I was awe-struck during the recent U.S. Open Championship, where Tiger Woods won a nerve-wracking 19-hole playoff on the fifth day. The whole time, Woods suffered from a torn ACL and a double-stress fracture in his leg. Not only was he often in visible pain when taking a shot: he also had to walk a […]
Yesterday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about his experiments in testing Chinese censorship of the internet. (See In China It’s ******* vs. Netizens, June 20, 2006, subscription required.) Kristof started two Chinese-language blogs and filled them with politically charged postings. He was surprised that the posts were quickly available online, with only an […]
Note to job applicants: your potential employers aren’t just looking at Google and Yahoo.
Sunday’s New York Times includes a really interesting article by Alan Finder on how some companies now investigate job applicants on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster. See “For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé.”
The article underscores a simple but important fact: users of social network sites shouldn’t assume that their postings are private. Although names like “MySpace” paint an image of personal spaces, personal doesn’t mean private. It’s not difficult to get into these sites – as the article notes, for some sites such as MySpace, you generally only need to register. For Facebook, to view entries for a particular college, you only need an e-mail address from that college.
That means an awful lot of people can view Facebook entries: alumni with email addresses (which could include potential employers), professors, even campus police. Despite this, at an emotional level, many people assume that their personal websites, blogs, and social network postings are relatively personal spaces that won’t be noticed or invaded by others. These assumptions are wrong in at least two ways.
Why use a chunk from Shakespeare’s first sonnet as my first posting? Quick answer #1: Because he wrote so much more beautifully than I ever will. Quick answer #2: Because I wanted a placeholder. Not-so-quick answer #3: When working on the blog’s design, I wanted something — anything — to serve as a placeholder. Shakespeare […]
