Many of us continue to use Facebook even as their privacy standards decline in favor of giving companies access to our preferences and background info—essentially our demographic statistics. As long as we have the option to increase privacy settings to the necessary level, we can keep using web services for all the obvious benefits.

However, now sites like Spokeo.com will be aggregating and offering our personal information to anyone who buys an account. That includes photos on sites like Facebook, videos on sites like YouTube, home value, credit score, income, age, sex, relationship info, occupation, hobbies, etc. And members can search by name, phone, email and username, so it’s pretty easy to find anyone.

Previously someone would have had to do a lot of digital legwork to get all this info, even if it wasn’t confidential—but not anymore. Ironically, Spokeo is partnered with ReputationDefender, a web privacy service! ReputationDefender also has paid services that help make your online info and content more private. Luckily you can request to remove your Spokeo listing for free. Here’s how:

1) Visit http://spokeo.com
2) Search for your name
3) Click on your listing in the table or the map
4) Copy the page URL once the info box appears
5) Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “privacy”
6) Paste the URL in the appropriate box, enter your email and the code, and click enter
7) Check your email to click or copy/past the confirmation link (They require this so that you don’t remove other people’s listings)

Hope this helps!

Now that I’ve emerged from my symbolic journey through the desert that took place over the last few months, I need to start cracking away at a variety of topics that have sparked my interest lately. The timeliest of those topics is WikiLeaks, a site that I heard about a few weeks ago via an NPR column. Now that I Google search for it, I see it was actually a partner article (from a group called Foreign Policy), and they made it sound like it was already old news on April 8.

In other words, a video of an American helicopter shooting down a group of non-militant people in a suburb of Baghdad accrued more than two million views on YouTube within five days of being posted online (that happened on 4/3/10). It now has more than six million views. This is the way that information will be distributed in the future, and the distribution itself is almost more interesting than what we see in the video. After all, put in a different context, this could be a scene from a popular Hollywood war movie.

But this is “real life.” This is a group of American marines murdering innocent Iraqis who were “suspected” to be looking for trouble in the streets. Two of them were professional journalists (Reuters photographers) carrying large cameras under their arms, which by a far stretch could be made out to be automatic weapons. If there had actually be a battle going on (and if more than two were carrying large black objects), one might be able to argue that it was an honest mistake — collateral damage in the “fight for justice” while we “bring freedom to the world.”

However, these people were walking casually down the street. There was no warfare in sight. The helicopter requested permission to shoot down these “targets” quite simply because they were out looking for targets. As many have likely already commented, the scariest thing is how absolutely ordinary these events seem to the marines in the helicopter.

The ghost of Bill Hicks is chuckling on my shoulder right now. “I told you fuckers! What do you expect when you give a bunch of emotionally stunted and overly aggressive Americans access to the most expensive toys in the world?! They’re gonna do exactly what those war video games and movies brainwashed them to do: kill everything in site with a grin on their face.”

Yes, Bill. Thanks, and we miss you… very dearly.

It turns out that WikiLeaks is actually based in Sweden and run by a group called the Sunshine Press — a “non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public” (Wikipedia has much more information about them). And they have a separate site for this specific video: collateralmurder.com. Essentially they published this video after Reuters used Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain it.

Personally I think this will be one of the most important stories of the year. This is the inevitable path of technological advance. Truth will demand to be acknowledged. I think that’s why Obama is pressing for universal access to high-speed Internet, even though he bowed to the bail-out demands from banks and auto companies. He knows there’s a hypocrisy to his actions, but he also knows that the intelligence capabilities of the general public are reaching a point where they will become superior to any one secret agency.

Of course, information will never come without a price — even if it’s free of cost to the public. From journalists on the war front (139 were killed in Iraq from 2003 to 2009, according to the Collateral Murder page), to a group like the Sunshine Press (who, according to information on their Wikipedia page, have already been the target of censorship, surveillance and/or attacks in various countries worldwide), this type of service is going to take a lot of courage, cooperation and hard work.

Currently their biggest problem might be fundraising. As it says on their site:

We have received hundreds of thousands of pages from corrupt banks, the US detainee system, the Iraq war, China, the UN and many others that we do not currently have the resources to release to a world audience. You can change that and by doing so, change the world. Even $10 will pay to put one of these reports into another ten thousand hands and $1000, a million.

So if you’re a fan of truth — not just “fact-based journalism” coming from mainstream media (which, because of near-universal corporate affiliation, is weakened by conflicts of interest), but the kind of truth that is going to reverse the downward spiral of civilization — and you have some money to spare, consider sending it their way.

