Pew Internet: Digital Footprints

Ellen pointed me to this new report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled "Digital Footprints". Quoting the teaser blurb:

Internet users are becoming more aware of their digital footprint; 47% have searched for information about themselves online, up from just 22% five years ago. However, few monitor their online presence with great regularity. Just 3% of self-searchers report that they make a regular habit of it and 74% have checked up on their digital footprints only once or twice.

Indeed, most internet users are not concerned about the amount of information available about them online, and most do not take steps to limit that information. Fully 60% of internet users say they are not worried about how much information is available about them online. Similarly, the majority of online adults (61%) do not feel compelled to limit the amount of information that can be found about them online.

Cyberinfrastructure and the liberal arts

Given our recent success with the Mellon Foundation, you might find this of interest. In introducing this special issue of Academic Commons, David Green writes:

Made possible by dramatic advances in networking technologies, cyberinfrastructure promises to combine new computing capabilities, massive data resources and distributed human expertise to enable qualitatively different creative product from new generations of "knowledge environments." Introducing this timely collection of observations on how this will affect liberal arts disciplines and institutions, David Green reviews the distance we've come in the last 15 years and identifies the main themes of the essays, interviews and reviews that follow.

Happy reading!

Design at Cisco

I found this article interesting. It describes how Cisco, a classic engineering-focussed network equipment company, is now paying attention to customer experience.

He [Ratzlaff] and his dozen-or-so staffers have created a blueprint for how Cisco's products should work together for customers. With the support of CEO John Chambers and other top brass, they are trying to impose it on the San Jose company.

Their degree of success will help determine whether Cisco can reach beyond the business of selling routers and other basic networking gear, an area it dominates, into faster-growing markets for products that make use of those networks. "Cisco is respected for their technology and for their financial success, but nobody really knows what they do," says Hartmut Esslinger, founder of consultancy frog design.

I think that this is a great example of what should be an i-School like project ... what kinds of information do network managers need, what kind of interfaces do the job, etc.

Study Finds 90 to 95 Percent of All Email in 2007 Spam

You might find this item interesting (and not surprising):

A study conducted by Barracuda Networks suggests spam email has accounted for 90 to 95 percent of all email sent in 2007. The study, based on an analysis of more than one billion daily email messages sent to its more than 50,000 customers worldwide, found a staggering percentage of all email sent in 2007 was spam, increasing from an estimated 85 to 90 percent of email in 2006.

Free for All in the Public Library

Every so often, an amusing book about some aspect of the information professions surfaces, such as Don Borchert’s Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library (New York: Virgin Books, 2007). The discovery of this book came just before our December 07 graduation ceremony, and I used it in my brief remarks, as follows:

Our School has been educating individuals to function as librarians for well over a century. The LIS program is internationally recognized for preparing public, school, children’s and youth services, medical, academic, digital, and special librarians, as well as archivists and preservation administrators. Some of these positions are quite new in their origins. Now you might one working as a Webmaster or an Electronic Records Specialist, jobs the first graduates in 1901 could never have imagined. We also have graduates of our program teaching in countries around the world as well. And we are happy to be recognizing the most recent graduates of our program today, hoping they understand the proud legacy they will be part of here in just a few moments.

All of you will face new and exciting challenges. Don Borchert, in a humorous book just published, Free for All: Oddballs, Geeks, and Gangstas in the Public Library, provides a sense of these challenges: “Libraries are a footnote to our civilization, an outpost to those unfamiliar with the concept, and a cheap, habit-forming narcotic to the regular patron. Walk into a public library and it is usually as calm and inviting as a warm bath. It is clean, well kept, and quiet enough to do the Sunday crossword puzzle (the one you brought with you from home, not the one torn surreptitiously out of the library’s copy of the paper while no one was looking). . . . The staff is invariably professional, courteous, and unobtrusive. They are almost always educated – not just disillusioned college grads who could find nothing in their own field but majors in Library Science, a degree as arcane as alchemy or predicting the future by reading the entails of a recently slaughtered lamb.”

Now, some might not agree with Borchert’s assessment, and his book is a bit of a trip, but we know you are ready for your new careers. And, we know as well, that if you don’t know what alchemy is or lack experience reading lamb entails that you know where to find the information about such activities and then preserve it for others to use.