Lifehacker reports on a recent analysis of 32 million web passwords – all for the same site – that showed that almost 300 000 users had chosen ’123456′, then we had the 70 000 that chose ’12345′, the 62 000 that went for ‘Password’, and the 23 000 who imaginatively picked ‘rockyou’, the name of the site.

It matters, folks! You want to keep your personal data, your online purchases, your website as safe as you can. Picking a easy to guess password is leaving your door unlocked and on the latch. And using the same password on more than one site is like putting the keys to your car, your shed, and everything in your house on a hook just inside that door: once someone’s found that the door is open, they have everything.

I wonder if we think about passwords the wrong way round – we think of them as how we get access to our stuff online rather than how we keep other people out. You don’t leave the keys in the car ignition (at least not round here), even though it would make it easier for you to drive off – because it makes it easier for someone else to do the same. So make your passwords tricky and use a different one for each site.

There’s lots of advice online on making stronger passwords – plenty in the Lifehacker article linked here. You need it if your passwords are short, or they’re long but don’t have a mix of upper and lower case and special characters.

Three steps to being safer:

1. Pick a system for inventing strong passwords (doesn’t matter which one you use – just pick one).

2. TODAY change the passwords to your most important services – banks, Amazon, other online retailers – anyone who has your credit card or bank details. Remember, one password per site. Never reuse.

3. Tomorrow, change the passwords on the next 3 most important sites – eg networking sites, your own website.

4. Repeat 3 until they’re all done.

Now, look me in the eye and tell me your passwords are all different and all strong! I’ll be asking!

I guess it’s possible – con artists are an obvious example, after all – but I’d never thought it might be desirable before. However, Scot Herrick makes an interesting distinction in this article: nice is when you are good-natured and kind, but, he suggests, open to exploitation; likeable is when people like you (obviously!) but it doesn’t have to include being nice.

Now we could argue all day about the differences (which the commenters on Herrick’s post do) but I like my friend K’s approach: she says, “I think it’s mostly about tailoring your approach to people – some people like nice and respond to nice – because they themselves are nice. Others need to know your boundaries.” It might be quite liberating to be able to choose according to the circumstances. Of course, many of us try to be likeable by being nice – maybe we should try to find other ways as well. Any ideas?

Incidentally, I came across another blog post I liked, Why nice people win BIG TIME in the end?, an analysis of why nice guys don’t lose out in the long term to the get ahead types, complete with graphs! It doesn’t really contradict Herrick, but it does assume that you’re not so nice that you have no time left to hang out with the people ahead of you!

I found Laura Roeder, appropriately enough, in a twitterfeed. She is a scarily together, competent and charming young woman with a great video manner and lots of useful information. I really liked her ‘Twitter in 10 minutes a day’ video – link in the right hand column – and have a look at earlier blog posts, too.

Meanwhile, Guy Kawasaki again – The Six Twitter Types – a field guide cum cautionary tale for those of us just starting out.

The sun eventually came out.

As this blog demonstrates, my progress in social media is slow! My first blog post was made back in 2006 (same time of year – the winter drives me to it!) and the second was yesterday.

However, I’m learning.

I have a business coaching client with a great business and a lovely online personality and I think Twitter might suit her wonderfully. I’ve mentioned this, of course, but not really been able to explain it very well. Rather than just send her out to wander the web on her own, I thought we might have a go together. We could tweet at each other endlessly and no-one would know, right?

I was very shocked to sign up and find I had a follower within a couple of minutes! Who? what? why? How did this person even know I had an account?

I took a while to recover, then picked out a couple of people to follow that I’ve liked reading on the web, and lo! a sudden influx of followers with weird names and no discernable connection to me or anything I knew about.

I thrashed about for a while, googling pathetically, “twitter why are they following me?” and the like. And in the resulting morass of information, I managed to work out that there are automatic systems for following people who’ve just followed someone you’re following, if you follow me.

OK, but that sense of happy anonymity I had when I began… has gone. I’d heard it, but I hadn’t understood it: once you’re out there, you’re out there. If you say something stupid, the only thing you can really do is say a lot more, so that it disappears from view, and hope a) that there was nothing so exciting (or libellous) in it that it gets picked up and retweeted, and b) that your ongoing stream of interesting, inspiring posts puts it into context as the understandable overexcitement of the newbie.

It’s called Performing under Pressure, and I’m very excited about it – I really think it could be great for people struggling with huge workloads in difficult circumstances – I’m thinking of some of the people I know in schools, the health service, social workers. And an online approach means that they can get support anytime they want, day or night.

