Month: July 2006

With my come back to GMail, I’m also trying other Google tools, because it’s all about integration. One of the tools that I’ve tried before, but didn’t like is Google Reader, Google’s RSS aggregator.

I was pleased to find out that a lot of changes were made to Google Reader since my last encounter with it. The interface is way more intuitive. Things are working out faster. And there are bits hard to ignore, like built-in multimedia support (images, podcasts, video, etc), tagging (although named labeling), sharing, and GMail integration.

For the slow ones, there’s an excellent screencast that explains most of the Google Reader functions in an easy and obvious way. The screencast is a bit outdated, but it doesn’ matter much, because the pricnples are still the same, just the interface is a bit cleaner.

I’ll try to use Google Reader for the next few days and see if it will stick…

Girl with a one-track mind wrote an insightful post about pictures taken during the “romantic moment”.

Women across the world have one thing in common … what I am talking about is this: if a woman has had erotic photographs taken of her by a sexual partner, these will, at some point appear on the internet – usually without her knowledge.

She says that it happens more often than you can imagine.

Time and time again, I have received pictures of men having sex with their ex-girlfriends, in some shape or form; my hard drive is filled with images of anonymous women I will never meet; women whose readily identifiable images are freely available to all on the internet.

I bet none of these women gave their consent for their pictures to be used in this way.

She explores some of the reasons of why this happens.

Being so disposable, having their image being a mechanism for a man to exploit, well, I guess in this day and age – where women’s bodies are sexualised commodities for capitalism – it’s no surprise that their consent isn’t asked; why should men think of getting permission when it’s so acceptable to profit off these images in mainstream society? What would make a man think differently, when he is surrounded by images of women in various states of undress, selling everything from magazines to cars?

And she also provides some answers.

So what’s the answer? I’m afraid there’s only one: if you don’t want to run the risk of your erotic pictures being shared on the internet, then you can’t EVER let any be taken. Seriously.

Overall, that’s one nicely written post. Go read it.