blog about them, if they want.
2) Get invitations for latest Web 2.0 beta services at the Beta Invite exchange service : InviteShare. This service is quite popular and the waiting time can be long is the new beta service is very popular, but you would get an invite eventually.

This is a fairly simple service but does an excellent job of fetching the invitations. You have to list your email in the a queue and invitations are sent out on first come first server basis. People who send out more invitations get priority on the lists, so there is an incentive to participate. And in a nice touch, email addresses are shown in images, making it much more difficult for spam bots to grab the names. At this time the services that are in demand from Invite share are Pownce.com , 8apps.com and Grandcentral.com to name a few.

So if you are one of those who like to get an early start join in and Enjoy the status of Beta Tester!

Posted in Innovation, Online Services | 6 Comments »

The Quest to become a Top Stumbler

When I first started blogging, I knew that the best way to get exposure is through social media sites. As I started participating, I saw that my blog got exposure, appreciation and a steady flow of traffic. But there were days when I saw that there was a huge surge of non-stop traffic, and the source was none other than StumbleUpon (SU) . I also observed that on the days when my posts received a lot of Thumbs Up from SU, the number of feed subscribers increased and so did the comments. Thats made me realize that SU can be an excellent source of new readers and getting diverse exposure from a wide range of audience.

I also noted that being active on SU can give you an edge over others and get better results. Thats why I decided that either slowly or aggressively, I should try and get in the Top stumblers list. However the opinion varies here. Some say that being a Top Stumbler does not give you an edge over others and isn’t that big a deal, whereas on the other side, Top stumblers are respected and get more exposure and a chance to be a part of a wonderful and expanding community.

Getting into the Top Stumblers list is a tough task. There are stumblers who have stumbled about 130,434 pages been with SU since 2 years or even more. But on the other side there are guys who have stumbled 500 odd pages and have been with the site since 4 months only. So there is no ideal profile to get into the TOP stumblers list. This seems encouraging. Some interesting information about Top StumbleUpon users can be found on my friend Glen’s Blog here.

I am going to try and get into the Top stumblers list with good old manual labor, by stumbling maximum number of pages and trying to discover great websites on the way.

This is an experiment, really, to check if getting into a Top stumblers position really worth it and whether others should try it or not. I would dedicate a major chunk of my day to SU to make the most of it. In this way if I lose some time and energy in this and no results come out, my readers need not waste their time in this effort. However if I succeed in this quest, then this is something I would advocate loud and wide and would share tips to get into the StumbleUpon Top stumblers list and share with everyone what benefits one can derive by being active in that community.

The ideal strategy to make it big on SU is to maximize the number of pages you stumble. Also the other factors are:
1)Number of Friends one has.
2)The number of reviews received.
3)How active the person is in the community.

I am going to try hard to get the maximum number of pages, videos and photos to improve my SU profile. If you think this is something you might want to assist me with please help me by adding me as your friend or writing a review . This is not a stunt to get more friends or reviews. Comment only if I show results. I am letting you know my present stats below.

My SU page is BlogStumbler. You can check the latest stats there as well. I would update the stats when I make some significant progress. This is a test to check if being active in SU really pays off or not? The current stats are as under:

My StumbleUpon Stats on 19/11/2007:
Pages: 140
Videos: 5
Photos: 9
Fans: 10

I am going to maximize the number if websites first as that is the most influencing attribute on all Top Stumblers profile.
I will Update these stats after I make noticeable progress. This is a quest to know if absolute dedication to SU everyday for a few hours pays off or not! The challenge I would say is breaking the 10000 pages mark. Thats my 1st challenge and I aim to break it in the least time possible.

If it does work well for me, you can join me in my quest and if doesn’t it would be only me who wasted my time and in a way I would save several other peoples time in the process, which can be put to other productive use. Whether this effort is foolhardy or productive only time will tell.You can subscribe to the blogs feed as I would update the stats quite regularly and you could see how is the progressing.

Wish me Luck and advice me by commenting about what you think about this project!

Posted in Online Services, Social Networking | 9 Comments »

A Guide to BackUp Your WordPress Blog

Recently I had to face the nightmarish experience of a Server crash, which eventually resulted in the database corruption of the entire Blog and whenever I tried to open it in a browser, all I saw was an option to Reinstall WordPress?? RE-INSTALL WP?? What happened to all my posts, my theme,the plugins and all the comments? When I tried to reinstall it, I got a list of over a 100 database errors. It was a horrible experience. Many weeks of work vanished in a matter of seconds! I used to believe one has to experience something to understand its gravity, but I pray to God, none of you guys ever face a server crash.

