Name: Vicky
Posts by Vicky Frank:
- 33% of internet users have paid for digital music online
- 21% have paid for apps for their cell phones or tablet computers
- 19% have paid for digital games
- 18% have paid for digital newspaper, magazine, or journal articles or reports
- 16% have paid for videos, movies, or TV shows
- 11% have paid for members-only premium content from a website that has other free material on it
- 10% have paid for e-books
- 7% have paid for podcasts
- 5% have paid for tools or materials to use in video or computer games
- 5% have paid for “cheats or codes” to help them in video games
- 2% have paid for adult content (I’m leaving this in for surprise sake!)
- Webvan (1999-2001) Online groceries. Raised $375 million.
- Pets.com (1998 - 2000) Pet supplies online. Raised $82.5 million
- eToys.com (1997 - 2001) Buy toys online. Raised $166 million. Now back for a second run.
- Kozmo.com (1008-2001) Online store and delivery service (movies to snack foods). Raised $280 million and a $150 million promotion deal with Starbucks.
- Boo.com (1998 - 2000) Online fashion store. Raised $160 million.
- MVP.com (1999 - 2000) Sporting goods sold online. $85 million.
- Go.com (1998 - 2001) Walt Disney Company stake - combination Disney’s online properties and Infoseek. $70 million write-off for Disney.
- Connect with friends
- Discover new places and recommendation them to your friends
- Earn rewards
- Starbucks
- BART
- The History Channel
- Harvard University
- The Today Show
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A "diigolet" saved to my Diigo account and found on Google Images with a search of my name
Notice my Diigo profile page is revealed as the source of this graphic. Notice further that the graphic reveals my username on Diigo! I was unaware images I bookmarked on Diigo were findable by Google and have since stopped using Diigo for this reason.
In Memorium - Dr. Absalom D.K. Phiri
March 19th, 2012
Seward Incorporated and colleagues far and wide mourn the loss of Dr. Absalom D.K. Phiri who died in a car accident over the weekend. Absalom was the leader of Seward’s office in Malawi. He was an essential contributor to the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) we have been doing over the past 24 months under a USAID contract.
Stephen Harvey, Chief of Party for the Malawi Teacher Professional Development Support project said, “Since the CPD that Absalom headed was nation wide, the whole nation is at a loss.”
And indeed it was. The impact of Absalom’s life was evident on Sunday when thousands attended the funeral and service outside his home.
Absalom was a natural teacher and leader. He received his Ph.D. from Virginia Tech - his colleagues already had heard the news one day after his passing. He worked for the Malawi Ministry of Education, capping a career that started as a teacher and continued in the service of training new teachers. Wherever you went with Absalom, someone knew him.
Absalom joined Seward Incorporated International as the head of the Malawi office in 2010. We were fortunate to have found such an experienced and respected leader for the project. He led with grace, wisdom, and even humor. He was not one to take his own accomplishments too seriously - and there were many. If there was pride, it was in the accomplishments of his children.
In this very sad time, we want to lend our voices to the many family, friends, and colleagues who respected and loved Absalom. He will be missed terribly, but we were so lucky to have known him. We should all have the opportunity once in our lives to know such a great human being.
How Digital Has Changed Movie Clichés
March 14th, 2012
Microfilm machine
MICROFICHE
In the old days, you used to see truth-seeking characters scrolling furiously through microfiche to find the key to a mystery.
Now they just Google it.
The elusive phone booth
PHONE BOOTH
In the old days, you used to see desperate characters hunting for a working phone booth.
Now they hunt for a signal.
Lifting weights in prison
GETTING EVEN AFTER PRISON
In the old days, you used to see prison inmates lifting weights or studying law so they could get even with the people who put them there when they got out.
Now they learn to hack in prison so they can get even while still inside.
Following someone covertly
TAILING PEOPLE
In the old days, you would see characters covertly following people on foot or by car. Many times they would lose them.
Now they attach a GPS tracker.
Spy camera
COPYING FILES
In the old days, characters would break into someone’s office late at night to Xerox or take spy camera photos of incriminating documents.
