Enough already with the Notifications

I had planned to use instagram and twitter via my phone during the periods when I was travelling for my Endless Summer project. However leaving data on and getting hundreds of notifications from instagram and less from twitter I quickly discovered that I had used over 60% of my monthly data allowance in just 4 days! Wow, I seemed to be getting notification even though the apps where not running on the phone, The twitter beeps and tweets where the most annoying since they where not related to my posts or even things that would interest me anyway. they were just trying to grab my attention. The deeper worry is that in all this activity I feel like I am just yelling into the wind, not joining a “conversation”. So the solution is simple just log out of Instagram and twitter and turn off data. Silence … …

My cartoon creation Alvin people was actually one of the earliest Australian Twitter accounts, predominantly to link to and later post cartoons. My cartooning is having an extended holiday, but I decide to consult Alvin as he would probably know what to do. He readily admits he hasn't posted in years and after going through the forgotten password dance to resurect his account he managed to set off a cacophony of chimes, beeps, tingings, chirps and other electronic sounds. Clearly he could not find how to turn off the notifications either.

He did find you can unsubscribe from twitter using a link on the bottom of the web site

Still having fun with dreamscope

https://t.co/DvpzlgiSdI still having fun with dreamscope

— AP@imageo (@APimageo) October 22, 2015

Twitter had the Fail Whale now Flickr gets a Bad Panda

Twitter earned a far bit of notoriety when the service was first becoming popular for the Fail Whale display. Which basically meant the service was down (normally due to bandwidth restrictions). The whale was cute and gained acceptance, perhaps even a fan base. This let the Twitter engineers focus on fixing things rather than fire-fight complaints. I haven’t seen the fail whale in a long time.

 

Flickr has been running into a few problems lately, superficially since February and often just regionally and are displaying this photo with the title Bad, Bad Panda. Flickr is apparently undergoing some pretty heavy updates, many are scheduled, which I assume are related to the new user display formats. Really it means the site is down and they know about, so be patient.  Once upon a time you would get a boring 404 message when a web site doesn’t respond, the Bad Panda screen is a much nicer let down but I don’t think it will be legend like the fail whale.

For those interested here is the story behind the Bad Panda Picture.

If you want to check an on-line service you use often and doesn’t seem to be responding. Fist of all check some other site (like the google query page) to make sure your access to the net is working. If the site is still not responding you can use a net called Is It Down Right Now?

5 steps to avoid sharing your on-line photos with the world!

There are many services that offer to share our photos on-line, and most, specifically the social media places, make it very easy but have defaults that mean your photos are being shared with anyone with net access. Perhaps you just wanted to share your photos with a few friends of family members. To really scare yourself, try finding some of your own images on-line using google’s neat reverse image search. To do that just drag and drop a photo you want to check onto the little camera icon on the google’s images search screen.

Ok now your scared! Time to pause and check whether that photo also lets others know where you live. You can find the extra information buried in your on-line photo by copying its URL to metapicz

So how do you fix it so your images and the hidden information they contain are not being shared with everyone in the future? Here are 5 steps you can take.

1) Make sure you know and set appropriately the default sharing setting when you upload photos. Most of the specialist photosharing sites like flickr, google+, photobucket, smugmug etc have a multi-level security/sharing system for just family, friends or then the public. Google+ have the added organizational control of just sharing with your selected circles.  Some cloud based photo services like Skydrive, and Drop Box also have multi-level sharing security and the private side normally involves sending those you wish to share with, a secure link (ie it has an access password/switch built into the link). A big limitation of these systems is in the  photo uploaders they provide, which often have public set as their sharing default. So you can unknowingly make your photo available to everyone. So it is in your interest to set the default to private and only set those you intend to share as public on an individual photo basis.

2) Be careful that you don’t share links to otherwise private photo, by reposting to public sites (like you blog or a social network site like twitter). in those systems that do allow you to share your images on another service such as facebook or twitter, Often they use some variant of OAuth to establish the authority to post on the attached site, unfortunately they seldom inherit the same privacy setting from your original post and the photo is posted as public. Generally if there is no mention of sharing security when you do the authorization there will be none (eg Sharing to twitter from flickr, even if the photo is private on flickr once it is shared to twitter it will be publically viewable on twitter)

3) If you don’t want strangers to find out where you live, work, go to school. Consider turning off the GPS in your phone, or finding the setting in your photo uploader to remove geotags/geolocation data. Flickr has a nice geo fence feature that allows you to supress showing location if your are close to sensitivity place (eg home, school etc). Lightroom has a setting to remove any geolocation data when posting an image via their Export or Publishing Services. You can also control the types of metadata exported.

4) Remove the photos from google search if necessary. I haven’t been a fan of the google’s official forums because they are often hard to figure out the context of the advice being given and even what the FAQs are actually asking. My impression has been that google staff must not actively moderate their forums or perhaps even read them (maybe I’m being a bit unkind here). However the Picasa Resources site does provide some good discussion on key FAQs about picasa and its advice on How to remove your images from google search gives some good advice on what to do, albeit quite technical advice. The photos don’t have to have been shared via picasa.

5) Don’t use Facebook (and probably Instagram), for any photo you don’t want to share with the world because someone else liking or tagging your photo will start sharing that with all their friends and so on. These access links can spread quickly and soon many folk you don’t know will be able to see and use your photos. Also the facebook TOS (terms of service), means they assume ownership of anything you post. I don’t have a facebook account, and I don’t want to be accused of facebook bashing but I understand in the past it wasn’t so easy or obvious how to remove and permanently delete photos, I gather facebook has yielded to pressure and here is a link to Steve’s Digicam with instruction on deleting facebook photos and albums.

So don’t panic, make sure you understand the sharing security on your favourite photo service and set the defaults appropriately. It is certainly not wrong to share your photos with others. It might just be wise to do little bit of checking right now for any existing images you don’t want shared publically.

Play me a song - about the future

Play me a song, originally uploaded by wolfcat_aus.

I went along to pubcamp in melbourne yesterday, looking at where Web 2.0 might go next and was clearly the oldest bloke in the audience (fortunately richard walsh was involved in the debate so I was not the oldest overall)
The real timetracking of twitter hasshtags was impressive, and I guess the general consensus was content is king, but it is "hard to make a buck" (Stephen Mayne) and the advertising networks have the money in their pockets already.

So where does that leave the humble content creator? Do you sell your soul to google (yahoo! etc) or can you keep your digital rights and expect a a tiny bit of value to flow back to the content creator. Or is the general perception going to remain, if its on the net, its free to copy (and reuse).

If you want to know more ben barren's blog is much more eloquent than mine.

Special applause to Jed White for organizing the event.