Recently in Technology Category

For a bit, you could see my name on Google News in the Sci/Tech section with a link to the article.

New Yorker Barry Hoggard draws a line in the sand when it comes to online privacy. In May he said farewell to 1251 Facebook friends by deleting his account of four years to protest what he calls the social network's eroding privacy policies.

"I'm sick of keeping track of my Facebook privacy settings and what boxes I have to check to protect myself," says Hoggard, a computer programmer. "I don't have a lot of illusions about online privacy, but Facebook has gone too far," he says of Facebook's recent privacy policy changes.

I wanted to be described as programmer/entrepreneur. I need a PR team. I'm hoping more articles appear, as I was also interviewed by a Washington Post reporter after writing about canceling my Facebook account on May 7. It has now been two weeks, so I assume my profile is safely gone.

Delete Billboard for the 2009 New York Street Advertising Takeover by Ji Lee, image via his website

I don't have a lot of illusions about privacy when using social media such as Flickr or Twitter, but there is a difference when a company like Facebook behaves in a really sleazy fashion.

I work on websites every day, including my own such as the art calendar ArtCat. I did not start out with one privacy policy for the calendar, and then gradually claim the right to use more and more information submitted to us. For example, I could offer a list of contemporary art galleries for sale to advertisers or artists looking for representation, but that would be wrong because it's not what the galleries expected when they gave information to us. However, given the changes in Facebook's privacy policy since 2005, they would consider this perfectly reasonable behavior.

In addition, with recent changes to their development platform, Facebook applications have more and more access to your private data, including applications you have not chosen to install, but your friends have. Want to share information only with friends? You're sharing it with applications that your friends use.

And how about those neat new sharing tools introduced by Facebook? Until they corrected a bug, visiting sites that are using Open Graph allowed them to install an application to your profile without asking you. Given their privacy track record, including the recent exposure of private chats, I wouldn't trust them to fix those holes quickly. "Instant personalization" indeed.

Related:

• The Rumpus: Conversations About the Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee
• rocket.ly: Why You Should Still Quit Facebook
• ReadWriteWeb: How to Delete Facebook Applications
• Electronic Frontier Foundation: Six Things You Need to Know About Facebook Connections
• groovyPost: How to Permanently Delete your Facebook Account

On this date in 2004, James and I launched the first version of the ArtCat Calendar (then called ArtCal). The first version just listed shows and dates by neighborhood, with the main innovation being the listing of Chelsea shows by street.

Some history:

• Images added: September 6, 2005
• RSS and iCal feeds added: December 12, 2005
• E-mail newsletter launched: March 30, 2006
• Newsletter reaches 1000 subscribers: March 13, 2007
• Redesigned: August 28, 2007
• Merged ArtCal and ArtCat: March 2009

One of the reasons I post so rarely these days is that I have been working on improvements to ArtCat -- both the calendar and hosting applications. While you are out tonight at openings in Chelsea or elsewhere, you can check out our site on your phone using our new mobile site.

I guess the pricey gallery website provider exhibit-e has heard of my ArtCat hosting business for artists and galleries. They are buying ads on the keyword "artcat" so that their ad appears when people Google it.

File storage and bandwidth are unlimited for all web sites hosted at ArtCat.

We stopped measuring storage space and bandwidth used by individual sites some time ago, but I realized that I never announced that or updated the text on the website. Now I have!

When I first started ArtCal in 2004, ArtCat web hosting for artists already existed. The latter doesn't stand for anything, but ArtCal was suggested by a friend as short for "Art Calendar."

Given the fact that I have trademarked ArtCat, and I own the .com for it, I always meant to consolidate everything -- artist and gallery web hosting, the calendar, and the zine, into one brand with interlinked sites, and now I have! As part of a redesign for the new Culture Pundits advertising format, I worked with the brilliant artist and designer Michael Mandiberg to come up with a new look.

We are still tweaking the design, but go check it out. I'm quite happy with it.

[Watch for changes to this blog and James's as well in the next 24 hours.]

I'm doing a server move, and I accidentally used the notifications feature to send emails to about 20 people. My bad.

We first put up the website, and had a few sites in addition to ArtCal, in August of last year. We've now reached over 40 sites with over 400,000 unique visitors and 1 million page views each month. Here is the official launch press release.

Hanna Fushihara Aron, Self Portrait

* For my fellow nerds in the audience, here is the link to my new tech blog I'm using to comment on the technologies I work with.
* Little Cakes is closing for now, and tomorrow (Sunday) is the last day to see them in this location. Brent Burket gives us an excellent tribute on the ArtCal Zine.