Technology

How I Invented Blogging

When I was a kid growing up, and my parents’ friends would ask me the inevitable question, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I would look them square in the eye and say definitively, “I want to be a blogger.” Well, that’s not entirely true. I did go through a period, when I was about 8 or 9, of wanting to be a vet, until my mother pointed out the inherent limitations of a veterinarian who accepted appointments only with cute, healthy dogs under a year old. That, and I was rather shy—so I never actually looked an adult square in the eye. Truth be told, I never spoke to them, either. But other than that brief diversion—I always wanted to be a blogger. In fact, I invented blogging. It’s just that it took 25 years for the technology to catch up. So while I […]

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In-Your-Facebook

I got an email from my friend Sharon this morning. She had recently signed up for a Facebook account and had just been “friended” by someone she didn’t know very well. Actually, she didn’t know him at all. She asked something like, “So who is he? Is he a creep? What does he want?” Then, she added, “And since when is ‘friend’ a verb?” For those of us who work in the digital space and have readily embraced online social media tools like Facebook, it’s easy to brush off Sharon’s condition as Neophyte Nerves. But, in truth, the essence of her concerns about privacy and access to her personal life has been clouding my wizened brow, too. And by “privacy” I’m not talking about access to my data—where I’ve been on the internet, or what I’ve bought, or what I’m emailing about. I’m concerned with something more fundamental and frailer

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