So chances are I fall into the minority of blogger's at Campus Progress, not because I want to but because I have no choice.  Let's start with the basics, I dig the death penalty, doing something big with the immigration situation, stem-cell research, Dave Matthews and I think Anne Coulter is kinda hot.  I don't dig abortion, most gun control, people thinking they know what's actually goin on in Iraq myself included, people scaring other people about the environment, and spiders. 

So I got that goin for me, but I have to tell you I'm new to this concept of writing down what I think and hoping people care enough to read it.  Which reminds me of a blog I just read about how Fox News is infiltrating facebook. The first thing that came to my head was "who cares?" I mean, I just go on facebook to see if any of the dumb crap I did the weekend before made it onto someone's camera, but then I got to thinking and it led me to the first point I'm going to make in this new venture. As 18, 19, 20, 21, ... year old men and women, we swim in pools of bias.  Whether it be left, right, up, down or around, institutions of higher learning throughout the United States are shaping the political climate to come, not Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hanity or The New York Times.  Their incites are left primarily to the baby boomers and our parents who are over the proverbial hump.

Ninety-nine out of 100 of us are going to form our beliefs on politics and government as a function of the institutions that raise us, and maybe only 60 out of 100 are gonna care enough to do something.  I'm no angel and I may or may not fall within that 99 or 60, but it should be forums like this, conversations with each other, and finding out for ourselves that builds our beliefs and our characters and fights the biases we see and feel everyday.  I'm not sure, but I don't think I'm gonna loose any sleep when The LA Times puts a link up on doratheexplorer.com, but it does shake me up to see how much we swallow in class and around campuses, without really considering it fully.   Thanks for readin.

The New York Times is reporting that it's nearly impossible to remove information from Facebook's database.  Apparently, the social network site retains information so that users can effortlessly reactivate their accounts.

Interestingly, a group on Facebook called "How to permanently delete your facebook account" has over 4,700 members.

Steve Clemons had an interesting post yesterday on how Facebook is moving from a somewhat sill tool for college kids to stay in touch with their friends to a source of legitimate political power. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are starting to break real news, creating a new trend called "microjournalism" -- brief messages texted from news events. Clemons has an a great personal note on working with Facebook at the end:

I'm still figuring out Facebook, which while easy to navigate is very full of folks trying to have fun as well as to digest indirectly what their "virtual friends" are up to. I have signed on to some of the less serious applications because I was afraid of irritating some real friends who want me to be part of their video game fetishes. . .but I'm on Facebook for serious stuff mostly -- reading John Dickerson's twitters, including one about him enjoying throwing apple slices into the fire after Christmas with his kids.

Aw. It's kind of like when your parents join Facebook. Part of you is really impressed, and part of you freaks out a little. 

There's a really full-throated takedown of Facebook over at the Guardian. Tom Hodgkinson sounds a bit like a cranky old man for the first part of his piece (Facebook, he argues, "encourages a disturbing competitivness [sic] around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king" -- as though Facebook users were no longer making distinctions between Facebook-only "friends" and real-life friends), but ends up with an effective, multi-pronged attack on the site. He covers everything from the super-creepy philosophies of the site's small cadre of top-level backers (one of whom co-wrote "The Diversity Myth," "a detailed attack on liberalism and... multiculturalist ideology") to the weird, salivating attention Facebook has received from the CIA.

If anyone's interested, here's a short article on how Facebook will eventually cause all of our computers to melt into smoldering globs of heavy metals. 

In short, all the spyware-related stuff you have to worry about when opening email or going to strange, suspect websites, you'll soon have to worry about when installing new crap on Facebook. And this doesn't even touch upon Facebook's basic privacy issues, which are getting worse as people give more and more information to the site.

Ari Melber reports:

Facebook's 58 million active members have posted more than 2.7 billion photos, with more than 2.2 billion digital labels of people in the pictures. But what many users may not realize is that the company owns every photo. In fact, everything that people post is automatically licensed to Facebook for its perpetual and transferable use, distribution or public display. The terms of use reserve the right to grant and sublicense all "user content" posted on the site to other businesses. Facebook, a privately held company, rejected a buyout offer from Yahoo! last year and recently sold a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft, which values the company at up to $15 billion. (Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace, the other leading social network site, for $580 million in 2005.)

Nothing good, I think, can come out of that setup.

Researchers at Harvard and UCLA are using Facebook for a study, but they're finally using it for the obvious purpose: sociology among young people. Facebook has been around since 2004, and researchers went through studies on identity and grade-point average correlation before they finally seized on the obvious choice. Facebook, if nothing else is a huge mine of raw data an social interactions.

The Harvard/UCLA team is focusing primarily on friendships -- including what kind of friends bond together and how people change based on those they know. It turns out there are several studies underway at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions to examine friendship, dating, and even political engagement.