At the same time, it keeps growing. I keep finding new things to include, new ideas for coaching, more stuff I’d love people to know about and be able to use. And I’d really like it to look good, too, which creates another set of to dos on the list. At this rate, it’ll never get published at all.

In the middle of all this, I came across just the right thing: an excerpt from Guy Kawasaki’s 2008 book, The Art of the Start. He says, “Don’t wait to develop the perfect product or service. Good enough is good enough.” That’s what I needed to hear. To begin with, I just need to make PuP work, and get it out there quickly rather than trying to make it perfect. And anyway, my idea of perfect isn’t necessarily what my clients need. I could spend months perfecting something that doesn’t quite do it for them.

Kawasaki also says, “Use prototypes as market research.” So, I can make a quick and dirty version and use it to see what potential clients think. Now I’m planning to get the first session drafted and uploaded by the end of the week, so I can start asking people to try it out!

The excerpt is an exceptionally good read – full of useful and interesting things, in a bright bouncy style and with real experience behind it. I’ve ordered the book. Get the excerpt here: http://www.guykawasaki.com/books/art-of-the-start.shtml The download button is at the foot of the page. Let me know what you think!

Some clever person at Ofcom has decided that media literacy has two levels.

‘The simplest (sic – someone speak to the RSA, whose draft response this is quoted from) is to use a range of media and to understand information received. A more advanced level requires questioning, analysing and evaluating the information.’

My rant:

The distinction made here between ‘using a range of media and understanding information received’ and ‘questioning, analysing and evaluating the information’ is unhelpful for planning work in media literacy.

Using a range of media is not an end in itself. It is only meaningful (and worth while) when you have something to communicate. At this point, it also makes sense to ‘question, analyse and evaluate’ what you and others are doing. This applies as much to a nursery child making a drawing for a parent, “Will she know what it is? Should we give it a title?” as to undergraduates comparing the use of images in news reports as to a 70 year old deciding whether it would be worth learning to use email to stay in touch with a globetrotting daughter. The two go together.

‘Understanding information received’ also perplexes me. The necessary understanding of speech, text etc are parts of oracy/literacy in their own right, and not peculiar to media literacy. It seems to me that ensuring that the recipient understands the information is largely the job of the person(s) initiating the communication, and I’m not sure what you would do to develop this. In general, people don’t need to be taught how to understand the information from the TV, email, texts, video, radio, online courses, podcasts and the like. And as soon as you start to look at how to develop more subtle understanding of the way the media have been used, you have begun the ‘questioning, analysing and evaluating’ supposedly at another level. (Actually in the interests of people actually reading my input, I left out this paragraph, but here I can go on as much as I like!)

Speaking from an education perspective, the distinctions between being able to do and being able to critique too often result in separating the two. This has a very strong tendency to produce sterile acontextual training for the first objective and the abandonment of the second for most groups. The ‘two levels’ are not helpful. I would suggest that the useful distinctions are not between using and critiquing but between the activities most valuable to different groups, who should each have access and encouragement to use AND critique the media most enabling to them.

Then the RSA did its rather too common all-purpose cheerleading for technology (but I suppose being founded in the heyday of humanism, progress, ever-upwards and all that makes it hard to take a more measured response, even now):

‘…the crucial issue in enabling media literacy is…to promote a society that enjoys learning about technology and is aware of the opportunities that technology can hold.’

(This is silly anyway – how can enjoying learning about technology be THE crucial issue in media literacy?? and there seem to be two crucial issues anyway.)

But here is my rant as posted:

Could we point out that technology offers dangers as well as opportunities? Each technology makes it easy to do some things and harder to do others. In a familiar example, office software has become so commonplace we no longer notice what we can’t do with it. Edward Tufte, Emeritus Professor at Yale, has analysed the ‘cognitive style’ of PowerPoint and its disadvantages, though his analysis would apply to other similar presentation software (https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ or http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html). The National Curriculum requires that pupils be taught to ‘reflect critically on the impact of ICT on their own and others’ lives, considering the social, economic, political, legal, ethical and moral issues’. This would seem sensible for all of us.

Question 14 asked whether whether initiatives should include ‘awareness of copyright issues’? The RSA rightly said yes, and added that it should cover open-source software etc too.

So then I ranted again:

I agree that awareness should be part of any initiative and that it should cover a range of systems. Awareness should include the gist of the main positions on the subject and show why copyright discussions are currently controversial. It should NOT be an apologia for whatever the rules happen to be.

I noticed that the contributions started out as one liners, but have gradually increased in length. Maybe it’s just that some of us have taken longer to write something (they email the Fellows they think may be interested) or perhaps it’s harder to put in a very short post once the long and boring ones have started. I’ll keep an eye on it and let you know.