Tag Cloud

I did a tag cloud (thanks to TagCrowd.com) based on the text of all my blog entries from 2008 (excepting super-common English words and words built into the Blogger interface), and this is what I got:

archive article available books brewster class community companies content cool copyright davies digital display excellent farm flickr forum francisco free global google immigration important information interesting internet issues kahle library life literacy lot love media national number online open page people photos pretty probably public pupusas reading really rights san service social someone something space stop story street students studies sure talk technology things think used user usf war website week work world year youtube

created at TagCrowd.com

I love my tag cloud. Library and people stand as the most common words, which I think is a fantastic reflection on my values. Books, digital, photos, and USF are runners-up. Some common words reflect my mediocre vocabulary (lot, really, something, things). I love the sequence in descending size, "library literacy lot love" (with a tiny "life" sticking itself in there).

Clearly, most of my posts have been related to my Digital Literacy class, but my blog entries have rarely felt like assignments (at least not in the burdensome sense). I've had a wonderful time doing this blog and this class. I'm happy that I've created something that I like and find interesting.

This class was never about telling us what to do - it was about encouraging us to do something, to use these technologies in ways that work for us. For me, that was a lot of announcements about things happening at USF, random interesting resources or information, work I was doing in other classes, and personal reflections.

As the semester comes to a close, the question remains, what will become of this blog? I'm definitely going to continue blogging here, but I expect the common themes will shift as my activities shift. Over the summer you can expect a lot about service-learning, and starting in August you'll hear about JVC and worker's rights issues. I'm sure I'll still talk about digital literacy sorts of things, since that's such a big interest of mine, and of course I'll continue to post about any other random stuff I want to share with the world.

I'm excited.

Photos of the World

One of our final assignments for Digital Literacy is to come up with a concept, and ideally an implementation, of some sort of ongoing blogging project. The idea is that we start something knowing that we will continue to add to it over time. An example is David Silver's "gone" posts. Every time an evil leader (my words, not his) is fired or arrested or quits, he posts a photo with the word "gone." He also has a Flickr gallery of these entries.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is how global it is. It can do a lot to break down artificial barriers we've built between groups of people. With the help of Flickr, I'm going to start posting photos from around the world.

Since I'm traveling to Tacna, Peru in a few weeks, here is the first photo, from Tacna:


"la dueña del pan"
by arcketipo

Jasmine Park

Last Thursday, Jasmine Park of Pike/Pine, a Seattle-based street fashion blog, came to speak to our Digital Literacy class. During the week, Jasmine does program management at Microsoft, but every weekend she walks around Seattle looking for fashionable people to photograph. She told us about how she started out and how her blog has developed since September, 2006, when she started it. She created four rules for herself:

1. Take good photos.
2. Make people look good.
3. Be nice.
4. Only post what she's proud of.

And she outlined three lessons she's learned:

1. Everyone's a critic.
2. Diversity is good (and hard to find).
3. People are nice.

It was in interesting talk, especially because fashion is never something I've paid attention to. It was cool to hear from a part-time blogger. It's still just a hobby for her, as it is for most people. I also liked to hear her thoughts on comments and her decision to delete mean comments in order to create a positive environment.

Moral of the story: If someone stops you on the street and wants to take your picture for a fashion blog, be nice and say yes.

Reflections on StoneLake Farm

This last weekend our Digital Literacy class went to StoneLake Farm in Humboldt County. StoneLake Farm is owned by USF Media Studies professor/filmmaker Melinda Stone and artist/adventurer/mountain man Francis Lake.



I was struck by the beauty and simplicity I encountered at the farm. It is pretty isolated (we traveled six miles off the highway on a bumpy dirt road that becomes impassable in the winter), and off the electrical grid. They get their power from the sun and their water from the creek that runs through the property. They have goats, chickens, dogs, and some new ducklings.

It was clear that Francis' philosophies about life are deeply ingrained in the way the farm is run. Instead of working against nature, as our industrial world tends to do, it works with nature, in harmony as part of nature.





