Googled!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You're like my yo-yo

that glowed in the dark.

What made it special,

made it dangerous.

Kate Bush, Cloudbusting

When you're using Gmail and send someone a mail saying something like 'The quotation is attached' and you forget the attachment, Google pops up with a wee dialogue saying 'Are you sure you want to send this email? Only you've forgotten the attachment, you dufus.'

Which is sort of cool and, certainly the first time it happens, sort of pulls you up a bit at the same time. This 2008 three-part video series, about inviting Google into your life is, incidentally, remarkably prescient.

On leave in the UK, I started to notice Google doing 'stuff'. I was getting wee notifications letting me know that Google had 'Auto-Awesomed' pictures I was taking on my mobile. But it wasn't until I got back that I got a BlipVert telling me that Google had made me a 'Story'. It was illustrated with a photo I'd taken of my 18 month-old niece.

I clicked on the link and watched with growing, sick fascination as a line on a world map led from Dubai to Heathrow and photos I'd taken - 'moments', apparently - started appearing in a day by day sequence, each locationally tagged and accompanied by a placename and map. Then a red line led from Wales to Hilltown and I got to see all my Christmas snaps, from the present opening frenzy (and subsequent cacophony of not one but TWO Elsa SnowGlow Dolls singing 'Let it go' to the accompaniment of small girls marching around with one hand, for some reason, waving in the air) to walks in the woods, parklands and seaside, including a red line to Castlewellan, where we spent a frozen afternoon getting enjoyably lost in the 'Peace Maze' to be found there. Google had 'Auto-Awesomed' a photo of a duck I had taken, which I had posted with a note (in a slightly scared sort of way) on Google+ - my note had been automatically added to the image in my 'Story' as a caption. Our trip back to Heathrow was another red line on a map before my New Year snaps and then 'The End'.

Like so much Google does, it both impressed and scared me. Even this 1.0 version is pretty slick, but I can see where we're going with this and, well, I'm not sure about it if you know what I mean. Goggles can identify books from their covers, landmarks from their image. Google knows when you were born, where you are now, where you've been - what you're doing and what you like. It can serve you with contextual stuff to enrich your life. It can help you with that illness by inserting itself into your DNA. Google welcomes you to the hivemind. Now, just do your bit to help feed the Queen, drone...

I was still turning this stuff over in my mind when Dina, the organiser of the MENA.Online.Literature.Today conference in Cairo, emailed me my ticket to travel there this weekend (the conference, postponed in December, is on again at the Townhouse Gallery this Saturday & Sunday). Her mail contained little more than 'Attached is your flight' and a PDF from the travel agent with the flight details.

Yesterday I went to Google Calendar to update a meeting. And I found my flight had been added as a calendar event. By Google. From the email content. Airline, flight number, time and booking code all noted.

I am under my desk typing this as we speak. I am dressed in tinfoil and have a colander on my head to stop them reading my brainwaves.

(I may also be doing a little 'I found an excuse to put a gratuitous image of Kate Bush on my blog' dance.)

Are Your Footprints All Over The Web?

Image by Andreas-photography via FlickrThe answer's probably yes.

The recent massive facepalmohmigodicantbelievetheydidthat scandal involving Facebook hiring a bunch of mendacious flaks to tout around fear-mongering stories about Google's 'privacy issues' merely highlighted (as Gulf News' Scott Shuey pointed out in his Saturday column) the issues of online privacy in general - and didn't leave Facebook unscarred. Amusingly, Shuey points out that, in his experience, most PRs are "...soulless drones who would sell their own mothers to keep a client happy."

I can't disagree with him, but then most social media sites and online publishers are soulless bots who are already selling us all to keep clients happy. It's a marriage made in heaven, no?

As time goes by, we're putting more and more data out there - and that data can be interconnected in ever-more creative and interesting ways. I was highly tickled the other day to do a Google Image Search on myself, looking for a picture someone had taken of me wot we needed for a presentation. As well as the usual daft pictures of me (of which the sunflower one is a firm favourite), the search started to throw up images from my blog and, as we go further down the search, images from people associated with me for one reason or another. The growing tree of interconnectedness was fun, if mildly disconcerting - try doing an image search on yourself and see what I mean (I assume you're in the habit of Googling yourself or have set up an alert on yourself/your unique identifying keyphrase).Bing also delivers, although relevance appears weaker and the associations come in more strongly and earlier.

Here's a scary trick. Take a look at your Google Search History, linked here. You'll have to sign in with Gmail and then you can access your entire history of search - every last query stored for posterity on Goog's servers. I deleted mine, believe me you don't want to see the things I was looking up while I was researching Beirut, something I have alluded to in posts passim!

The basic rule of thumb is that if you put it out on the web (and by that I most definitely include Twitter and all other things comfortingly transient), it stays out on the web. Take three or four seemingly disconnected pieces of data and you can start to build a profile - the more comprehensive the profile, the more sticky every new piece of data becomes until you can build exponentially more intelligent data sets that define you very nicely indeed.

Facebook has consistently been in trouble over things like privacy settings and is often accused of encouraging people to share too much. But that's the trouble with social search - you're selling increasingly intelligently filtered access and so you need to get people to share more as well as create more from what they do share. It's a self-fulfilling beast. And it's after your data.

There's no need to buy a nuclear bunker quite yet, but it would do as well to be aware that you're now essentially a public figure. And you're leaving footprints behind all the time...