I’ve often considered the important issue of online privacy for myself and my family. I’m not concerned with any of the crazy kidnap/murder/stalking scenarios that the media likes to play up. Just, in general, I think people should be able to control what personal information about them gets onto the internet. I have never posted the real name of anyone in my family. But I wonder if it makes any difference in the long run? A recent development has got me rethinking my strategy. Namely, face recognition in public search engines.

Read the rest at The Blogfathers…

My kids have suddenly entered the world of online social networking and competitive gaming via Webkinz and Club Penguin. And for me, that comes with a whole new set of challenges and opportunities that I never knew I signed up for when I became a parent.

In the late 20th century, circa 1980¹, I played with cardboard boxes and threw rocks. My world was as big as my street. Now kids want hand-held communication devices with internet access. They think nothing of routine communication with people in other countries.²

Half the kids in my daughter’s second grade class already have cell phones. To my eight-year-old self that would have seemed like magic. Watching them do the stuff they’re taking for granted forces me to think of what I was doing when I was eight. But in contrast to what my kids tell me when they’re bored, in 1980 there really was nothing to do.³

I’m a member of the first generation raised with a personal computer in the house, the age of the microprocessor. And my kids are part of the first wired generation, raised with constant and ubiquitous online access. They are already doing stuff with computers that I didn’t (couldn’t) do until college. I like to think (naively perhaps) that my science-based education and being raised with computers during a period of increasing technological change has made my mind bendy enough to adapt.

I’m somewhat unusual as well in that I know not only how to program computers, I also understand how they work at a very low level.⁴ I have a strong background in physics and mathematics. That gives me an advantage vis-à-vis understanding future advances that will hopefully keep me from being befuddled by whatever newfangled doodads those crazy kids invent.⁵

And yet, services like Club Penguin (and Webkinz and all the rest) do worry me a little. I’m not afraid of online predators. In fact, online sickos will find it much more difficult to find prey going forward—kids of 2008 are infinitely more savvy than the kids of 1998 were. And I’m not afraid of internet addiction or a lack of social contact or any of the other internet bogeymen that journalists like to write about.

I think what worries me is the subtle mind-warping that comes with being exposed to corporate branding and marketing over long periods of time. Of course, television is the current lord-high-godzilla of this already and in some very slick and sick ways. We have 600 channels of satellite television streaming into our home with no less than a half dozen 24-hour networks devoted exclusively to kids (or should I say aimed at?). And of course there are ads and product tie-ins for all of the shows. A more serious problem with television is that it glorifies and normalizes things which in reality are not glorious or normal at all. Advertising lifestyles, so to speak. “Reality” shows which do not portray reality. The sitcom, a staple of American television which teaches that lying to people is funny.

Television is becoming less relevant with children spending an increasing amount of time online both at home and at school. My kids learned how to skip commercials with the Tivo before they could tie their shoes. Not that that helps much—the shows themselves are as much about lifestyle and product branding as they are entertainment (Oh look! Hannah Montana CDs!).

Online advertising and branding can be at least as effective as its offline cousins. And it often shows up in surprising and subtle ways. For a long time, without my knowledge, my kids thought that the lower-case letter “g” was called a “google.”

People have been selling things to each other since the dawn of time but it’s never been such an onslaught as it is now.⁶ Like it or not we live in a global culture dominated by a free market economy that sells everything from products to lifestyles to politics. Parents have always had to teach their children how to recognize a salesman. Now it’s more important than ever. Everyone should be able to recognize when they are being pandered to.

I’m taking the optimistic view with online destinations for kids. Well, some of them, anyway.⁷ Club Penguin is fun. And rather than forbid them to play or shield the kids from the fact that these services are in it for the money, I simply point out to them when they are being advertised to, when they are being asked for money, and why.

Selling things for profit isn’t going away any time soon (I do it myself). I’m looking to these services partly as a kind of advertising boot camp. And I’m not against advertising. But being educated about and having a realistic view of why, how, when and where people sell things to other people, including the subtleties of branding and repetition, will hopefully give them the ability to recognize when they are being sold something and to make choices based more on reason than zombie-like subconscious familiarity.

I’m just Mr. Software lately. Every morning my kids ask me about the weather so they can get dressed. This is my first attempt at building a simplified weather forecast page for them.

It’s the weather report for today and tomorrow in a kid-friendly format. Once you’ve got it bookmarked, your kids are just one-click away from knowing what they should wear today. It shows the current conditions plus clothing suggestions for cold, cool, and warm weather. Works for any city in the world. (See the help page for setting up cities outside of the U.S.)

