Friday, September 4, 2009

Dogear Nation

Are you aware of the kind of hole you are opening up, when you can be found on Facebook? I have noticed many people are aware of that, but to what extend is this real?

A technical podcast I ran into, because of reader comments, gave an answer. The 118th episode of Dogear Nation, paid attention to this subject (Social Privacy). According to their sources, employers use the information you put on Facebook to make their impression when you apply for a job. Among the information they manage to pull from Facebook, are the answers you gave at the popular quizzes there. The 'what kind of character in Star Trek' kind. These quizzes are applications embedded in Facebook and the default security settings give a very free hand to extract information to anybody.

Dogear nation is a technical podcast consisting of a dialog between two or three presenters, who do this very well. The subjects they choose are actually listener-directed. Anybody who is on Delicious, and tags any content on the web with Dogear-Nation draws their attention. For making the show, they take into account what has been tagged and they choose a representable extract from this content. The issues therefore are always in the same realm: issues of software and technology. The audience serves itself. It is a method of making a podcast, many others could consider.