How much transparency do you really want?

The web has a great ability to generate transparency and people who have similar interest to each other. I recently got an email from uPlayMe, “a free social networking application designed to link people with similar tastes in musical artists, songs or genres... Once installed, the uPlayMe application automatically scans for music recently played on your computer or iPod and then connects you with other uPlayMe users who share your music tastes. The program continues to run in the background, constantly updating your matches based on what you're listening to.’ I did not want to have a tool want to have a tool making these connections but I am sure some people do and it will be successful in today’s web psyche.

David Gurteen recently alerted an email group that I belong to about Mybloglog.com. As Davd said it, “allows anyone with a weblog or a personal website like mine to build a proper community around the site - you could say a bit like MySpace for bloggers!... The first shows a list of people plus their photos who have recently visited my site - they of course need to be members of MyBlogLog - and if you click through you get to see their profiles.and a whole load more. The second panel shows the top five links that readers have clicked on.”

His comment generated a flurry of responses on the pros and cons of such a tool. One with concerns came from Mathemagenic that featured a link to Jill Walker’s blog post on the tool.

Jill Walker is an associate professor at the University of Bergen, and who does research on how people tell stories online. She talkd about mybloglog.com recently and said it is “a site that provides stats about your blog and that also has a social network thing set up…I can upload my photo and specify that I read Boing Boing or Water Cooler Games and from there, others can see I’m “in” those “communities” and so on…but there are certainly websites I visit that I do NOT want my image permanently afixed to so everyone who visits that website thereafter can see that I was there.”

Now I always assume that my internet activities can be tracked if someone really wants to. Look at the use of Google searches in legal proceedings. I do not go places that I would not want to be public information. However, I think that services should make their users aware of the transparency their services generates so people can make a conscious decision on what they opt into. Jill’s blog post has a number of comments that allow you to pursue the issue further. In fairness to Mybloglog, they are trying to respond to concerns such as Jill’s.

Here is more on the issue from Mathemagenic that alerted me to Jill’s post.