This little exchange highlights the essence of an individual’s right to privacy – Individuals should have control over how their personal data is used. Do you have control?  Should you?

If you can’t see the video, you can access it on YouTube here.

This morning, I saw a cool photo of the Space Shuttle bursting through the clouds on Facebook and shared it with my friends.  

But alas, I subsequently found out in an article on Universe Today, that photographer Richard Silvera faked it;

The picture of the sky and clouds was taken by me from an airplane, and the shuttle is a picture from NASA. Then the assembly was done in Photoshop & Lightroom.

So, as the wise Abraham Lincoln once said, “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”

Or was that George Washington?

This happy little notice dropped in my email box this morning, claiming that my birthday was also the sixth anniversary of my joining Twitter.

 

Actually, Twitter may need to adjust its email robot a bit.  Upon further investigation, with the help of the Twopcharts web site, I found more precise information:

 

So, I have been on Twitter a total of 2,500 days (6 years, 10 months and 4 days).  Twitter was only 10 months late sending the Twitterversary message to me.

The burning question is: how much valuable time have you wasted or invested (depending on your point of view) posting tweets on Twitter?  Twopcharts estimates 118 hours for me!

Tweet on, my friends!

This morning, I stumbled upon a Facebook post that explained the different social media services in terms that even I could understand.  I think it originally came from geek.com.  Grab a donut and enjoy!

Did you ever wonder who the first blogger was?  Now, thanks to Frank & Ernest, we know …

Which type of glasses do you prefer?

Finally … the reason people post social media comments in anger …

 

Thanks, Frank & Ernest!

Last Friday, I began experimenting with publishing a  Discovering Identity “paper” via the paper.li service.  It was enlightening to learn how to specify sources of information and then see how paper.li drew from those sources to lay out a paper fit for publication.  

I don’t pretend to understand the algorithms they use to select from the hundreds of articles and tweets in the sources I specified, but I will continue to experiment with sources and priorities as I move forward.

I decided to upgrade to the Pro version, which allowed me to tweak the branding a bit.  I decided to use the new Discovering Identity logo that appears on this blog, and the same background color.

You can view the paper at  paper.discoveringidentity.com.  I hope this proves to be a useful addition to my online presence as I try to reignite my personal social media efforts.

It’s nice to know that there are folks out there (at least in Dilbert comic strips) who are farther out on the social media long tail than I am.

The big question is … how to strike the right balance?

Last night, I was experimenting with IFTTT to see if it would automatically announce my blog posts on Twitter and LinkedIn.  Last night, it worked on LinkedIn, but not Twitter.  Apparently there was a problem with authentication to my Twitter account. That fixed, it seemed to work just fine this morning … albeit not very quickly.