I read a lot of Blogs and subscribe to quite a few, but I have seen this topic does not get the attention it deserves. Many bloggers are beginners and don’t have experience in maintaining their self hosted blogs. One is not always aware how shared hosting can be deceptive and you can lose your entire site in a server crash, so its of utmost importance that one backs up his work as often as possible, at least once a week. It is almost the only insurance one has.In this post I have covered the process of backing up your blog along with various resources, tools and services that can be useful in this process.

Any WordPress blog, consists of two important parts that need to be backed up separately. One is your actual blog, and other is the database. Its important to understand the difference between these two as both have a different method of backing up and they are incomplete without the each other.Some people just backup the database and think they don’t need to worry about anything, but thats not enough.

Your Blog + Your Blogs Database = Your Complete Site.

Your WordPress Blog consists of the following:

• Your WordPress Core Installation.
• Your WordPress Theme.
• Your Plugins.
• The images and files on your Blog.
• Various Scripts (Java scripts, php scripts etc) and static webpages.

Your WordPress Database consists of the following:

• Your Blog Posts.
• Your Blog Comments.
• Various data that is generated by different plugins. (like Akismet and WP Stats)

These two components together constitute your Blog. If you back up your blog and not the database then you would only get a blank theme and no content. And if you backup the database and not the theme, you would all your content but, the Theme would need to be rebuilt from scratch. Now I would elaborate on the methods of backing up the Blog first and then the database with the most commonly used tools.

Backing up your WordPress Blog: There are three ways to backup your blog(files).

1. Back Up software provided by your Webhost: Almost all Webhosts provide some software to back up your Blog. You should consult with your respective Webhost and find out what options do you have to back up your Blog. You should also check with them how often do they back up your blog and if they back up just the database or the entire site.
2. Copying your entire blog to your computer using a FTP software: Using a FTP software like FileZilla or CuteFTP you can connect to your server and download the entire site in one of the folders on your computer. If your blog is quite large with lot of images and other graphics you can use a Zip software to Zip it and save space, which will let you have multiple back ups without wasting space. A comprehensive guide by WordPress.org about FTP clients and how they work is given here.
3. Synchronizing your Blog with the backup of your computer: There are certain softwares that can automatically sync your Blog contents and the changes that you make on your blog,with the files that you have previously backed up on your computer. Its a a automated process and saves time. Once you get a hang of it, backing the Blog will become quite easy. SyncBackSE and WinSCP are two products that allow you to sync your blog. You can download them and get more information about them by clicking on the names.

Backing up your WordPress Database: There are three ways to back up your WordPress Blog Database.

1. Using a web-based MySQL database Administrative tool: Almost all webhosts provide a utility like phpMyAdmin which is a program to perform administrative operations on your database.Its graphical user interface makes it more intuitive to use. An excellent guide to backup the database using phpMAdmin can be found here. Another excellent guide can be found here. Please bookmark these links for future as backing up of the database is of prime importance. However phpMyAdmin can’t handle large databases. For large databases straight MySQL code would help. Instructions can be found here.
2. Using the WordPress database backup Plugins: There are quite a few plugins that would help us backup our WordPress database. The ones I have used or currently using and recommend are, WordPress Database Backup. Another effective plugin for database backup is BackUp WordPress, its in beta phase but it works quite fine.
3. Using an Online Blog Backup Service: This is also a good option. You can use this as a back up of the back up. One of the great features of a Online Blog back up service is that once you set it up, its completely automated and each post is backed up after its published. The one week of data that I had not manually backed up was recovered from one such service. I would recommend you register for one as well. The one I use is Blog Back Up Online. Limitations are 50 Mb space and its in Beta stage. It supports all major blogging platforms.

After backing up your blog, in case something goes wrong and you need to restore the back up, and excellent guide to restore your database can be found here.

I hope you find the above information useful and make the best use of it. I would ask you to backup your blog every week at the least. I would be more than happy to answer and assist you with any stage of backing up your blog as I have gone through the entire process, using all the above methods to get the peace of mind that my blog is perfectly safe.

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Posted in Blogging, Online Services, Popular, WordPress | 20 Comments »