Digital Dirt/Google Wave

Digital dirt, to me, is just the next step in hyper-surveillance in the age of the Internet. Everything we type into the Internet is being saved and stored somewhere, often in several places, and it's being used by everyone. Information is being used by employers, advertisers, the government, you name it. Just yesterday my friend's roommate used one of those tracking services to get someone's full name, date of birth, address, phone number, cell number, credit score, etc. and all he had to do was pay 10 bucks and presto, there it is. We, and at least I, don't think about it nearly often enough and are pretty careless about posting our information on the web, and in some instances it has become unavoidable. These days, in our generation, if you don't have a facebook account, or even just to make these blog accounts, personal information is required everywhere. I'm not sure what we can do to combat this besides throwing away our computers, but I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.

The Google Wave program is intriguing. I like the idea of having my live chat incorporated into my email, but only if I can use it with as many people as I can use ichat with, otherwise it won't be worth it. I think it could be useful in terms of organization and saving things, but it's just more information that's being saved on the Internet for you. I guess I can't really say much else about this until I get a chance to try it and check out the features.