Now they copy computer files to a flash drive (in the movies, this happens FASTER than using a spy camera or Xerox, but in real life, it takes MUCH longer!)
Black clothes rule
Movie chic
MOVIE WARDROBES
In the old days, characters dressed in colorful and chic wardrobes, designed by Edith Head.
Now they wear black.
Fax machine
POLICE FAX MACHINES
In the old days, the grainy driver’s license photo of the killer would be sent to the local police station via a very slow fax machine, which everyone would be too busy to notice.
Now they text a photo of the killer to all the cops at once.
Mistaken Identity
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
In the old days, many movie plots turned on a case of mistaken identity (e.g., Hitchcock’s “wrong man” themes).
Now anyone can quickly find a photo and bio of anyone thanks to Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
Siri to the rescue!
A hit on the head produces amnesia
AMNESIA
In the old days, characters who suffered a whack on the head developed amnesia and wouldn’t know their names.
Now they can just ask Siri.
Welcome to the Digital Economy: Paid vs. Free
June 28th, 2011This week’s post looks at the question of whether people will buy content online. I’ve heard it said that most people only go for the free apps or that no one wants to pay to read the newspaper online. It’s true – if you can get something for free that satisfies the need, why buy?
Why buy, indeed. How many of us would have thought we’d pay to have a satellite dish nailed to our roof and shell out $100 plus per month to have 800 channels, 790 of which we don’t use?
I think the new “sharing economy” has both interfered with and helped develop the paid market for online content: “interfered with” in the sense that much content (apps, music, news, etc.) was put online for free; “helped develop” in the sense that once good content started flowing, channels to deliver content and devices to consume it exploded.
With the availability of desirable content and new, and much easier, ways to deliver it, “paywalls” (as transactional mechanisms for content are called) are taking off. None other than the New York Times erected their paywall this year on March 17 in Canada and worldwide on March 28. Fifteen dollars per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. In keeping with share mentality, however, access to free content still exists.
Don’t just go by the New York Times, though. For a more comprehensive look at paid content, a November 2010 survey from the Pew Internet and American Life project concluded that nearly two-thirds of U.S. internet users have paid to download or access online content such as music, movies, or news articles. According to this survey of 1,003 adults in the continental United States, 755 of whom are internet users,
I was surprised to see the survey result for e-books. However, remember the survey was concluded in November 2010. A lot has happened in the intervening months, witnessed by the king of online booksellers, Amazon. Amazon began selling books online in July 1995. The Kindle was introduced in November 2007. And on May 19 of this year, Amazon announced that by July 2010 Kindle book sales had surpassed hardcover book sales, and then six months later, Kindle beat the paperback books sales rate. Sixteen years in business and it took 3 ½ years for e-books to overtake print sales!
I do think people are paying and will continue to pay for online content in greater numbers. One of the last bastions may be subscription television: cable and satellite, specifically. As people experience the exhilaration of purchasing only the content (music, apps, e-books, magazines, courses, etc.) they want, bundling strategies seem more archaic. There’s a new generation of TV consumers who’ve been dubbed “cord cutters” (those who eliminate paid television in favor of over-the-air, online, and streaming options) and they are reportedly on the rise. Convergence Consulting Group found that 2.07 million U.S. subscribers will have “cut the cord” between 2008 and the end of 2011. Between 2008 and 2009, just 550,000 households had eliminated their cable or satellite television subscriptions.
When I started this post, I thought I was on the low end of the bell curve when it came to purchased content. But maybe not. Today, I bought a movie from iTunes for my iPad, am reading an e-book I purchased for my Nook, have listened to music I bought for my MP3 player, and will watch TV via the satellite dish nailed to my roof. Welcome to the digital economy!
Dot Com 2.0?
May 17th, 2011Have you heard that LinkedIn will go public this week? The 8-year-old professional networking site with over 100 million users will begin trading under the symbol LNKD on the New York Stock Exchange after its initial public offering (IPO) on Thursday. The company currently runs at a profit and hopes to raise $274 million with this round of financing. With a number of other social media companies poised to offer IPOs, some are calling this the “echo of the tech bubble of the 90s.”
