Tag Archives: digital footprint

A Facebook Like⤴

from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”

from: Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media | Politics | The Guardian

Carole Cadwalladr’s article in today’s Observer, is both fascinating and frightening. The technology used by Cambridge Analytics is incredibly  powerful the use it has ben put too worrying. Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s comms director in the quote above doesn’t have a Facebook account quoted in the same article:

It is creepy! It’s really creepy! It’s why I’m not on Facebook! I tried it on myself to see what information it had on me and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ What’s scary is that my kids had put things on Instagram and it picked that up. It knew where my kids went to school.

Featured image on this post created with a wee AppleScript Makes auto complete google search gifs.

Medium

I don’t even like liver⤴

from @ John's World Wide Wall Display

google-image-johnjohnston

A day to go in Week two of 23 Things so a rather rushed approach.

Thing 3: Digital Footprint, reading includes:

It is important for you to think about how you manage your activity online in the context of your emerging professional identity (or identities) and what you need to do to manage an effective online presence and your digital footprint.

‎ Student e-Professionalism
Which sums up the problem fairly nicely.

after the reading the task was to Google yourself. Go to Google.com, type in your name, and see what results come up.

The first thing to note is that I am redirected to google.co.uk

google-me-text

From as owning own my name pov this looks pretty good. The fly in the ointment is the location. The only John Johnston higher than me is a Glasgow photographer.

It turns out it is quite hard to get results from google without using your location (I googled it). So I gave up and turned to Duck Duck go.

me-duck-duck

No Glasgow photographer, no G+ and I am a bit further down the listing.

An image search finds me quite far down the results, with only my twitter icons on the first page.

google-me

I had a look on Facebook, where I have an seldom used account, I was not even on the page, even filtering for Glasgow.

Having a common name makes me harder to find, I am not sure if this is a good thing or not.

I’ve just returned to classroom teaching after a break of 8 years. This is a different world than the one I left. It is apparent from talking to the pupils that some of them have looked me up online. One has followed me on twitter. I don’t think anyone would find anything disturbing in my social streams, but some of the content might be a bit strange. I’ll need to live with that.

The other day in class we were talking about copyright and image use. This is hard for the age group I am dealing with (8-10 years). At one point I lead them to my FlickrCC Stampr page, which can be useful in attribution for pupils. The only trouble is that it was easiest to point them to the link on johnjohnston.info which doesn’t not look like a primary teachers site. Again I’ll need to live with that.

There are many John Johnstons that are a lot more interesting than me, this is my current favourite:

Liver Eating Johnson was a violent, drunk, mountain of a man who didn’t have a very high reputation but was by no doubt the most fearless fighter and he became a legend.  Johnston was built like a brick wall with a towering height over six feet tall and weighing 280 pounds none of which was fat.

Skyler Gabel Cody 8th Grade quoted on from: John Liver Eating Johnston – Home
his name seems to be spelt with and without a t.

Featured Image a screenshot of google search results for johnjohnston, copyright, confused.