That line we usually place between people and nature is blurred. The intentions of the farm are pure -- it's not about making money, it's about sustainability.

Life on the farm was certainly different from everyday life in San Francisco. It involved a lot of cooking, eating, and chopping wood for the stove that kept us warm in the snowy weather.





There was no feeling of rushing from one task to the next, another reflection of Francis. When he spoke to us there would often be long pauses, which would normally feel awkward, but didn't. I managed, for the most part, to ignore the homework I brought with me, and I enjoyed some wonderful conversations with my classmates.



Simple living was a core value of the program I did in El Salvador, and it is a core value of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, which I will be a part of next year. What does it mean to live simply in a world of consumerism and satisfaction based on material wealth and goods? Some people, like Francis, withdraw from that society and culture and live their own way. For some, that life might be perfect, but I wouldn't want the isolation that accompanies it.

I see two facets of simple living: rejecting materialism and simplifying one's daily life. How do you find a balance between doing all the things you want to do (education, service, activism, spending time with friends and family) and taking a step back, allowing yourself time? I wouldn't consider most of my activities a waste of time, so what could I cut out to allow myself the time to watch the sun set for two hours, as Francis mentioned doing? It's not an easy task, nor is living in harmony with nature when you're in a city and part of American culture, but if we're conscious of our actions, we can do better. I read a book last semester called Affluenza, which describes the all-too-common cycle of working hard, being unhappy at your job, buying material goods to make you happy, working even harder to pay for those things, buying more things to be happy, and so on. That is the lifestyle to avoid, and there's no reason we can't avoid it. Maybe all it takes is a trip to a farm.



"Live simply, so that all may simply live." - St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

Gayla Trail at USF

Last week our Davies Forum speaker was Gayla Trail, creator of You Grow Girl, a website about gardens and gardening. Gayla used to be a designer, and she started the website in 2000 as just something fun to do. She wanted to meet other gardeners like her, who were young and urban, which was not the audience most garden writing focuses on. She said garden writing is dominated by books and magazines, and it is written in a very authoritarian way (this is right, this is wrong, this is how you do it). There's also usually an expectation of space, like a yard, and lots of money. She wanted something different, so she created it herself, and it has become very popular. After a while, she ended up quitting her design work to focus on the website. She talked about the importance of play, and how good it is to be able to have fun and try new things without the pressure of doing well and making money. That's how her site developed the way it did.

To me, Gayla's example shows the power of the internet as a means for creativity and alternative information/messages. I also love the concept of using the internet, which is so "virtual," to share information and experiences about something so earthy and "real life" as gardening.

Kevin Epps

Kevin Epps, a filmmaker best known for Straight Outta Hunter's Point, spoke to our Digital Literacy class (along with quite a few other people, many of whom were from the Performing Arts and Social Justice "Company" class, which is doing a production based in part on service-learning they did in Hunter's Point) last Thursday. He was fascinating, and it was wonderful to hear his story. What struck me most is his efforts to give a voice to people who are ignored. Not only does he make media about these people and these communities, but he empowers others to do it as well.


My camera battery is dead at the moment, so I hope Lis will forgive me for using one of hers:

Corners

Kelly Quinn, an assistant professor of American Studies at Miami University, came and spoke to our Digital Literacy class on Thursday. She spoke about cities, sidewalks, grids, social intercourse, and public spaces. She was amazing.

This week's assignment is to talk about a place we like, using the concepts of Kelly Quinn and Jane Jacobs to describe why. This was an interesting exercise for me, because while our Jacobs reading made a lot of sense to me, I tend to enjoy parks and relatively isolated places (unsafe as they may be). However, in Kelly Quinn's lecture on Thursday, one thing that stuck out to me in particular was her description of the value of corners, which there are many of when your city is set on a grid. This brought to mind the most famous corner around: Haight and Ashbury.