Here’s a look at other companies slated for IPOs in the next 12 months.
Facebook
The social networking service is 7 years old with more than 500 million users. An IPO is rumored for later this year or early 2012. The company is valued between $75-100 billion.
Groupon
This fast-growing provider of online coupons is only 3 years old, but has a user count over 50 million. Groupon rejected a $6 billion offer by Google. The date of the IPO is yet to be announced, but some say it may be bigger than Google’s was. The company is currently valued at around $25 billion.
Zynga
The 4-year-old maker of social gaming services FarmVille and CityVille, claims 39.1 percent share of the social gaming market. CityVille recently surpassed FarmVille with over 100 million users, and the promotional innovation, GagaVille, which launches today, will likely increase the volume for Zynga. Zynga is valued at up to $10 billion.
Zillow
This online real estate site provides Internet users and real-estate professionals (19 million unique users currently) with data about property listings and mortgages and touts a database that includes more than 100 million U.S. homes. The 7-year-old company is currently in a net loss position, hoping to raise $51.8 million from the IPO.
Pandora Media Inc.
Known to many as Pandora Radio, this music recommendation and custodian of Music Genome Project, is the oldest of the bunch. They started as TheSavageBeast.com in 2000 and survived the fate of peers such as Napster. In 2005, they changed their name and now serve over 80 million users who have created over 1.4 billion stations comprised of over 800,000 songs by more than 80,000 artists. They are currently in a loss position and hope to raise $100 million through their IPO.
Skype
Put your checkbooks away, because it looks like Skype is off the market. At first, they floated a desire for IPO to raise $750 million to $1 billion. Then Google and Facebook were both talking “partnerships”. But by May 10, Microsoft announced it would acquire Skype for $8.5 billion. Skype was sold previously in 2005 at a loss by EBay. (Not a good deal, EBay!)
Lest we get too excited by the current wave of IPOs, it’s worth a quick look back at some dot-com IPOs that came and went. R.I.P.
Is Facebook the New…
April 4th, 2011
Facebook has been evolving with chameleon-like shifts and changes, so it seems everyone is trying to figure out what it is. To find out, I Googled the phrase “Is Facebook the New” and found many new things that it might be. There are a lot of articles proclaiming it to be the new Twitter, Google, Netflix, Xbox, Foursquare, which is funny because all of these are new – some newer than Facebook. I picked out a few of the more obscure “new” things that I thought our readers would enjoy.
AOL?
This article in Gizmodo makes the case that Facebook is going the way of AOL by trying to integrate too many things in one place, thereby producing a mediocre experience. Remember when a lot of people thought AOL was the internet? Facebook’s two big differences – being social and not being as closed as AOL was – does not save the medium from mediocrity in this writer’s opinion. But don’t they say that it’s called a medium because anything well done is rare?
Telephone?
This blog article is one Baby Boomer’s admonishment to anti-Facebooking Baby Boomers, asking them to remember how the telephone started slow and then flourished because people wanted to be connected to each other (there’s a photo of a wax A.G. Bell to add relevance!)
Good enough point, I guess, but invoking the early days of the telephone to get Baby Boomers onto Facebook seems like reminiscing about the invention of the wheel in order to get people to buy a car. Unless you’ve Rip-Van-Winkled away the last 20 years and missed email, chatrooms, LISTSERVs, intranets, web conferencing, instant messaging, to name a few, you probably don’t have to cover the entire distance from the phone to Facebook in one leap.
My Space?
This is a funny one because it was published in 2007. Today’s answer is an obvious “Yes!” But back then, MySpace was bigger than Facebook. The author rightly predicts that Facebook could overtake MySpace as older people (25+!) get exposed to Facebook as well as adding apps. I wish he had predicted the real estate collapse with as much accuracy!
Wal-Mart?
