Information on the Web

I begin to wonder if people are really thinking about who reads their blogs/posts and comments on social networking sites. If they understand or even know how long that information will be held.

I heard a lawyer on the radio the other day. He was saying that during jury selection on big trials, the lawyers pull up Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites and begin searching names as the jury selection process takes place. Lawyers are going to look at your comments/posts and blogs to learn things about you that may qualify or disqualify you from a jury.

The same can be said for any legal proceeding. Human Resource personnel in any large company may review social networking sites to see if you violate internal codes of conduct. Certainly, the news media is dialed into this source of information on people in the public eye.

I think we can safely say that a politician will find it hard to evade any comments or posts made in previous years, if said politician changes his viewpoint in the future.

The Internet is an interesting place. It's a virtual storehouse of information. But it's also a physical warehouse of data. Even if you delete or take down a post from your site or social networking page, that post or comment made reside on a 'cached' copy of the site or page on some server somewhere. You can't control that. You cannot make sure that all instances of that comment or post go away.

The companies that have tried to offer that as a paid service, whose business model was "pay me and I will find all instances of that post and delete it by using my super-cool webcrawler or 'bot" have been challenged in courts of law by the big social networking sites. The most successful one is being sued, of all people, by Facebook. Seems Fb doesn't want people to be able to disassociate themselves from the site by removing all instances of themselves and all their posts. But I digress.

By putting my thoughts into this blog, on this day, I am committing them to history like I carved them in stone. No amount of 'wishing it wasn't so' will be able to call them all back. So, that said, why do people post the diatribes they do? Why do people choose this media to state their views, when their views might morph, but history of their words will not?

Do you think that people really understand the distributed computing model? Or when someone posts a comment or blog, do you think they think it's just committed to one server in one place?