Of course, many would argue that Wikipedia or some other resource really marked the beginning of what I’ve deemed the “first-ever golden age of journalism.” But I’m not so sure. Wikipedia is great for that purpose, but you really have to know what you’re looking for. I think we’re going to see a very rapid growth of specialized reporting sites like WikiLeaks that have a specific focus or unique way of gathering and distributing content — content that is vital to the interests of the American public, rather than to the interests of the American oligarchy. Either way, we have a lot to look forward to in this area.

In case you haven’t yet seen “Collateral Murder,” here’s the clip from YouTube.

WordPress is basically a lightweight content management system. Behind the scenes, this will take my workload down from about 40 hours per month to about 4-6 hours per month. The most notable front-end improvement is the automatically populated home page, which displays the most recent items from a variety of categories.

Category/section pages: Anywhere you see a category name (like Fiction or Photography), you should be able to click it and see a list of everything that’s been posted in that section in reverse chronological order. WordPress and the amazing Linoluna theme do this automatically!

Issue archive pages: Same as the category pages, except this will group posts from each month together. You’ll be able to find these links in the right sidebar under “Issues.”

Author pages: This is one thing I’m really excited about! I’ve been wanting author profile pages since I launched the site in June 2008. Once they get updated, these pages will contain a photo, biography, email link, and a list of everything that author has published on the site.

RSS Feeds: You’ll find all of these soon on the RSS Feeds page.
-Main feed: This one is super easy — http://supraterranean.com/feed/
-Recent Comments
-Categories: Anything posted in a certain category. So if you just want to follow Poetry or Video posts, you can do that!
-Tags: Same as categories, but even more specific
-Authors: To get an author RSS feed, just add “feed/” to the end of the author page URL. Example: http://www.supraterranean.com/author/tpierson/feed/
In other words, any archive-style page on the site has an RSS feed. Just try adding “/feed” to the end of the URL.

Front page:
- Most recent posts from various categories show in main area, with featured items in a slideshow view at the top
- Sidebar has Recent Posts, Recent Comments, Most Viewed, Most Commented, Most Recommended, Most Emailed, Recently Tweeted, Most Tweeted (note: I still need to tweak some of these to get them working)
- Also, headlines from Refractor Blog, Issue archive links, and an Arts & Culture news box with headlines from Michigan Radio and NPR

Article pages:
- Recommend function replaces star ratings. This decision was partially inspired by JS-Kit.com‘s ill-conceived decision to drop everything but their comment service, which they’re renaming Echo. It’s totally out of my control, but ratings on the old site will become inactive in November 2009. But also, I didn’t like the idea of rating creative work. I want the site to be a constructive environment.
- Similar Posts: This function should grab similar posts by category, keywords (tags), and author, and display them at the bottom of articles when applicable.
- Disqus Comments: Disqus.com is an amazing comment service that is portable across the web. You’ll notice that many big sites use the service, like Mashable.com. I also put Disqus comments on the Michigan Radio website at work.
- Share button from AddThis. I used this on the old site too, since they provide dozens of social networking links for you to send pages to.

Email updates using Feedburner.com — you can subscribe here. They also provide a mobile page that can be viewed on any internet-enabled mobile device: http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/supraterranean

- I’ll now use a rolling submission process, so there are no deadlines. Posting schedule changes from once a month to more like once a week. Each month will still be collected under issues archive.

Category names: Film changed to Video. Audio was added. Multimedia was removed, since now we can cross-categorize posts if needed.

- Message board has been removed because it was totally unused

- Admin Blog name was changed to the Refractor Blog. This refers to idea of a telescope that brings all sorts of faraway things into focus. Plus I’m an astronomy nerd.

- Your old links should still work if you published material on the old site. I’ll be linking to old archive pages so people can browse content from issues #1 to #14. I tried to keep the new site’s visual feel similar to the old site, while making the necessary updates.

But to whichever group you belong, you may have noticed the Twitter widget situated in the right sidebar of this blog. It essentially lists all recent posts for the Supraterranean Twitter account, where I post the headlines from and links to all content from each monthly issue on the site, Supraterranean.com. It’s kind of a bare-bones approach to Twitter, but remember, I’m from category two, and I’m still finding new ways to use the site.

Those of you in category three might now be asking yourself, “What’s the point? It’s boring and useless. People just post what they’re doing at various times throughout the day. That’s not interesting. And I don’t want to share that kind of personal information on the web for everyone and their grandma to see.” Well stated, category three.