This article, from 2009, makes a parallel case to the one above about AOL: as Facebook becomes more things to more people, it becomes more mainstream and less cool. More interesting is how Facebook is the low-cost provider to advertisers. According to a source, Facebook’s ad rates run at least 20% less than those at comparable sites. Because of detailed user profiles, it’s easy to target ads based on ZIP code, interests and age. Marketers can also “advertise” for free by setting up fan pages. With a large market share and a lot of market intelligence, Facebook is poised to be able to make a lot of money – that is unless people get turned off by the ads!
Watercooler?
We all hear the career coaches telling us not to post things online that we don’t want a current or prospective employer to see, but are Facebook posts the domain of free speech? In a recent development the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that a Connecticut firm illegally fired an employee for criticizing her supervisor on Facebook and engaging in online conversations with other workers. “It’s the same as talking at the water cooler…The point is that employees have protection under the law to talk to each other about conditions at work.” Could this become a battleground between employees and employers in the coming years?
911?
This article describes a nurse who noticed something amiss in a photo of one of her friend’s children. She recognized it as a possible sign of cancer and alerted her friend of the potential health issue. There also is the story of a woman whose phone line was cut in an attempted break-in. She posted a distress message on Facebook so that her Facebook friends could call the police. Might be worth reviewing your friend list to make sure you’ve included people who’d bother to call the police for you!
Cigarette break?
This one’s all about productivity. Facebook is reportedly the most commonly visited website at the workplace, twice as popular as Google, and three times as popular as Yahoo. More than 150 million Facebook users access the site from their mobile phones and Facebook’s press page says those users are twice as active. Despite companies’ attempts to exert control through social networking policies, firings, blocked sites, and firewall strategies, employees are still able to sneak off for a Facebook break throughout the day. The modern-day cigarette break – unproductive and addictive!
As the writer of the AOL article summed it up, “Facebook wants to be the internet. Will you let it?” Let us know!
The Best Kept Academic Secret: Student Services
February 2nd, 2011It’s true that more widely available broadband access, the massive growth of mobile technology, and the explosion of social media has turned up the volume on online - again. Those of us who did business during dot-com/dot-bomb have been to this dance before.
However, what had been a fragile and ultimately doomed model for doing business in the dot-com era has surely matured to a level of no-turning-back. So the online channel is alive, well, and growing, and educators have been one of many to see the power of this channel for reaching their constitutents (prospective and existing students.)
Which brings me to the subject of student services. Customer service of any sort always seems to be the ugly stepsister of marketing products. Marketing products is sexy. Customer service is dreary. Marketing products is a profit center. Customer service is a cost center.
But the little-acknowledged but often rediscovered secret is that good customer service will net far more than the initial sale through things like customer retention, positive word-of-mouth, customer acquisition, and competitive differentiation.
Where this is headed is to a terrific article in the Winter 2011 issue of Leadership Exchange, published by NASPA, an international network of more than 11,000 student affairs professionals. The article by Joleen Barnhart, entitled “The Virtual World of Student Services” aptly describes the challenges colleges and universities encounter when trying to devise a comprehensive strategy for online student services.
In the spirit of full disclosure, the article also describes Seward Inc.’s CENTSS Online Student Services Audit. We’re pleased by this mention because the CENTSS audit is the single most effective tool for analyzing and generating data to make informed decisions about online student services strategy. The CENTSS audit has been used by colleges and universities across the country to help devise a comprehensive and logical approach to improving online student services.
If online student services is an area of interest for you, please check out this article! For more information about the CENTSS Online Student Services Audit, contact us at Seward Inc.
Happ-E Holidays!
December 14th, 2010‘Tis the season for reaching out to those near and dear with greetings, gifts, and gab. But instead of jumping in your car, why not hit the information superhighway with a digitally inspired creation! Here are some of the stops along the information superhighway that have caught my attention this year.
Portable North Pole
http://www.portablenorthpole.tv/
My neighbor clued me in to this one, and it’s great for young and old alike. Create a personalized message – to be delivered by Santa himself – complete with personal photos and stories that will make the recipient glow with royal beauty bright. It was a treat to see my neighbor’s 4-year-old light up with excitement when Santa spoke directly to her. It also was a treat to see that my neighbor made sure Santa’s message emphasized obeying her mother!
