Earlier this month, Google got called out by privacy advocates after it announced it would be bringing its Street View to London. Apparently some people have problems with random unmarked vans touring the streets and taking detailed photos…

I love Street View, because I have a crap memory. I can remember store locations, for example, but not what they’re called — which is a bit of a problem when you want to look them up to see their hours or call them to see if they stock random items (in this case, face paint).

Rather than just walk around the corner, I started googling to try to kick start my memory of shop names, and came across a site called StreetSensation, which features full panoramic photos of entire London streets.

Okay, not quite Street View’s level of detail, and it’s not on every street, but it could help find what’s across the street from Primark on Oxford Street, remind you that the pub you stumbled out of last night is called the Fitzroy Tavern, or uncover the name of that awesome restaurant you stopped in at while shopping on Neal Street.

Didn’t help me find cheap face paint though. I had to go for a walk for that. William’s Newsagents on the corner of TCR and Goodge Street, if you’re ever in the need…

An etiquette guide has been released for Facebook by something called Debrett’s - which is apparently “Britain’s etiquette bible”. The politeness gurus have come up with a list of golden rules to keep virtual interactions from souring real friendships.

Here’s Debrett’s advice:

1. You don’t have to make friends with people you don’t know. Think before you poke. In case you didn’t realise you could ignore people…?

2. Wait 24 hours before accepting or removing someone as a friend. The delay will help you gather your thoughts. Probably good advice, especially when Facebooking drunk… which is a bad, bad idea.

3. Birthdays, engagements and weddings are not “virtual” events. Always send cards or phone friends when there is an important event. Do e-cards count? If not, I’m a bad friend. And daughter. And aunt. Crap. I’m a bad person.

4. Think before posting a friend’s photo what you would feel like if it was you. And if you think “hey, that’d be embarrassing” then you should just continue on posting, because that’s the whole point, isn’t it? …it’s not? Oh. Yeah, I’m a bad person.

5. Think carefully about your profile picture. Would you want it to be appearing in your local newspaper? This is a fair point, as those horrible media types scour the internet looking for photos of people when they’ve died in horrible ways or done something stupid. But then again, really, if you’re dead, does it really matter if the whole world knows you once got drunk and shaved your eyebrows? Not that I’ve done that; I’m not that bad of a person.

What would you add to this list? And, if you haven’t already, come join IT PRO on Facebook here.

Last month, I wrote a feature about a school in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and how they’re using technology to teach local girls real skills to get real jobs.Achieving such at thing is no easy feat, to underestimate wildly. But the effort is well worth it. Economically, it’s added a major boost to the area. The Afghan Canadian Community Center’s students go on to work for NGOs and aid bodies who would have had to import staff - now the local area gets an influx of foreign money, the girls get proper jobs, and the organisations get the benefit of employees with local knowledge.

Not only that, these students are creating a future for themselves and creating a new Afghanistan - one with educated, technology-saavy women ready to lead it. S

Myself and Ryan at the fundraising group Afghan School Project would like to thank everyone for their help; the money donated is doing some very, very good work. While each and every donation put a smile on my face - and helped the school reach it’s goal - one donation was so exceptional it deserves to be highlighted.

The campaign was set to end on December 31, a date we’d arbitrarily chosen. The day before, I went online to our fundraising site ChipIn to see how things were going. We were short, quite significantly so. I was really dissapointed we hadn’t raised the full amount, I’ve got to say. Such a worthy project, asking for so little, with such measurable results - who could say no?

So I went back to the ChipIn site, to extend the deadline. But where the “amount raised” had previously said 45 per cent, it now read 100 per cent. My first reaction was that the site had a bug. But no - there in the list of donators was a new name: Brendan Choi. And next to his name, the donation amount, totalling the exact difference between what we had and what we needed.Tears in my eyes and a massive grin on my face, I frantically called Ryan with the good news. He contacted Brendan, an IT worker in the US, who gave us a bit of insight into why he had been so incredibly generous.  “I was looking for ways to help the people of southern Afghanistan. I went on the internet and researched aid efforts in the region. It was not hard to find the Afghan Canadian Community Center in Kandahar. The ACCC was exactly the kind of institution I was looking for,” he wrote.

Some managers just don’t know what to do with the internet, or their people.

 Along with many ways to be more efficient, the web brought with it a lot of ways to kill time: Facebook. Personal email. LOLcats. Reading blogs (slacker!).

Good companies choose to manage their people without contacting the IT department, and only come down hard on such time-wasters if the employee in question isn’t doing enough work. Fair enough.

But others just ban everything.

A friend of mine – and I do actually mean someone other than me, as our publishers aren’t even remotely this silly – works for such a place.

Despite the employees being generally completely run off their feet, working long hours for low pay, and still getting the job done, this company has felt the need to ban all personal use of the internet.

If you want to Facebook, do your banking online, book a train ticket, or send a quick email to your mom, you can do it on your lunch hour – from one shared machine, not the one on your desk.

Employees there – my friend included – are frustrated, and morale is low. They think their boss is an ass.

Talk about poor management. Only a really crap manager, with no web-savvy, no trust in their employees and no clue about their work levels, would do such a thing.

If people need a break from work, they should be allowed to take it. Why is it okay (well, not so much these days) to take a five-minute cigarette break out by the back doors, but not okay to take a five-minute Scrabulous break at your desk?

Sometimes workers – especially those stuck in front of a monitor thinking all day – need to shut off for a few minutes, or just get a chore (like banking) done, before getting back to work.

