Sebastian Schaffert

I’ve been enjoying the “Social Skills durch Social Software” conference we organised in Salzburg the last few days. I gained lots of insights in different areas, and met a lot of interesting people during the conference, many of them long-time webloggers widely known in the community. Although I am a long time Open Source advocate and definately see the benefits in the community-based content creation of Weblogs, a very critical point of Weblogs became apparent to me during the conference: there is no privacy left even for participants of the conference that don’t want to see their photos, their comments, their opinions widely distributed on the net.
As an example, I’d like to point you to a picture of me and Wernher taken by Martin Roell during the conference. The comment given to the picture translates roughly to “let us now all look devoutly to the bright slide”. Although the comical element of this comment is quite adequate and well observed, there is a certain critical element: I as the person whose picture is shown did not approve its presentation.

Whereas personally, I really like the picture and can laugh about it (I herewith grant its publication ), I could easily imagine that other persons would not, and that there might be different situations where the persons photographed are not at all happy about the publication. What I am troubled about is that with Weblogs, the Internet could become not only the publication platform but also the “pillory” of the digital age.