Some statistics on how personal info is shared

that could lead to things like identity theft, hacking, etc.:

Infographic: Are You Revealing Too Much on Social Networks?

A great cause

TEDGlobal 2011: Social media game aims to end extremism

Mr Bakhit, who comes from Jordan, was a student at the US University of Minnesota when the 9/11 attacks took place. Shortly afterwards he was attacked by four men because he was an Arab....

Instead of feeling bitter, Mr Bakhit decided to engage in an education campaign.

"I realised that you fight extremism by starting with the young. The message was simple - 'We are not all terrorists'," he told the BBC.

Armed with a not-so-magic carpet, he began telling Aladdin-style stories in local schools.

"One day a child asked me if there was an Arab superman and I realised that there wasn't," he said.

So began his comic-book project which aimed to create a range of positive Arab role-models, including a female James Bond and a Jordanian special agent who fights extremists.

Social networking has been a major player in this crisis, and continues to be

One of my friends, who never really saw the point of things such as Facebook and Twitter, admitted the other day that he had no idea that they could help topple governments. So far the Aegyptian leader still seems to be in place, but that could change. In the meantime, Internet and even cell phone use have been cut off by the government. For those who can get to a regular phone, there is some help for trying to get messages of what is going on to loved ones and to the world, also using the social networking tool Twitter:


Techies make way for stranded Egyptians to be heard

For those stuck in Egypt without the Internet, Google, Twitter and SayNow have teamed up to create an innovative voicemail system: Call a number and leave a message, and the system blasts it out into the universe in the form of a tweet with the hashtag #egypt.

Links in the tweets go to the actual voicemail, and volunteers are translating the tweets.

I hope that this can end peacefully and that it will not usher in some ultra-conservative religious party in a grab for power. I'm also keeping a co-worker in my thoughts--she is from Iraq but some of her family went to Aegypt looking for stability, so I'm sure this is tense time for her.

Some stories on social networking or technology in the news, with a special look at closing a medical library

Twitterers defy China's firewall (Using technology to get around the censorship regarding Tiananmen Square.)

Homeless Advocate Goes High Tech (DC Man uses social networking to advocate for the homeless.)

'Text' Books (Japanese women write novels quickly using just their thumbs.)

AP Reporter Reprimanded For Facebook Post; Union Protests (How what you say online can affect your job.)

and as a special bonus...this tidbit created quite a stir on DOCLINE-L, with posts about how the National Library of Medicine should work to make sure their network is not available to such institutions that cut out library jobs (although it kind of degenerated into a vague 'us' vs. 'them' where some people favoured degreed librarians and perhaps unintentionally stepped on the feet of library technicians, or favoured shutting out small library collections, so I have to admit, I weighed in on that.) In this case, there won't be anyone with a library background trained to staff it, degreed or not. And I hope the hospital gets exactly what it sows. This idea that everything's free on the Internet is so wrong. Electronic resources are costly, need a lot of oversight and maintenance, and there's still interlibrary loan resources (such as through DOCLINE) and other cost-saving benefits such as consortial access that they're simply going to be shut out of.

Hospital library closes to public, goes electronic

'They can put whatever spin they want on it, but brass tacks is that they're closing the library,' [library volunteer Joyce Herbst] said. 'I guess I just don't understand how you can take that resource away from a teaching hospital. How can it be a teaching hospital, without a resource library and someone to run it? I just think it's not a very smart thing to do.'

The library closes on Friday, at which point medical librarian Pat Hamilton, who has run the library along with a staff of volunteers for 24 years will be out of a job. I hate to hear things like this, all due to a desire to cut costs indiscriminately without really understanding the costs involved. Bah!

An excellent social networking site based on reading books

Goodreads allows you to easily search books and add them to a 'read', 'to-read', or 'currently reading' category. You can tag books to organise them whilst looking for friends online--and comparing reading lists, even. It's really kind of neat. Be sure to check it out.

Let's not forget

Email Blows Away All Other Social Networks

The president of MLA blogs

about hospital IT departments and their tendency to block useful social networking sites (like Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube).

It includes a chart from a survey listing what percentage of MLA members' institutions block each site. It doesn't break it down between hospitals, academic medical centres, etc., yet. Heartening is that 66% of reporting members said their institution did not block any site. But it's frustring for the rest of us.

I'm not sure what ours blocks. I think the only one I've come across is YouTube, when I was looking for a presentation video I'd seen at a conference that I wanted to view again. We at least have the option of appealing if we have a legitimate reason for accessing the site, though, and that's great.