Quinn said that the grid is the most democratic form of urban planning, and that at corners you connect with people who are unlike yourself. One of the things I like about Haight Street is the variety of people you encounter. You find tourists, locals, yuppies, hippies, poor people, wealthy people, young people, and old people, of all sorts of colors and orientations. Jacobs writes about good urban planning being a way to fight segregation and racism (she offers the example of someone in Los Angeles who had never actually seen a Mexican person). If we don't isolate communities from each other, they will interact and come to realize that their differences are superficial.

Jacobs wrote about the importance of eyes on the street in order to maintain safety. Haight Street is always bustling with activity, even until late at night. I would feel safer walking down Haight at night than I would walking back home through the quiet residential streets.



Another very important thing to Jacobs is the anonymity that cities offer. Residents don't want to be best friends with each other, but for a safe and stable environment, there needs to be a level of trust. To me Haight Street feels like it has more of a culture of trust than other busy city streets I know, perhaps because of the quantity of pedestrians and the fact that many of them are there for the sake of being there, rather than just passing through on their way somewhere else. They have a certain level of investment in the neighborhood.

A delicious meal: pupusas

One of our assignments this week was to make a delicious meal. Unlike many of my classmates, I am not much of a cook, and I knew I wouldn't get away with pulling something out of the freezer and sticking it in the microwave. I thought long and hard about what I could make that wasn't boring, and I decided to make pupusas. Pupusas are a Salvadoran food, and they are basically filled tortillas, usually with cheese, sometimes with beans, meat, or other fillings. They are delicious, and I had them at least once a week while I was in El Salvador. I had only made pupusas once before, under heavy supervision and help from a Salvadoran woman, so the process was a bit of a challenge, but I managed. Taking photos throughout the process was also a challenge, because my hands were usually covered in masa dough.

There are only three ingredients in these pupusas: masa, beans, and cheese. Masa is just ground up corn (what corn tortillas are made out of). In El Salvador they have a special soft cheese for pupusas, but I'm not even sure what it's called, so I used mozzarella.

My ingredients:


I already had this Maseca (dry masa), which I got at a store called Mi Tierra in Berkeley.


There is no exciting story behind this can of beans. I bought it at Haight Street Market (only because I happened to be on Haight Street). Note that it is vegetarian because most refried beans have lard (yuck).


The cheese has the same story as the beans.

And this is how I made the pupusas:

First step: prepare the masa. I mixed some Maseca with water to make the dough. I had to add a little more water than the packaging said to make it the right consistency.




Second step: make the pupusa. First you roll a hunk of masa into a ball.



Then you flatten it into something like a bowl-shape, using a circular motion with your hands to keep it even and round (this is pretty hard, and I definitely don't do it the "right" way). This photo is not a great example of how it should be, but you get the idea:



Put a little bit of beans and cheese in the middle and fold up the sides of the masa to make a closed ball again.




Then you want to flatten that ball, patting it back and forth between your hands.



You have to be careful not to put too much beans, or the masa will break open very easily (which happened to me a lot). When you're handling the masa, you have to wet your hands frequently to keep the dough from sticking to your skin (much).

Third step: cook it. I wasn't sure what temperature to have the pan or how long to cook it, so I improvised. It takes a long time for the masa to cook all the way through, which definitely tested my patience.



Cooked pupusas:


I cut up some cherry tomatoes and made a bit of simple guacamole (avocado, lemon juice, salt) to go with the pupusas, and it was all very delicious.



They weren't the same as authentic pupusas, but for gringa pupusas they were pretty yummy!

Andrea liked them:


And so did Melanie:


Overall, it was a delicious success.

Bryan Alexander at USF

As usual, everything took longer than it was supposed to today, and I'm afraid I can hardly do justice to Bryan Alexander's talk last Thursday, but I'll write what I can now (before class starts) and write some more later.