Love or hate Facebook's power over social data, it may just lead to a better understanding of how people interact. 

02138, a snooty magazine devoted to Harvard and its illustrious alums (02138 is Harvard’s ZIP code), has a piece up on the simmering—though underreported—controversy regarding the origins of Facebook and the integrity of its 23-year-old founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.

What are college students most likely doing on their computers if they’re up at 3:30 a.m.? Probably wasting time on Facebook. (Or perhaps blogging about Facebook as I am now.) College presidents should probably try to kick that habit.

Dr. Janet Dudley-Eschbach, President of Salisbury University in Maryland, has been getting some heat after posting pictures from her family vacation on her Facebook profile. From a WBOC-TV report:

Among those was a picture of Dudley-Eshbach pointing a stick toward her daughter and a Hispanic man. 

The caption underneath the picture reads that Eshbach had to “beat off the Mexicans because they were constantly flirting with my daughter."

Another picture shows an animal, a tapir, and has a caption referring to the large size of the animal's genitalia.

The president has issued a statement noting that she’s taken down her profile. Shame we can’t all poke the president.

Adam Key, a law student at Regent University in Houston Texas, has been suspended "pending a psychiatric evaluation" for posting a picture on his Facebook profile of Regent founder Pat Robertson flipping the bird.

The Regent administration claims that Key was suspended for  wielding a gun on campus (which Key denies).  Key's response to the request for a psychiatric evaluation:

"I will undergo this psychiatric exam after Regent forces Pat Robertson to undergo one. Truly, what’s crazier… disagreeing with the administration, or hearing voices that tell you about hurricanes that don’t happen, and the impending apocalypse?"

Fun facts about Regent University: Regent is rated the #1 most conservative school in the nation. Approximately 150 of its graduates are serving in the Bush administration.

Get the full skinny at Think Progress...

Chronicle's Wired Campus blog links to a British study that shows social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace don't really expand your number of "core friends." The headline? "Social Networks Make Few 'Real Friends'" Most people maintain about five close friends, and social networking sites haven't changed that.

Hm, I guess T-Moble was onto something with their circle campaign. 

Everyone knows that Facebook, while immensely popular and strangely addictive, is creepy. The fact that it compiles so much information, the fact that we spend so much time poring over the profiles of our friends, acquaintances, and enemies... it's all quite weird, and I'm not sure I want to know what these tendencies say about us.

Things just got weirder. When I signed on recently, I was presented with this notice:

Now people can search for this listing from Facebook's Welcome page. In a few weeks, it may also be found through search engines like Google.

Fantastic. Now, on the off chance that anyone actually Googles my name in search of stuff I've written, they'll be just a few clicks away from a picture of me playing Beirut with my pants off. Good stuff.

If you have a Facebook account, do this immediately: Click on "privacy" in the upper-right hand corner of site, then click on "Search." You'll see a couple boxes; the text next to one of them reads "Allow my public search listing to be indexed by external search engines." Facebook, obnoxiously and inconceivably, checks this box by default. Uncheck it. There is absolutely no good that can come from enabling this option.

Kids, protect your personal info. This would seem to be the message of a post on a Boston Globe blog:

In fairy tales, pretty girls will kiss a frog; in the online world, they might divulge enough personal information to a frog to leave themselves vulnerable to identity theft.

Sophos, a Boston firm focused on information-technology security, decided to see how easy it was to get users of the social networking website facebook.com to divulge personal data; to conduct that experiment, Sophos said it fabricated a Facebook profile page for a small green plastic frog called Freddi Staur, the name being an anagram for "ID Fraudster."

Sophos said that it then sent out 200 friend requests to observe how people would respond to the faux frog and how much personal information could be gleaned from respondents.

According to Sophos, 41 percent of users divulged personal information such as an e-mail address, a date of birth, and a phone number to a complete stranger, greatly increasing their susceptability to identity theft.

I know people are lonely, but do you really need to be friends with a frog? And if you answered "yes," shouldn't the frog at least be real? 

So I link to Slate a lot. I’ll admit it: I’m obsessed. But I can’t help but share an article today about the continuation of the family troubles of Giuliani. There’s one Obama Girl here that he didn’t count on: his daughter Caroline.

After having it's Feed fed to it for lunch by almost three quarters of a million users protesting the feature last fall, Facebook was much more cautious when it rolled out the new interface and features that hit the site last night. For one thing, they actually seem to make the site more usable, with the introduction of the obviously useful regional network pages, complete with a wall and what not.

But if 740,000 people will join a group complaining, how many will join a group to test and comment on the new features? Well, it seems like a hell of a lot. Facebook decided to take their input from committed users before foisting it upon the user base over night through a Facebook group, and 113,000 people joined to try it out and give comments.

Well done, folks.