mrweaver's blog

If you are constantly moving files between computers via thumb drives, or by emailing them to yourself, consider using Dropbox.com

I've written about Facebook privacy a couple of times, here, and here. Facebook's privacy policy has grown from 1,004 words in 2005 to nearly 6,000 words in 2010, and has become harder to figure out.

eBird is a website for the serious birder. Created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society, the site builds a database of bird sightings based on the observations of recreational birders.

If you have made that common New Year's resolution to lose weight, one of the most important parts of staying on track is knowing what you've eaten. DailyPlate.com, part of Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong.com, is a site where you can create a free account to track your food intake.

The Ohio Department of Transportation is using Twitter.com to post winter weather road condition status reports in 6 Ohio cities.

What is Twitter? it is a social networking website, where people can share information in very short messages, no longer than 140 characters. You can create an account on Twitter and "follow" one or all of ODOT's traffic pages (and other pages, like WPPL's page). Through your Twitter account, you can have information sent to your cell phone, keeping you up to date, wherever you are (standard text message rates apply--this option is best if you have unlimited texting.

To learn more about Twitter, watch a video from a previous blog post.

For more traffic info, be sure to check out BuckeyeTraffic.org

Recently, Facebook made changes to its privacy policies, giving users more control over their personal information, including restricting access to individual status updates, etc.

is a new search engine for free educational videos for kids. More than 10,000 videos have been added.

From the project's website:

What is WatchKnow?
Imagine hundreds of thousands of great short videos, and other media, explaining every topic taught to school kids. Imagine them rated and sorted into a giant Directory, making them simple to find. WatchKnow--as in, "You watch, you know"--is a non-profit online community devoted to this goal.

Facebook is huge and growing every day. And a lot of people have concerns about privacy. Others don't think about privacy on such sites at all (which is a big problem).

Facebook can be used safely, but people should educate themselves about privacy matters. Here is a good article with some general guidelines on Facebook called 5 Easy Steps to Stay Safe (and Private!) on Facebook. The article shows you how to configure your privacy settings to keep your information private, and there are some common sense guidelines about watching what you put online in the first place.

There are a lot of websites that promise to give you a free credit report, some with catchy musical tv commercials. These sites require you to subscribe to some sort of service.

Where can you get your credit report for free? There is only one source authorized to give a free credit report under federal law: Annualcreditreport.com.

Check out this information from the Federal Trade Commission on free credit reports.

These commercials will help make things clear:

This Mashable.com post shows some great extensions for the Firefox web browser that are useful for students.