I took an intelligent survey about blogging and privacy. The survey was as anonymous as anything can be on the Internet. It’s part of the work that Karen Mc Cullagh is doing. She’s a PhD researcher at CCSR, University of Manchester, England. She’s sponsored by the ESRC and Office of the Information Commissioner, UK.

To take part in her survey, click here: http://www.ccsr.ac.uk/privacysurvey/. Find out more about Karen and her research.

The survey asks a lot of the questions that need to be asked. It only takes a few minutes.

The UK seems to have bigger privacy issues than us here in the US. According to this very interesting map, the UK is the worst privacy offender (aside from the usual suspects like China and Russia). The US is second to the UK, but most of our bad marks seem to stem from corporate offenses. (Which I’ve been suspecting for some time.)

If you blog or otherwise publish online, Karen’s survey asks questions you need to be asking yourself, whether or not you fill out all the answers and send it in.

From her e-mail to me

If you participate you will be asked to answer questions anonymously about your blogging practices and your expectations of privacy when publishing online. All answers will be stored and analysed on a confidential basis. The responses will be used to inform academic and policy discussions on blogging practices and attitudes towards privacy.

I heard about Squidoo over a month ago; closer to two months, actually. I checked out the site and decided it looked like too much work. Later, I decided it wasn’t too much work, but I didn’t have anything written down.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to just go for it. So here’s my Squidoo lens, with more lenses planned. To find out more about Squidoo, click here (this is a PDF).

It took me four painstaking hours to come up with that little bit of text. But now that I’ve done it, I can do it again! It’s not that it’s fun, but it’s sort of like creating an instant Web site without all the coding. I can think of all sorts of topics I want to Squidoo about (I don’t know what the actual verb would be).

I haven’t played much with this Web 2.0 stuff (beyond blogging) but this first experience was great. Next time, I hope I can get my lens up in just a couple hours.

If anyone else has created a Squidoo lens, let me know!

Something old, something new, lots of borrowed. Scattered and untimely random thoughts.

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I’m feeling the love today. I submitted “After Hours” to freelinksfriday.com. Jason (the site owner), liked it! He wrote a very nice review of the blog and enjoyed reading it.

Since my blog doesn’t really fit into any of the usually defined blog categories, it’s hard for me to find places to submit my random writings (I get rejected because I mention sex a little too much, not nearly enough or because I don’t blog about one topic). FLF just let me be me. What a nice change of pace.

I discovered FLF through a blog entry at SEOmoz.org (at least 99% sure). Jason doesn’t always spend his time reviewing other sites. He does other things, not to mention that searching through his site is a great way to get exposed to other sites you might not normally find (like mine).

As in life, love comes when you least expect it.

I came across this phrase a few weeks ago while looking for information on some CSS topic I was struggling with. I could immediately identify because I pore over my code until it’s perfect (to me). Occassionally, I let things slip. But they nag at me every time I see the code until I have to straighten it out. I even clean up the sloppy code on scripts I end up not using. I can’t stand testing a messy script. (I don’t know if this is a girl thing or an obsessive-compulsive thing.)

So in honor in these two blog posts: the simple definition and the more-detailed version, I created a button for anyone who wants to let the world know they are code perfectionists.

I used a free button-maker I found online. If code is poetry (the motto of WordPress), then girly code is haiku.