Saturday, January 21, 2017

The Play that Goes Wrong performing at The Royal Variety Performance 2015

I haven't laughed this hard in a long time.



Enjoy!

Big Metadata Article Summary #1, A LS566 Post

"We kill people based on metadata." - Michael Hayden

The above (and completely unexpected) quote illustrates the massive importance of metadata and how it can be used. Allison Jai O'Dell in her article, Big Metadata: Mining Special Collections Catalogs for New Knowledge talks about how special collection catalogues are full of metadata that can be used for research. But for that to happen the catalogues have to be thought of as big metadata which in turn can be data mined. She points out that it will be a lot of work but the information is there and it just have to be organized.
http://copyrightuser.org/topics/text-and-data-mining/

I have never really thought of library catalogues as a form of metadata before, but it does make a good bit of sense. The aforementioned quote, which comes from the article, made me do a double take, but after the second reading I realized that Michael Hayden was correct. A lot can be learned of someone by the information that is innocuously put out everyday.

Monday, January 16, 2017

Protecting My Tweets and My Six, a LS 566 Post

Well, I did something that I thought I would never do - I got a twitter account. Please cue the dramatic music. The only reason I got one was for school as part of a way to aid in building a learning network with my peers. Yes, it's as cool as it sounds.

Image from Twitter.com
But something weird happened when I went to sign up for an account. Everything was fine until I put in my email address. Apparently there was a twitter account already attached to my email. After a brief moment of feeling my stomach dropping to my feet, I was able to get the account attached to my email suspended by asking for a password reset and in the email Twitter sent there was an option at the bottom "not my account".

I try to be careful of what I put out on the internet, so this did not make me feel better. So I went under 'Settings' to the section 'Security and Privacy' and selected the option of 'Protect my Tweets'.

This means (direct from Twitter's help page):

  • You’ll receive a request when new people want to follow you, which you can approve or deny. Learn more.
  • Your Tweets, including permanent links to your Tweets, will only be visible to your followers.
  • Your followers will not be able to use the Retweet button to Retweet or quote your Tweets. Learn more.
  • Protected Tweets will not appear in third-party search engines (like Google search or Bing).
  • Your protected Tweets will only be searchable on Twitter by you and your followers.
  • Replies you send to an account that isn’t following you will not be seen by that account (because only your followers will see your Tweets).
I'm going to start off protecting my tweets for the time being until I am more comfortable using the site.

Next step, learning how to use 'Feedly'!!