Bryan Alexander works for NITLE, focusing on use of technology in education. This is completely interesting and awesome. He talked about some of the great collaborative tools in Web 2.0, including collaborative writing and collective research. He said that there is a shift in the model of learning from individual experts to learning through networks (connectivism). This reminded me of this article on categorization and tagging, which describes the limitations of structured, institutionalized categorization (as we have in libraries), and some of the ways that tagging can change this. I have more thoughts on this article, which I will talk about later, but it's the same concept of collective creation.

I think the use of these tools is really exciting, and the formats of collaboration could really transform our culture. If people begin to feel empowered in their education, it's a different dynamic than the "sit down and do as you're told" model.

Brewster Kahle at USF

Brewster Kahle gave an excellent talk at USF last Thursday as part of the Davies Forum. His mission is universal access to all knowledge: he wants to create a library like the (former) library of Alexandria, but digitized and online. He showed us, medium by medium, that this it is doable and not crazy to think we can digitize all texts (in the broad sense). The Internet Archive is that library, which stores hundreds of thousands of digitized books (and other written texts), audio files, moving images, web pages, and software. He successfully convinced me that it is possible, but I still don't know if open content (which the Internet Archive promotes) can beat Google (which uses proprietary formats).

I am excited about all the Old Time Radio files they have. I love OTR. It's engaging on an entertainment level and fascinating on a historical level. Lots of cigarettes and war and blatant sexism. The mysteries are the best.

But back to the talk, he answered the question I posed in an earlier blog post (about how easily digital media can be erased) without me even having to ask it. They back up all their stuff on servers far far away (in Alexandria!), so when a giant earthquake puts San Francisco underwater, the Internet Archive will still exist. Excellent.

Preliminary thoughts on Brewster Kahle

Okay, this is going to have to be a short post because it is getting very late, but after reading this interview with Brewster Kahle, I am completely stoked on libraries. I love this question and answer:

As a “digital librarian” and an Internet pioneer, how do you view the library system?

I see the library system in this country as a $12 billion industry dedicated to preservation and access of materials that are not mediated through a corporate experience. You don't have to sign a nondisclosure form to come up with a new idea in a library. In libraries, materials are preserved in original form, uncensored. The alternative is that the materials people learn from are forever mediated by a relatively small number of commercial companies in terms of selection and presentation. This is one of the biggest issues facing libraries in the future: what services will they perform, and what services will be performed by companies or by nonprofits acting like companies. If all content is moderated by a few companies in the digital world, we'll have a giant bookstore rather than a library system.

He knows how to go straight to my heart: Pro-free, uncensored, unmediated information and anti-commercial.

I have mixed feelings about Google. One the one hand, it is a wonderful search engine, and they have lots of really awesome stuff, like Gmail. On the other hand, they have so much power, and while they haven't been too irresponsible so far (I don't think), I am very wary about one company having so much control. I'm sure many of Google's employees have excellent intentions, but as a for-profit and publicly traded company, the primary goal is to make money, which can lead to lots of problems. I haven't spent of a lot of time on the Googlization of Everything, but I'll be interested to read more about this specific issue of Google's power.

Back to Brewster Kahle, the Open Content Alliance sounds wonderful. Books should be digitized, and we need to make it open, free of digital rights management, and accessible to all.

Random information I have learned about Brewster Kahle recently: He is a major donor to Streetside Stories. Also, he (or his people) are able to make an exabyte of space fit in a shipping container. (A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes, a petabyte is a thousand terabytes, and an exabyte is a thousand petabytes. That's a lot, folks.) I'm not sure what the implications of this are, but judging by the reactions of the computer science people I was with, this is impressive.

Another quote (also from "Scan This Book!"):

We have to recognize that it's not only possible but it is our responsibility to bring digital services to the world. If we can build this next generation in the open, the same way the open network and the open software infrastructure of the Internet developed, it will be the librarians' day. Media companies, the Googles and Microsofts, they will play their roles. They'll bring things to hundreds of millions. But they will never bring things to our patrons the way we can as librarians.

