Scary thought . . .

Google, Facebook, Myspace, we all use them. Maybe not all of them, but at least one or two. And of course I'm not just limiting usage to these three, but if I were to list all the social networking sites and search engines well that would be the word limit for this blog taken up just in unpaid promotion.

In fact to be a little more precise, there are 1.4billion people using the internet and at least one of these facilities on a regular basis. 400 million people are members of social networking sites. 300 and odd of those are my friends on Facebook. Have you ever searched for yourself on google? Thats not vain, just curiousness (I think I just made up an adjective), but guaranteed if your a member of Facebook or Myspace thats the first link that will appear. So anyone can find you, anywhere, anytime.

Google tracks 1 trillion webpages, thats an insane number. Or at least it was until we entered a rather bad economic depression and suddenly it was used quite frequently, and not in a good way. But, 8/10 searches conducted by those 1.4billion people go through Google. Its popularity and trustworthiness (another made up adjective) are unrivaled, but it is a little bit daunting when you think of all the things you can find on a free search engine.

I frequently use Facebook to see what other people are up to. The best part being that no one can tell you've looked at their profile. Of course, Mysapce comes with a profil visit counter, but still, no one knows who's looking because that would be against privacy laws. But what privacy laws apply to such a large search engine whose job it is to find out as much as it can about the subject of a search? My Facebook profile is private, because that is what people advise me I should do, but it still pops up on Google search, so as private as it is, people can still search and find me even if they can't view it.

So the point my friend makes below really made me think. We're being told to use these tools, not of course that anyone needs to be told to use Google, but at the same time how much do we really know about them? We've been told that it registers every single search and link to make it the best it can be. Now that kind of power is a little bit scary when you think of the scale of the searches that go through it. I'll leave the rest up to someone who can tell you WhatYouNeedToKnow:



Makes you think doesn't it. I realise I haven't really spoken much about the uses of Google and journalism, but I would have thought they were obvious given the track listing of Google, and the number of people who use it. Basically, anything you write can be found by someone who wants it. After all, the web was created to be social, so anything you do online can literally be distributed anywhere, whether it was meant to be or not.