Guest Speaker, Jessica Jinn

Today I was a guest speaker at my old high school's Theory of Knowledge class. It was a great experience, and I hope to do it again soon.

The topic of the presentation was Internet Privacy, a topic that is pretty interesting to me. Hopefully it was interesting to the kids, too. I definitely did not lecture them about how to use the internet safely -- forget that boring stuff. That's not only dull but obsolete and irrelevant.

Mainly, I just want people to be more wary about the way in which they interact online, how our most "trusted" websites can betray us.

Anyway, good experience. I think I got their minds thinking. On Wednesday I'll be excited to hear their debate about the topic. Yippee...

Internet Privacy

This morning I read the weekend Wall Street Journal and was really intrigued by the cover story of their Weekend Journal: "The Great Privacy Debate". For the past week, I've been reading the journal's coverage of internet privacy as they've been spreading the word about tracking cookies and data mining.

As you'd expect, one writer took a positive stance of web tracking having its benefits, and the other was anti-web tracking.

The first article, about being web tracking and its benefits, has a lot of good points. As users of the internet, we should know that part of us being online means that we're giving up some information and, in turn for giving information, we're getting a personalized experience while we surf the internet.Ads made just for you!

I don't know about you, but sometimes the ads scare me.

That's why, I'd have to agree more with the second stance that says we shouldn't take web tracking so lightly. The writer made a good point in fearing the way we seem to care less and less about our privacy and treat the internet as a diary – something we can confide our secrets and information in – without considering the consequences. “Personalization’s evil twin is manipulation,” he states.

I think that we should be wary of the information we choose to post on the internet. Unless you really don't mind people being able to track you down through your internet history, then you can carry on. However, it would be a shame if our world turned into the one Cory Doctorow depicted in "Scroogled".

New Dating Tool

I like to read about what's happening in the world of online dating. Whether it's as official as eHarmony or as haphazard as a relationship through SecondLife, it's amazing how the internet is changing the rules of dating, love, and relationships.

Recently on the NY Times, I read about a new way to catch someone through new media. The article featured a site called Cheek'd. With Cheek'd you can get cards with cute pick-up lines with your identification code and hand them out to strangers you find attractive during the day. Then, the apple of your eye can log on to the site and find your profile.

What a great way to get social, right? In general, with the rise of the internet, some would say that people have lost the ability to interact in real life. However, with something like Cheek'd, you're pushing people out of their comfort boundaries to find a mate. It can be hard to find someone merely through cut-and-paste e-mails and trite chats, but if you can encourage yourself to approach someone and give them a card, I think you're proving how interested you are in the other person and that you're not solely dependent upon the internet to find "the one".

I really think that the dating tools profiled in the article are useful. Hopefully, if you use them, you'd get a higher date-rate. (Is that the right way to say it? Basically, you'll probably get more dates.) Also, they seem like fun.

If you're not ready to spend money on the little cards though, why not try just slipping someone your business card? On the back, you can write your blog address or, well, "I <3 You." Right? But then that's probably too "old-fashioned", isn't it?