JibJab eCards
http://sendables.jibjab.com/holidays
Yes, there are lots of eCards out there, but JibJab tops them all in my book. You upload headshots of yourself, your friends/family, your pets – whatever – to animated scenarios that will knock the tube socks off your friends. Here’s a still from their Holiday Disco card. The face in this card is a close, personal friend who shall remain nameless…
ABC Family’s 25 Days of Christmas Gift Guide
http://abcfamily.go.com/specials/25-days-christmas/gift-guide
Access online or download the app from iTunes to any iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. Users are able to compile a shopping list by either importing contacts from Facebook or from address books already on the device, or entering names manually. Choose up to 20 things that describe your intended. The guide produces a wide range of gift suggestions to making purchases. The guide saves your gift picks, shows you where to buy, tracks your purchases and lets you set a budget.
Greetings from Brick
http://GreetingsFromBrick.com
If you’re a fan of the ABC TV show, The Middle, you will be delighted to know you can send a personalized video message from Brick. You can select from hundreds of names, locations and holiday and event phrases recorded by Brick, which are seamlessly merged into a fully customized greeting. Fill in the recipient’s name, relationship, location, specific holiday or event (i.e. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Groundhog Day, day of the week, etc.), along with a selected tip or greeting that could only come from Brick, as well as your name and relationship, and the greeting will be rendered. After previewing it, one can send the greeting to the recipient via e-mail or directly to their Facebook or Twitter accounts.
Holiday greetings via YouTube
http://www.YouTube.com
Don’t forget you can always star in your own video card via YouTube. Or search YouTube for “Holiday Greetings” and find someone else’s video to send. Here’s one: A holiday greeting based on the new Battlestar Galactica series intro proving once again that no idea is too small or ridiculous for YouTube.
Holidays on Twitter
http://twitter.com/#!/christmas
http://twitter.com/#!/HANUKKAH
http://twitter.com/#!/EidulFitr�
If you are looking for late-breaking news on your favorite holiday, look no further than Twitter. I found these three Twitter feeds for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Eid ul Fitr, but I am sure there are many more. Your social holiday network is just a click away!
I wish everyone a safe and satisfying holiday and prosperous New Year!
How To Keep Up With Social Media
October 6th, 2010Whether you are a serious social media practitioner or just a person who wonders what all the fuss is about (e.g., “Why would anyone want to know what I’m doing 24-7?”), it is a daunting task to keep up with the trends in social media. Just when you think you’ve got them all figured out, another one comes along that (turns out) has been out there for a couple of years and is now becoming the NEXT BIG THING (See Location! Location! Location! Location-Based Social Networking.)
I’ve put together a “greatest hits” list of resources I find myself returning to again and again to try to ride this wave of new information. Hopefully these resources will be helpful to you wherever you are in the “need-to-know” continuum.
Social Media Gurus to Follow on Twitter
I follow a lot of people for different reasons, but these folks are the best for providing great information about social media news, trends, and ideas. Here they are, listed in alpha order by Twitter name, and, yes, you need to set up an account on Twitter to learn from them (it’s FREE!).
Amber Naslund @AmberCadabra
Brian Solis @briansolis
Pete Cashmore @Mashable and @MashableSocialMedia
Richard Darell @Minervity
Darren Rowse @problogger
Sarah Evans @prsarahevans
Robin Broitman @rgbroitman
Blogs to Read
There are many good blogs out there. Most of the tweeters listed above have their own blogs, and they also will point you in the direction of other interesting ones to visit. Meanwhile, here are my top blog picks (in order of overall value) for staying in the know about social media:
Mashable http://mashable.com/
Brass Tack thinking http://www.brasstackthinking.com/
TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/
Hubspot Blog http://blog.hubspot.com
“Top” Lists
You can Google “top [fill-in-the-blank]” for any social media trend and come up with many good lists. Mashable has an area on their blog dedicated to lists http://mashable.com/lists/.
