Productivity Portfolio

Do you watch videos on YouTube? If you don’t remember, that’s OK as Google has a log. The problem is a recent court decision says that Google needs to turn over that “logging database” to Viacom. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a nice write up explaining some of the consequences of this decision. Viacom may have a case about copyrighted material, but I think they shot themselves in the foot with this request. Let’s hope the New York Times is correct in saying that the two firms “were hoping to come up with a way to protect the anonymity of the site’s visitors”.

Related to privacy, Mike Gunderloy wrote a nice piece for Web Worker Daily on Who Owns Your Online Documents. He compared several the Terms of Service and Privacy Policies of online document vendors such as Google, Zoho and Acrobat. I think the article should remind us that before putting any data online, we should understand these agreements.

And for those of you who do look for Privacy Policies, you’re probably laughing since Google never had a privacy link on their search page. Google has now joined the ranks of the other major search engines and added one. Marissa Mayer did a post on the subject which provides an interesting look at how obsessed Google is over word count.

One item I miss about living in the San Francisco area is we don’t get many thunderstorms. The flip side is thunderstorms can cause problems to equipment, particularly your PC. Agam Shah wrote an informative article for TechSoup.org on uninterruptible power supply options. Although the article is written for nonprofits, you can still benefit from the information.

PCs aren’t the only items to go dark. Occasionally, websites do go down. The key question most of us ask is whether the site is down for everyone. One way to answer this question is to use the service DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com. Like Google, the page is sparse except for the input box. If you need more details, you can read about Alex Payne, the developer, in the NYT. Not all the messages make sense to me. One site that appears to be down is franklincovey.com. Yet, the tool returned a message saying “Huh? doesn’t look like a site on the interwho.” Perhaps, the messages vary by the error type.

And speaking of sites that go down, I’m still playing with Twitter.

That's all for this week's web round up. If you want to know when our next article comes out, you can sign up for email updates or the RSS feed.