Managers need to manager people, not their web permissions.

And with that said, time for a turn on Scrabulous… but first: has your employer ever tried to ban online access? And what’d you do about it? Let us know in the comments!

Because I spend too much of my time online – blogging, posting photos, emailing, facebooking, and other activities (read: looking at funny pictures of cats) – the web services I choose (or don’t choose) are increasingly starting to cause me trouble.

I’ve made some missteps in the past. I chose a random photo host years and years ago, because they offered easy uploads and produced a ready-made website to show my pics – all very handy and easy to use. But in the years since, they’ve added very few functions. Unlike Flickr, my DotPhoto doesn’t allow tagging or any sort of networking. I didn’t want those features at first, because they didn’t exist. But I want them now… and DotPhoto’s developers don’t seem to care (mind, I haven’t actually asked them to develop this for me, but I’m guessing the answer would be: “who are you?” and “get out of my house, I’m calling the police!”). But downloading and then reuploading all my pictures would take about a year and a half, and it seems insane to abandon half my photos on one site just to move to another.
I’ve got this problem with email, too. When I signed up for Hotmail many years ago, it really was the best free web-based email service out there. I swear. When Gmail launched way-back when, I got an account, but never really used it, because all my archives were on Hotmail. Now, the whole Live Mail crap is so slow and old-fashioned that I wish I was on Gmail, which is so much slicker and quicker. (I will probably move soon… keeping my Hotmail account to hold my archives, which as noted above, is annoying).
And blogging. Blogger was and is a solid service, but it hasn’t developed as well as the super-shiny WordPress, so if I want to upgrade, I’ve got to import my blogs, which is a painful process, it seems.
I think I got it right with Facebook – everyone I know seems to be on it, from my internet-loathing sister to friends who have sworn they’ve better things to do or already have a MySpace page.
And maybe that’s the key. I didn’t sign up for any of the first social networking sites (Bebo and MySpace and others I’ve forgotten). So maybe it’s better not to be an early-adopter and just hang-back and let the cream rise to the top.

But that’s no fun, is it? Unless someone develops (see above) a shiny way to move my stuff from one site to another, I’m not sure what to do… any suggestions/thoughts from my dedicated by usually comment-free readership?

There seems to be a lot of Facebook backlash swirling about, as there often is with anything popular. (Thankfully, I have never been popular, which is good, as I’m not sure I could take the criticism.)

Anyway, spouting off about how crap Facebook is seems to be the newest way to show how cool you are (sorry Rene). According to Everyone Else, the ridiculously-successful site’s privacy and security are bogus, the applications are horrid, it hurts productivity and my favourite: how lame it is to vomit your entire life up online to show off to a bunch of people you call your friends, when you haven’t actually spoken to them in ten years.

And while I do hate the pretentiously pouty profile pics (I know what you look like! I’ve seen you in real life! Stop pretending you’re hot!) and the my-life-is-better-than-yours showing off, I can’t really blame Facebook for the vapidity of the entire human race.

But it’s not all bad, which is why we’re all there. So in defense of a rich, successful company that doesn’t need my help, here’re my responses to the usual complaints/criticisms, numbered for no reason whatsoever:

1) What’s the point, it’s a waste of time. No one made you sign up. You can quit (unless you’re addicted, and I can’t help you with that).

2) Why would I want to hear from people I don’t really like? You can reject people. (I find it rather gratifying, to be honest.) And don’t worry about them disliking you, as you don’t like them anyway. Think about it. You can also remove them from your friend list after the fact; I’ve been planning a bit of a cull for weeks now…

3) All these people can see stuff about me! You can make it private if you’re not an idiot. If you don’t want your boss to see what you’re up to on the weekend, keep your profile private. And if you’re worried about people finding out what a freak you are, don’t post it online. Don’t blame Facebook, blame a lack of common sense. Facebook (and blogs and Flickr and the rest of Web 2.0) just highlight people’s stupidity.

4) Going down to the pub is better. Um, no kidding. Congratulations. You’re a genius. But while I’m stuck at my desk bored, unable to get to the pub with every single person I know from Canada and the rest of the world, I’ll settle for Facebook.

5) The applications are shitty.  This is true. But if you want your friends to stop trying to turn you into a zombie, just tell them off. Think of it this way: Imagine you’re down in the pub, and some drunken buddy of yours is pretending he’s a zombie, and it’s really annoying. What would you do? Ignore him until you can’t take it anymore, tell him off and then punch him. Try that, Facebook-style: ignore it, send your friend a message, then block the application. Yes, you can do that.

6) Email is better. Can’t argue that. But Facebook’s message function is a good way to send a quick note to someone and keep track of a conversation, which Gmail admittedly does as well. But Gmail doesn’t let you tag photos and videos, plan parties in three and a half minutes or play Scrabble. 

7) Productivity. If you’re wasting an excessive amount of time at work fiddling with your profile, it’s because you’re a slacker and because your boss is a poor manager. Don’t blame the internet.

Really, what I don’t understand is why people complain about a free, easy-to-use site which isn’t compulsory. I like it, as it lets me keep track of my friends around the world in an easy way — because yes, I’m too lazy to email them all constantly or even call them despite having free long distance. I do admit it is annoying to hear about Facebook all the time, but again, don’t blame Facebook, blame the media for constantly writing about it… oh, wait. I think I might be part of the problem here…