One of the semi-frequent questions/complaints I get from our branch librarians is how to deal with patrons who are looking at pornography. But during my training, one branch librarian mentioned that she'd had an incident with a patron looking at something much much worse: rotten.com
(I don't usually do warnings on my blog but I'm doing one here. Although there's nothing disturbing on the Rotten.com front page that I linked to above, remember that you can't "unsee" anything you see once you start clicking on the links on that page! )
Rotten.com bills itself this way:
The soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated
for all to see: Rotten dot com collects images and information
from many sources to present the viewer with a truly
unpleasant experience.
[Rotten.com] is devoted to morbid curiosities, primarily pictures of gruesome fatalities, deformities, autopsy or forensic photographs, depictions of perverse sex acts, and historical curios that are disturbing or misanthropic in nature.
I've got mixed feelings about the site myself. Does seeing a picture of a decapitated person (to take but one example of what you might see if you click through the links on the site) harm you in some way? Is it illegal? Is it immoral? (And is that simply a cultural construct or a personal bias? Or is this an absolute value?)
On the other hand, is the site just a way to satisfy natural human curiosity? Is it better to be able to see this type of material rather than having it hidden? (The US policy of not allowing photos of caskets returning from Iraq is on the very opposite end of the spectrum.) Is it any different than the six o'clock news where you can regularly see video of people being killed, dying, being tortured, being assassinated, and god knows what else. It's explicit but on some level, is it any different than a site like MyFreeImplants.com (again, as just one example among hundreds that could be cited.)
But Rotten.com
isn't just a database of the disgusting; it's also a venue for making a
point about censorship, at least according to "Soylent," the
pseudonymous proprietor of Rotten.com, whose highly graphic content has
earned him enemies around the world. The site is currently being
investigated by Scotland Yard and the FBI for cannibalism. The German
Family Ministry has threatened Soylent with legal action if he doesn't
find a way to shield minors from his site. And then there's the endless
cease-and-desist letters that flood in from a long list of major
corporations that object to the site.
"Rotten dot-com
serves as a beacon to demonstrate that censorship of the Internet is
impractical, unethical and wrong," Soylent writes in his manifesto,
adding that nothing he posts there can't be found elsewhere. "To censor
this site, it is necessary to censor medical texts, history texts,
evidence rooms, courtrooms, art museums, libraries, and other sources
of information vital to functioning of free society."
TechCrunch recently had a story about a new study which found that lower-income people tend to prefer Yahoo! and higher-income people prefer Google.
(Shea's reading over my shoulder and goes "That's funny - I didn't know anyone preferred Yahoo!")
Anyhow, that made me think about the "Everything You Wanted To Know About the Internet (But Were Afraid To Ask)" public sessions I've been giving in rural libraries for the last month and a half. I introduce my presentation as "a guided tour of the Internet's most useful and most popular web sites" and tend to have an audience of very new, inexperienced Internet users who are mostly online for e-mail and some basic web surfing. In very general terms, they've heard of Google, Hotmail, Ebay (but definitely haven't bought or sold anything online!) and occasionally Facebook but that's about it.
And to be fair, "rural villages" are almost perfectly split between using Yahoo! and Google according to the TechCrunch article while "small towns" skew towards Google. It's places like "struggling societies", "blue collar backbone" and "remote America" that spend more time with Yahoo! (Just don't ask me what those different categories mean!)
During the presentation, I also do a section on sites that are useful
for our everyday life in the province - sites for maps, phone books,
local news, etc. and a plug for the library's web site and all it has to offer.
But for the bulk of the presentation, these are the sites I talk about (with related subjects I cover in brackets.)
Amazon.com (buying online and e-commerce) Download.com (viruses and keeping your computer secure) Ebay.com (how sites like Amazon and Ebay among others have leveled the playing field for people in rural areas who are now able to buy (and sell) a massive range of products that used to require special trips to the nearest major centre to obtain in the past) Facebook.com (online privacy) Flickr.com (your digital footprint) Google.com (basic tips to improve your searches, different features of Google beyond search) Hotmail.com Wikipedia.org YouTube.com
This is also especially ironic given my recent discovery that only three of the four major search engines find my blog - Yahoo! is one that does along with MSN Live and Ask.com. Google is the only one that doesn't!
I've only got a couple weeks left but are there any other sites that you'd introduce to an audience of beginning Internet users (er, other than Yahoo? )
Just the other day, I was thinking to myself "with all the social networking sites out there, when is somebody going to design an online genealogy site that works in a similar way - you enter the information you know about your family and ancestors and then connect to other family members who have entered information you don't have?"
I surfed to MetaFilter that night and lo and behold, there was a link to a new site named Kindo that does something along that line, although not nearly as fully-featured as a hardcore genealogist would want. The comments in the MetaFilter have lots of good information about online genealogy resources including the mention of another Web 2.0 genealogy site named Geni (which also isn't as full-featured as you might want.)
The highlight of the thread though was finding a site called Automated Genealogy, a volunteer project to type up digital versions of Canada's early censuses. I took a genealogy class in library school but have to admit that I frequently found it less than enlightening so I honestly don't even remember if this site was mentioned in class or not. It may have been but I don't remember seeing it.
So I spent some time poking around and lo and behold, found this which is the record for John and Janet Brown, my dad's maternal great-grandparents who first settled the farm in 1883 that our family still owns to this day. My dad's grandpa, James Leslie Brown, isn't listed in the record but would've been 23 at the time of this census so presumably had left home. (Leslie would marry three years later, coincidentally in Weyburn, SK where my dad also got married and where I am currently living.)