YouTube, SlideShare, and Delicious
A search on “social media” of these three sources produces a wealth of rich and fresh information about social media:
YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng
Recently updated, this video provides social media use statistics that will make you worry a lot more that you’re not up to speed!
SlideShare
http://www.slideshare.net/mzkagan/what-the-fk-is-social-media-now-z4747637
A great collection of social media trend information. It bears some similarity to the YouTube video, but it includes more about how social media is being used in addition to who is using it. WARNING! Content is a bit “R” rated!
Delicious
http://www.delicious.com/vfrank/socialmedia
My personal collection of web pages devoted to social media trends, how-tos, and metrics. You can search everyone’s Delicious bookmarks to find more resources.
These are some great resources to help you get and stay in-the-know about social media, but they are by no means the only ones. Please share your favorite resources with us!
Location! Location! Location! Location-Based Social Networking
September 28th, 2010Location-based social media tool Foursquare has been getting a lot of press lately, including an exciting announcement last week that a McDonald’s campaign using Foursquare increased foot traffic by 33%! More about that later.
First, what is location-based networking?
According to their website, Foursquare is a mobile application that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore. It is a friend-finder, a social city guide and a game that challenges users to experience new things, and rewards them for doing so. Foursquare lets users “check in” to a place when they’re there, tell friends where they are and track the history of where they’ve been and who they’ve been there with.
Foursquare was launched March 2009 and currently claims about 3 million users worldwide.
Foursquare and other location-based social networking services such as Gowalla, Whrrl, and MyTown enable users to
Before you dismiss this as just another “blah, blah, blah” social networking flash-in-the-pan, take a look at the list of organizations using Foursquare to attract and retain customers:
…and many more: See http://socialfresh.com/foursquare-case-studies/
The History Channel’s story is particularly interesting: The History Channel created tips on Foursquare that share historically significant facts with users when they check into a location of note, for instance the first building that bought an Otis elevator.
Imagine the educational and cultural awareness possibilities with such a tool!
If you are interested in learning more about location-based social tools and ways to use them, here’s a good article about how businesses and organizations can use location-based services to offer deals: http://mashable.com/2010/09/04/location-based-small-business-deals/. As with all promotional tactics, thinking it up and implementing it is only half the battle. Identifying and measuring a realistic and desirable outcome is the other half of the equation that really makes the difference.
Back to the McDonald’s story: Shortly after that news broke about Foursquare and McDonald’s, another story appeared that corrected the “foot traffic” claim to say it was a 33% increase in “check-ins” (people reporting they are at the place of business/action). Obviously getting people to the place of business is one large step closer to increasing sales, however, sales increase wasn’t reported in this case.
As with all marketing tactics, the proof is not in the innovation, but in the outcome. We’re in a very innovative period of experimentation toward desired outcomes. Stay tuned as the outcomes become a bigger part of the story.
The Visible Invisible: Your Information Hiding in Plain Sight
August 18th, 2010The other day I visited LinkedIn to refresh my memory of a person I’d met some time ago. Unfortunately, their photo was so small I could not make out their face, so I did a quick Google Images search to see if I could find a better photo of them. I was surprised to find that Google’s new Image Search now displays the actual filename of the image when you hover over it. Unfortunately in this case, the filename was less than flattering. I’m sure my colleague was not expecting this filename to be presented to the world!
This got me thinking about the digital fragments we leave behind every day, unaware that other people can actually see them. I went looking for information about this and found a slew of articles from the computer forensics world on the field of “steganalysis” (from the Greek name, “steganos” [hidden or secret] and “graphy” [writing or drawing], which literally means “hidden writing.”)
Good to know, but I’ll leave steganalysis to the funky computer forensics techs on the TV cop shows – I just wanted to be able to track down my own digital bits and pieces to avoid potential embarrassment.
So after a little more study, I’ve come up with some things you may want to watch out for and perhaps handle a little bit more carefully:
Photo and Image Filenames
As my opening example illustrated, poor file naming can have unintended consequences.
Unflattering file name for Andy Roddick
To protect the identity of my colleague, I found the example at right that shows a similarly embarrassing filename for tennis star, Andy Roddick. This photo was found using the search term “cross eyed” in Google Images.