I'm really excited to hear him talk. One question I have is what do they do to protect all this data they're archiving? What do they do to make sure it won't be lost? Do they back it up all the time? Do they have servers spread out geographically? I can just imagine a giant magnet falling on their roof and erasing everything (okay, that probably wouldn't happen, but something along those lines). It's a lot easier to erase digital information, especially accidentally, than it is to destroy a paper book (which this article brings up). This is something I've thought about when people talk about blogs as future historical archives. How do we know it will stay online, especially if someone else is hosting it? Google is doing pretty well for itself now, but things change so fast that it could disappear, along with every blog hosted by Blogger, in just a few years. People who are careful will save it and post it somewhere new, but think of all that could be lost. Web pages can require active maintenance - I know I've had web pages which no longer exist, and many of the web sites I frequented in my early teens aren't there any more. This is why something like the Internet Archive is so wonderful, but they'll have to guard their data carefully. This is another reason it's so good that their work is DRM-free, so if something happens to Internet Archive, their work can still be used by other people.

Sarah Houghton-Jan on the Future of Libraries

For my Digital Literacy class this Tuesday we attended a lecture at the San Francisco Public Library by Sarah Houghton-Jan, a.k.a. the Librarian in Black. She is the Digital Futures Manager at the San José Public Library, and the focus of her talk was on the future of libraries. She identified some of the issues that libraries are facing and talked about some things she sees for the future of libraries.

She talked about a lot, so this is a selection of some of her main points. I'll look forward to reading other people's accounts of/thoughts on the lecture.

She said that libraries aren't used to change, and when technology began to develop so rapidly, libraries were slow to catch on. In the meantime, many companies and the population in general moved way ahead. As a result, libraries lost their role as primary sources of information, being replaced with online resources. At the same time, however, the number of digital library users is growing exponentially. Those are users which only use the library's online resources and never come into the physical library building. She said that libraries are not doing a very good job of counting those people because they never see them. These users are becoming unhappy because their needs are not being addressed. Her advice to libraries: listen to the digital users.

She went through quite a few reasons people don't like or don't use libraries. One problem is that if you want a popular item, a new item, or something the library doesn't have, it's a long and potentially expensive process to get a hold of it. If the library has it but it's checked out, you can put a hold on it, but then you have to wait till that person returns it, and one or more people could have put holds on it ahead of you, meaning you'll have to wait that much longer. Another option is interlibrary loan (ILL), which is slow, complicated, and often costs money (when I worked at Gleeson Library, I would process ILL requests occasionally, and it was simpler than she described, but it is a slow process). She said that she and her husband, who both work in libraries and could literally have materials delivered to their desks, often resort to buying things online so they don't have to wait for them from the library. Something that some libraries have experimented with is when a patron wants something the library doesn't have, the library orders it from Amazon and has it shipped directly to the patron. Apparently Amazon will do some preliminary processing (e.g. barcode, labeling) for the library before sending it. It's turned out to be cheaper and faster than ILL. She has a blog entry dealing with this here. Be sure to read the comments. Even if this became common, I still see an important place for ILL. This is probably more applicable in academic libraries than public libraries, but a lot of things aren't available on Amazon (*gasp*). Many of the ILL requests I processed were for journal articles, for example. I would go up in the stacks, find the bound volume of periodicals, make a photocopy, scan it (most of the time), and send it to the library that requested it. We had this nifty software that is standard enough that most libraries had it, and we could send the document electronically straight from the scanning software; otherwise we would fax or snail mail. I asked her her thoughts on alternatives like Link+ (similar to ILL but among a smaller number of libraries geographically close to each other, way faster, very easy, and free), and she seemed to think it can be good, but if users don't find what they're looking for there, they tend to give up and think that's their last/only option, which is not good.