Anyhow, very cool anytime you come across records like this that give you a real connection to the people who came before you, doubly so when it's found almost by accident.
I was going to link to a list of the symptoms of severe food poisoning and leave off at that. But after sleeping sixteen hours out of the last twenty-four (I won't get too graphic about how I spent the other eight hours but you can imagine...
...I'm feeling a bit better so I decided to do a regular Friday Fun Link, if one day late.)
During a public session a couple weeks ago, I got asked if there was a web site where a person could type in a song and have it play automatically. My best suggestion was MeeMix. But I forgot about a couple interfaces I'd seen which use Google's advanced search to find MP3's that people have uploaded to their web sites. Then a recent MetaFilter thread unveiled a couple more - Songza and Songerize. So here's a list of all of them that I know about ( should also mention QTrax that was launched recently but down for the time being due to overwhelming interest):
Just finished trying to help someone update their profile on VampireFreaks.com (half successfully, half not - I figured out how to add a background image rather than a solid colour and to add an embedded music player as well. But I couldn't figure out how to place the music player where the person wanted it on the page.)
I sort of regret that I didn't keep a list of all the computer & Internet reference questions I've been asked over the past month as it's been pretty amazing in terms of the range of what people come up with to ask me (as the VampireFreaks.com shows!) - from the most basic beginner questions to quite involved advanced stuff. With a glance at my list of communities visited so far to prompt my memory, here's a list of some I remember...
- how do I do better Google searches? - how do I print a selection of a web page instead of the whole thing? - what are the advantages and disadvantages of high-speed satellite Internet? - why does my high speed cut off sometimes? - how do I erase errors when typing in Word? - how do I change the font in Word? In my e-mail program? - how do I hook my DS to my wireless system at home? - does your library have wireless access for my laptop? (Librarians often mention that patrons ask this as well but unfortunately, we don't at this time.) - what are the "F" keys for? - how do I change a document I've saved on a CD-RW? - is AVG Free Edition good? Should I update it when it pops up saying I should? - how do I erase a contact from my e-mail? - why did someone not receive a message I sent even though it's in my "Sent" folder? - can you help me install my Bridge game from 1999 on my new Vista machine? - what do each of these icons mean? (The patron had pencil-sketched every single icon on her task bar!) - why does my monitor flicker? - why are there pop-ups as soon as I start my computer? - how do I play an MP4 movie on my portable video player? - how do I recover the e-mail address book from the CD-ROM that was created after my hard drive crashed? - how do I get pictures off my digital camera? (I've been asked this one a few times.) - how do I create a Facebook account/should I create a Facebook account/what is Facebook? (This one has come up a few times as well.) - how do I listen to Internet radio? Is there a way to pick a song or artist and have it play automatically? - how do I download music/movies from the Internet? (I've gotten this one a few times, usually asked rather sheepishly as if I'm an undercover cop instead of a librarian dedicated to sharing information with the world! ) - how to log-in to the SaskTel webmail service - why this is an advantage if you're on dial-up and want to preview message sizes before starting downloading huge attached photos, powerpoint files or movies. - how to attach a photo to a Hotmail message - how to save photos that are attached to an e-mail to a hard drive - what a hard drive is - the office metaphor that Windows uses - folders, files, desktops, etc. - how to upload photos to Picasa. What Picasa is. Stepping back, what "upload" means. - how to find census information online - the difference between Hotmail and "regular" (ie. SaskTel) mail - why does my mouse move so fast? How can I slow it down? - how do you log in to TutorWorld.com? - does having a bunch of shortcuts on my desktop slow down my computer? - how can I speed up my computer? - how to view Powerpoint files that someone sends as an attachment - where people find "those funny forwards" that everybody sends. (This is maybe the only time I've actually tried to disuade a patron - "are you really sure you want to do that?" But I did show her some sites where these types of things can be found.)
That doesn't capture everything I've been asked but hopefully provides a good overview of what types of things I'm being asked.
So I was giving my standard "these days, buying online or doing your online banking is as safe, if not safer, than doing it via a real world transaction" line during a public Internet session the other day when some old guy puts up his hand and goes "What about that Silent Banker virus they were talking about on the news the other night?"
I've been on the road for most evenings lately and hadn't seen that particular report so I admited I hadn't heard about it, bluffed some answer about making sure you have your anti-virus program up-to-date and quickly changed the subject.
Anybody have any more details? How does it get on your computer? Are most anti-virus programs able to catch it with their latest updates? Is there a program out there yet to specifically check for it? The people of rural Saskatchewan (including me!) need answers!
Oh, and speaking of the librarian's best friend, in my training sessions, I always point out that Google isn't the be-all-and-end-all and that there are other search engines that often have vastly different results - Ask.com, MSN Live and Yahoo! being the other main ones right now.
I also get my branch librarians to do a "vanity search" for their own name, first without quotes then within quotes then with a relevant keyword related to themselves ("Saskatchewan" or their community name or "librarian") to illustrate how to use different techniques to improve and refine a Google search.
Even though this is part of the training, I hadn't done a vanity search on my own name for a long time and guess what I realised when I did - "Jason Hammond", even without quotes, brings up my blog as the first result in all of the search engines I listed above EXCEPT Google.
I can't figure it out - before starting my blog, my regular web page used to be the first result for Jason Hamond as well. Now, even though I've submitted my new site to Google via their own URL submitter, it's just not showing up at all - even in the first few pages of results. Using quotes doesn't help and even a search for "head tale" only brings up my site via a third-party listing service called MyBlogLog.com. Very weird.
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