Jason and the Anti-Social Social Network

Last week, I heard the point of privacy and all this Learning 2.0 stuff come up from a few different people. It's a valid concern. One of the major pushes of Web 2.0 is the the way it can easily share information with others on the Web, what a lot of people refer to as its "social" aspect. Throughout this experience, many of the websites we are and will be using will be putting information about ourselves out on the huge expanse of data known as the Internet.

On one hand, that can be a great and powerful thing. For instance, let's say I love monkeys (and I do). I can set up a blog about monkeys, collect a bunch of monkey links on Delicious, subscribe to every monkey blog's RSS feed, set up a Google Alert to email me with the latest news on monkeys, search for pictures of monkeys on Flickr and post some photos of my own, have a monkey podcast loaded directly to my iPod every morning, join a social network dedicated to monkeys...

You get the picture. I'm just CUH-RAZY about monkeys and I don't care who knows it. In fact, I want A LOT of people to know of my love of monkeys and that I crave more information about them so that they might share their monkey knowledge with me. Instead of roaming the streets like an insane person, stopping people on every corner and asking "Excuse me, but do you looooooove monkeys?!", I can go to the web and bring that information to me, simply by using a few of Web 2.0's applications.

On the other hand, maybe there are some things I want to do online that I really don't want others on the internet to pry into, like a personal social networking account I only use to communicate with old high school friends, a collection of links for a work project, a catalog of books I read or music I listen to, a group of photos of myself as a baby, or even just an online journal or diary. There are some great 2.0 tools that make doing things like those easy, but releasing all that info on to the web is a little intimidating.

Luckily, the tools we're learning about as we hurtle through Learning 2.0 have privacy settings you can configure to keep prying eyes out. By changing a few options, you can still get the experience of using Web 2.0 without sacrificing your anonymity.

Blogger, for example, gives you the option of not only restricting who reads you blog, but keeping everyone out completely. From the Dashboard of your blog, click the Settings link, highlighted below.

From here, scroll down to the options that read:

Choose "No" for both, then scroll down and click the Save Settings button. This will keep your blog from being listed on search engines and off of Blogger's front page. Once it's saved, go back to the top of the page and click Permissions just under the Post, Settings, and Layout tabs. In the middle of the screen, you should get a box that looks like the following:

Here, you can decide to limit who reads your blog. By choosing "Only People I Choose", you'll be given a box to enter in the email addresses of the readers you want, like your mother or co-workers. Blogger will then send those people an invite to the site which they can accept, allowing them to enjoy your blog posts. You can also choose "Only Blog Authors" which restricts viewing to only those who post to your blog. That way, as long as you're the only author, you be the only one who reads your blog.

There. You have achieved blogging anonymity. Now, I know this is a long post, but let's make Delicious private, too. Login to your account and, over there on the top right of the page, click the Settings link.

Scroll down to where it says Bookmarks and click the "Private Saving" link. It should take you to a page where you'll get the following:

If your box isn't checked, do that now by clicking on it and then clicking "change setting".

What this does is add the option to hide, or "not share", your bookmarks with the rest of the web. Try posting a link to Delicious. If you're posting from the web page, you should see a little check box next to the web address (url) field on the description page like this:

Clicking that box and then saving will make the bookmark visible to ONLY YOU and only when you log in. You'll have to do this every time you post a link, though, so keep that in mind should you need to use it.

Every tool we've used so far in Learning Web 2.0, from Blogger to Flickr, has a privacy setting for those who feel more comfortable not sharing their information with the world. Take some time to review your uses for each application and look through their settings page to determine what privacy level is right for you.