I wonder how common it is for people to buy stuff when they can't get it immediately from the library. Besides books for my classes, which I usually need for a long period of time, and may need to mark up, I have a really hard time buying books when I know I can get them for free. It has been rare for me to want a book that was not available through any of the libraries I can access (including the Link+ network). Usually that's only been when I'm researching obscure topics for a class. When I do buy books (usually for school), I rarely buy books new if it's possible to get them used for cheaper. If I thought to myself, "Hey, I'd like to read ____" and my library didn't have it on hand, I would not just go ahead and buy it, especially not if I could order it through Link+ and get it within a week. Even if that weren't available, books are expensive, and I wouldn't spend $20 on a whim, especially one I would only want to read once. Maybe I'm just cheap/poor. (As my dad says, "You already have a book." Next time I'm home, I want to take pictures of the huge numbers of books in my house to share with the internet. We have a building in our backyard that used to be a garage, but we converted into a "library room." It is filled with books. I'll save that for a later blog entry.) However, if the only option to get a book a library doesn't have on hand is to buy it, that brings up serious issues of access across economic levels. That's what's so great about libraries: they're free. They bridge economic divides, making information available to everyone. Libraries should do whatever they can to maintain and promote that.

Moving on from that, something interesting she said was that digital rights management is a huge problem for libraries in terms of home access to digital materials. I never would have thought about this, but it makes a lot of sense. She thinks libraries can play a big role in changing this. Along similar lines, she told us that libraries have a very few choices for where to buy their catalog software, and they have to keep paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to continue using it - not because they're getting new features or upgrades, but just because the companies say they have to. Because of this, libraries are starting to develop open source catalog software. This is something else she sees for libraries' futures. Nice.

Another thing she says libraries need to do is embrace the democratization of information and expertise. Librarians need to let go of telling people the "right way" to do things. Libraries need to allow the user to have more control and incorporate things like tagging, social labeling, decentralized data creation (such as user-created reading lists), and social organization of data. This is interesting and potentially cool, but the little librarian inside me keeps saying "no, no, people will mess stuff up." Fortunately, the little librarian inside of me is probably wrong because people have shown that they're good at this sort of thing and they'll improve what's already there. It's also a really good way to engage people with their libraries.

This is really just a smattering of what she covered in her excellent talk, but I'm sure the things she spoke about will come up again, and I will blog some more.

Ivan Chew, the liblogarian, comes to USF

Last Thursday, the Davies Forum was lucky enough to have Ivan Chew, a librarian from Singapore, as a guest lecturer. Ivan is a prolific blogger (with nine blogs!) and works for the Singapore National Library Board. He was a very interesting and engaging speaker. He focused on three topics in his presentation: his personal reasons for blogging, the Singapore Public Library's digital experiments, and senior citizens and blogging (follow the links for abbreviated sets of his presentation slides).

Instead of a general summary, I'm going to touch on a few points that stuck out for me.

First, I was mortified to discover that I did not know specifically where Singapore is. General area, yes, but specifically, no. I stand educated and appropriately embarrassed. In general I like to think of myself as more geographically aware than the average American (with the possible exception of U.S. geography, probably because I homeschooled). Anyway, thanks Ivan!

He talked about some of the history of blogging in Singapore, from early on when people were wary about the possibilities of inappropriate content and misinformation, to now, when the Prime Minister has encouraged people to use new media, and all National Library Board employees are required to take new media classes. They even did a call for citizen journalists to cover the closure of one of their libraries. This was interesting and very cool. They (Ivan especially) are recognizing the importance and potential of new media.

I especially like how the libraries are using the blogs to "publicize" and "engage." I love libraries and I love the internet, so I was glad to see the successes that they are having in meshing the two together. I asked him what he thought about the future of the (paper) book, and he asked whether it matters. Very interesting point, and one that's come up in a slightly different context in our class discussion - how important is the medium of the information? Aren't the content and the way we read it the most important? Of course, the medium is related to those, but maybe we shouldn't get caught up on whether a word is made of pigment and fiber or 1's and 0's.