Usefulness varies depending on your weather and children.

KidsWeatherReport.com

I can see why people become podcasters. It’s the toys.

I bought some recording gear recently, my very first recording purchase, actually. I’d been trying to do some screencasts on another blog and just wasn’t satisfied at all with the sound quality. So I spent about $170 and bought a condenser microphone and a pre-amp/mixer combo and all the bits to connect things (a Samson C01 and Behringer 802 + accessories).

Another use I have planned is to record the children. The Girl loves to read and she’s missing several teeth at the moment and The Boy has a wonderful way of saying tongue twisters and, although I’m biased, I know they each have the cutest voices in the universe. So I want to record them as well (I’ll post some samples when I get them back—they’re on a week long vacation with their Aunt: goddess and deserving of all things good, may she attain eternal bliss, amen).

So, one gets a pre-amp, and a microphone, and a mixing board. And there are blinking lights and glowing consoles and billions of knobs. And it sounds good and it’s incredibly fun. And a funny thing happens. All that gear makes you feel like you need to do something incredibly creative with it. And not only that, it makes you feel like you can do something with it.

And so, despite the vast amount of evidence to the contrary, people start podcasts.

It might be a good idea if recording gear came with some kind of podcasting waiting period or warning. A week or 10 days. You need a buffer to let the novelty fade. Otherwise it’s possible you’ll just end up making a fool of yourself on the internet.

Many publishers consider the Internet, and Google in particular, a greater threat to their livelihoods than Osama bin Laden. — It’s not journalism – Los Angeles Times

A greater threat than Osama bin Laden. But in the very next paragraph it says that Google News, without running any ads themselves, links to stories that “prompt people to spend more time on the news media’s sites, potentially increasing their ad sales.” That’s worse than killing thousands of people? Am I missing something?

The editorial goes on but to me it just sounds like the Times is whining. They’re afraid they’re going to be held to a higher standard now and will have to work harder because Google has just made it easier for people to call them on their bullshit.

Here’s a point by point rebuttal by Robert Niles of the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review.

Sitting alone in the living room in front of the television, Mrs. Hoogestraat says she worries it will be years before her husband realizes that he’s traded his real life for a pixilated fantasy existence, one that doesn’t include her.

Is This Man Cheating on His Wife? – WSJ.com

I’ve been wanting to do a web project centered around the book for a couple of years now. At its core, a way to read the book; but also as a place to really explore it and discuss it with other enthusiasts. Well, I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally found some time to work on it and the result is suntzusaid.com:

It might seem strange to be talking about The Art of War but there really is a lot more to it than just military strategy. Certainly the wisdom in this book can be (and is) applied to warfare. But if you allow yourself to think of the business world or even parenting as a form of conflict you find that much of the advice is appropriate in those fields as well.

For example, Sun Tzu says that “All warfare is based on deception.” Anyone with kids old enough to speak can see the truth in that. ;-)

I’m putting the finishing touches on the site, adjusting some content here and there, but I’d love it if you checked it out and shared it with your friends (and let me know if you find anything broken). Most of all, I hope that at least a few of you enjoy it as much as I have. Thanks!

I hope that Zooomr elaborates on their launch issues on their blog (after Kristopher gets some much needed sleep). Until they do, I can only speculate. But one thing that comes to mind immediately is the craziness of bottling up 250 new features and deploying them all at once. Rolling out one new feature is difficult enough—multiplying that by 250 is extremely risky. It’s a very Web 1.0 way of doing deployments. I can’t say why they did it this way but it’s obviously not going well. And what role does S3 have to play in this, if any? Is it taking longer to migrate data out of S3 into a local storage system than was estimated? If you’ve got terabytes of data invested in S3, how do you get it back out again? Why didn’t they start the data migration prior to taking the site down and then transfer the balance afterwards?

When it comes down to it, I’m sure Zooomr’s problems aren’t caused by one thing that anyone can point to and say: “Look! It was this thing here.” Deployments always involve some level of risk. And I understand the circumstances that can sometimes lead to the need for large, monolithic deployments. But doing a storage system migration and adding 250 new features all at once seems downright irresponsible. Scoble is right on the money when he says you need a parallel set of servers to play around with. The thing is, they’ve presumably already got the infrastructure they need to run Mark III. So why not segment that to keep the old site running while they brought Mark III online?

As I write this, the Zooomr site shows a new launch ETA of 7pm PDT (just a few minutes from now). I’ll raise a cold one for you, guys.