Build a Better Website

Our friends at Lunametrics are offering a one-day SEO workshop this week, and there’s still time to sign up.

Want your site to show up at the top of Google but don’t want to spend a fortune to get it done? Here’s something most SEO consultation companies won’t tell you: You can do it yourself.

The workshop will be on June 23 from 8am to 5:30pm, at Left Field Meeting Space in Pittsburgh (across the street from PNC Park).

Find out more about the SEO workshop and register today.

Anthony has adopted a dog, Sydney. She’s pit bull mix, about two years old, and absolutely the sweetest thing. She’s a little shy around tall men and a lot anxious when Anthony isn’t nearby, but she’s starting to get used to her new surroundings and relax.

Related to my post yesterday about Facebook’s privacy settings: danah boyd posted in more detail about the implications of Facebooks privacy (“Facebook and ‘radical transparency’“). These two paragraphs convey the problem I often see in which people haven’t thought through the implications of the “network” part of social networks:

A while back, I was talking with a teenage girl about her privacy
settings and noticed that she had made lots of content available to
friends-of-friends. I asked her if she made her content available to
her mother. She responded with, “of course not!” I had noticed that
she had listed her aunt as a friend of hers and so I surfed with her to
her aunt’s page and pointed out that her mother was a friend of her
aunt, thus a friend-of-a-friend. She was horrified. It had never
dawned on her that her mother might be included in that grouping.

Over and over again, I find that people’s mental model of who can see
what doesn’t match up with reality. People think “everyone” includes
everyone who searches for them on Facebook. They never imagine that
“everyone” includes every third party sucking up data for goddess only
knows what purpose. They think that if they lock down everything in the
settings that they see, that they’re completely locked down. They
don’t get that their friends lists, interests, likes, primary photo,
affiliations, and other content is publicly accessible.

danah’s full post is well worth your time.

How to navigate Facebook Privacy Settings, from the New York Times

Yesterday the New York Times made a noble attempt to map Facebook’s new, super-complicated privacy settings, via a few well-designed graphics and an accompanying article (“The Price of Facebook Privacy? Start Clicking,” by Nick Bilton, 5/12/2010).

The new opt-out settings certainly are complex. Facebook users who hope to make their personal information private should be prepared to spend a lot of time pressing a lot of buttons. To opt out of full disclosure of most information, it is necessary to click through more than 50 privacy buttons, which then require choosing among a total of more than 170 options.

Users must decide if they want only friends, friends of friends, everyone on Facebook, or a customized list of people to see things like their birthdays or their most recent photos. To keep information as private as possible, users must select “only friends” or “only me” from the pull-down options for all the choices in the privacy settings, and must uncheck boxes that say information will be shared across the Web.

If you have a Facebook account, it’s worth taking a few minutes to understand what information is being shared with other members of the site, whether they’re your friends or the general public.

But the most important rule about privacy online still stands: If you have information that you want to keep private, do not put it online.

This applies to explicit information like data, photos, and video, and also to implicit data like your connections — who you know or have worked for, for example. It applies to your thoughts and opinions, including likes and dislikes.

Keep in mind that sending an email is a means of putting information online. Once it’s sent, you have no control over where it ends up.