Naming image files properly to avoid embarrassing revelations serves another purpose as well: file names are findable by search engines, and naming them correctly and relevantly will support your search engine optimization strategy.
Document Properties in MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint
Metadata (data about data) is helpful in organizing information (The Dewey Decimal System is an example of metadata), but in the digital world metadata also is created in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in a feature called “Properties.”
Advanced document properties in Word 2007 reveals a great deal of information about this Word document
Document properties include details such as author name, title, subject, keywords, category, status, comments, revision number, and total editing time.
A great article entitled “E-Discovery Update: Controlling the Accidental Release of Digital Information” describes an embarrassing outcome from not checking the properties of a Word document. A law firm represented a complex contract as their own work and submitted many hours of billable time. The document properties revealed that it was created for a different client, by a different law firm, and that it had only been opened twice and edited for a total of 35 minutes in the past six months!
To view document properties or inspect the document:
Quick Access Toolbar > Prepare > Properties
On the subject of PowerPoint, it also is worth remembering that slide notes may not always be desirable to share. If you send a PowerPoint file to someone or share it on SlideShare or Google Presentations, make sure you delete any slide notes you don’t want made public.
More Information in Digital Photos and Images
Metadata also is contained in photos. Some digital cameras include GPS location information of where the photo was taken! Revealing this information can extend beyond embarrassment as described in (PDF) “Removing Hidden Patient Data from Digital Images in PowerPoint” where clinical photos copied into a PowerPoint presentation that was to be submitted to a healthcare conference were found to contain patients’ names and identification.
For more information on detecting and removing metadata from photos, see How To Remove MetaData from Photos (Windows).
Redacting and Searchable PDFs
Redacting a document is the act of blacking out words in a document that should not be revealed to a wider audience.
PDFs created from redacted Word documents are still searchable for the redacted terms
Although there are Word redaction tools out there, some people think the same can be accomplished by using a black highlighter in Word over the sensitive phrase(s) and then outputting the document as a PDF.
Unfortunately, creating a PDF from a Word file does not “erase” the underlying data. I tested this by inserting my name into a Word document, “redacting” using the black highlighter, and then outputting the document as a PDF. Then I searched for my name and both instances of my name were returned in the results. To overcome this, a PDF can have its metadata reduced if it is rendered without embedded searchable text. The resulting PDF acts more like a digital photograph of the document than the editable, original native version.
Track Changes in Word
Track changes is a handy feature in Word to enable several people to edit the same document. Unfortunately, all edits and comments remain findable until all changes are accepted in the document. Selecting “Final Showing Markup” displays your document as if you had accepted all the tracked changes. It hides (but does not remove) the tracked changes.
Track changes controls on the Review tab in Word 2007
If you turn off the display of tracked changes, it doesn’t mean they’re not there. They are simply hidden. Anyone could open your document and choose to view your tracked changes. To ensure others do not see comments or edits, finalize the document using the Accept feature.
To accept changes: Review > Accept
Images Posted on Networking/Sharing/ Bookmarking Sites
Another Google Images search revealed this screen capture I created and saved to my Diigo account (Diigo is a bookmarking service like Delicious that allows you to save bits of web sites vs. entire pages).
Facebook profile harvesting: The ubiquitous Ashton Kutcher's profile photo found via Google Images
Similarly, images you post on social networking sites appear to be fair game for Google to index. In the example of my business colleague, not only was there the less-than-flattering filename problem, the photo presented in Google Images was harvested from Facebook, whose content is thought to be only available to “friends.” Even though the filename was obscure, the photo was ascribed to this person by way of their Facebook account name.
Lastly (A Related Item)
I’ve often experienced people using previous emails to start a new email and leaving the subject line unchanged. This confuses the recipient when they first receive the email and makes it difficult to find the email later. Sometimes the subject line is so “lite” it might inadvertently get emails so titled deleted along with their important message content. Consider having a serious email exchange under the subject “Congratulations to XYZ on their new baby!”