Since Ivan works with young people, someone asked what age he thought kids should be introduced to the internet. He said "As soon as they have something to say." So cool! It's a shift from when I first began to use the internet, when I was 10. Back then, everything was about cybersafety, not getting "lost" on the information superhighway (that never made sense to me), and always asking a parent's permission. Cybersafety for kids is still really important, but his response is a shift from "old enough to know better than to give an ax-murderer her address" to "old enough to participate and create." I love it!

He talked about a conversation he had in which someone asked him if he thought there would ever be a point when there were no more wars. His response was no, but they could be a lot fewer and far-between if the memory of the horrors of war stayed in people's consciousness for longer. This, to me, is an excellent reason for people, especially senior citizens, to blog, and is an excellent reason for us to blog about the war in Iraq. And then when we're old (or probably before then), and the U.S. is trying to get into another ridiculous war, let's look back through our blog archives, remind ourselves what a bad idea war is, and do something to stop it.

And finally he closed his presentation with a cool music video that he made, Dolphins Galaxia.

Here's a nice picture of Ivan, Professor Silver, and a librarian from the USF Gleeson Library.

Mary Madden and my online presence

On Thursday evening, Mary Madden, a researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project came and spoke to my Digital Literacy class (and the many other people who showed up!). She give a very interesting talk, with a good question and answer session at the end. On Friday she was nice enough to make herself available and a few of us met in Crossroads Cafe to have a more informal conversation.

One thing she talked about which is really interesting to me is online identity management. Increasingly, we have more and more information about ourselves available online. That can be good or bad, depending on the level of visibility we want (some people want it to promote themselves), and depending on the quality and type of the information. I might be happy to put my name, my major, my interests, my activities, and a list of my friends online, but I don't want my phone number or address to be so readily available.

Professor Silver has mentioned a couple of times that by the end of this class, the number of Google hits with our name will go up dramatically. To see if this is true, I searched for "amber mcchesney-young" in quotation marks in Google, and got 10 hits.



All of them are about me - as far as I know there are only four other McChesney-Youngs in the world, and they are my immediate family. If you search for my dad's name you get 4,460 hits because he is a very active member on lots of archived email lists. My mom gets 46 hits, my older brother has 19, and my younger sister has 6 - I will always be the middle child. ;-) Anyway, there's kind of an interesting variety there. Most hits are relatively recent, since I've been at USF. One of the more obscure ones is results from a Bay Area Orienteering Coalition activity I did, I think with my Girl Scout troop, on the UC Berkeley campus. We had to navigate around the campus, and answer things like "Which direction is the bear statue facing?" (East, by the way.) Two others, which are fun and just a little embarrassing, are guestbook entries I wrote when I was ten years old (that's almost twelve years ago!). Remember back in the day when people had their Geocities and Angelfire pages with random information, animated GIFs, and guestbooks? They always said "Please sign my guestbook!" and sometimes I did. It's similar to the comments we now leave on blog entries. In these guestbook entries, I told the person that I was 10 years old and liked synchronized swimming. It's from 1996, the year my family first got the internet. Very magical and exciting. Check out Kate's Twenty Second Guest Book. It's fascinating - totally a blast from the past.

In addition to my Google hits, I have a MySpace page (which only includes my first name on the page, but does have pictures and says that I go to USF), and my Facebook page (which is only visible to people in the USFCA network and my friends in other networks). My MySpace page has very little on it, but Facebook has a fair amount of information (no address or phone number). I don't think there's anything I wouldn't be okay with an employer seeing, though. So to sum up, at this point, I'm pretty cool with my online presence. If someone wanted to find me in person, I'm sure they could, but it would take a bit of effort. They can find out a lot about me, but it's stuff I'm comfortable with. Yay.

Just a note for accuracy, the 10 hits that show up are with "very similar" results omitted. When those are included I get 19. Some are the same page over and over, but there are some distinct hits there. Let's see if Professor Silver's prediction is correct and my number of hits goes up.