However, there’s more to it than that. I recently started working as web manager at an NPR affiliate station, and we’re finding that Twitter is extremely useful. In fact, in my four weeks on the job, I’ve almost become convinced that Twitter is drastically more useful for a media organization than for any individual. We can distribute headlines for all our news with a convenient link back to our website. Anyone following us will see these links, and they can easily keep up with the news.

They can respond to us with an @reply (now simply called a “mention”). For example, let’s say someone likes a post I put on the Supraterranean Twitter account. If they want to reply, they might post the following: “@supraterranean That was a great poem by Joe Shmoe. Thanks for being super duper.” This will show up in my reply box, but it’s a public message that remains on their page. Another cool development is called hashtags, essentially keywords denoted by a pound sign (“#”). You may have noticed that I started adding keywords to the Supraterranean posts. A poem gets keywords like #poetry and #writing. As of now, the best way to search Twitter is at Twitter Search, which will eventually be integrated into the site itself. Go there and type in the keywords I just mentioned. I bet you’ll find some content from Supraterranean.

None of this impresses you? You remain skeptical? Or, like Jack Lessenberry, the senior political analyst at Michigan Radio, you think that social media are “the real al-Qaeda plot to destroy western civilization.” But wait! There’s more! Twitter isn’t just a destination; it’s also it’s own middle man. The third-party applications and services being built around Twitter are often more interesting than the site itself. Programs like Twhirl and TweetDeck allow you to keep track of posts, replies, direct messages and more, right from your desktop. Sites like Tweetburner and Tiny.cc allow you to shorten links so that you can fit more text into Twitter’s 140-character limit. TwitPic makes it easy to share photos in Twitter. FriendFeed can aggregate all your activity on Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and pretty much every other social site.

Are you still bored? Or more to the point, are you still confused? If there’s one thing I want to convince you of in this post, it’s that Twitter is a positive presence on the web. That’s because, no matter what actually happens on Twitter, it is constantly evolving based on how people use it. Hashtags evolved because people started putting the pound sign (“#”) in front of keywords, not because some company made people do it. More importantly, it’s all about sharing! It’s the single greatest method for share links that has emerged on the web so far. Yeah, Facebook has updates (and they might have even done that first), but by being tied to the rest of Facebook, those updates will never be as capable of flexing and maneuvering as Twitter updates are.

Do you see what I’m getting at? Twitter seems simple, but that’s just because we’re still thinking of more interesting ways to use it. I just heard about a small publisher in New York called Muumuu House, edited by writer/blogger Tao Lin, that purports to publish Twitter posts. I’m not joking at all. Follow this link and you’ll find “Selections From Chris Killen’s Twitter Account” (edited by Tao Lin). What’s there? One example: “2:22 AM Mar 16th my penis feels like a CD i never listen to anymore.”

My favorite use of Twitter so far is by anti-pop star Lily Allen (Twitter @lilyroseallen). She’s currently on tour in the U.S., and she’s been holding Twitter scavenger hunts for concert tickets. She arrives in a new city, posts a riddle on her Twitter account with a hint as to the ticket location, and then updates when the tickets have been discovered. I think that’s a freaking cool idea.

Even just posting on your own page and not paying attention to other people, you could come up with creative ways to use Twitter. Take still shots from your favorite movies, post them using TwitPic, but include a quote from that scene and challenge people to guess the film before clicking the image link. Track every instance of the most random keyword combinations you can think of: #seaweed #wax; #carrot #car; #dog #cake; and then Re-Tweet those posts on your own account (FYI, “RT” on Twitter means, re-tweet — essentially repeating or forwarding what someone else has already posted). Write impromptu haikus and click update.

If this blog post fails to inform or inspire, hopefully it’s because — as I already pointed out — the system is still developing. I’m convinced that it will get more and more interesting, so I’m content to take it for what it is right now. What seems like anarchy today will feel like a regular old institution a year from now, so be patient and maybe you’ll enjoy yourself.

p.s. – Feel free to follow me @ndmeador

UPDATE 4/21/09: This weekend I found someone doing something new and interesting with Twitter. They’re called “Retweet Bots.” Essentially whenever someone types a certain phrase on a Twitter update, and that certain phrase has a bot set up, the update is picked up and the author receives an automatic reply. For example, if you include the expression “Oh snap!” in your update, a retweet bot by @natefanaro will catch it and reply to you.

But that’s not the coolest part. What’s more exciting is his website, where the bots display in real time all the Twitter updates they’ve collected. You can even follow those bot accounts and see all the funny messages that come up! So it may not have any practical use (not yet anyways), but it’s still fun and creative.