I contributed to humor magazine Old Trout’s much-anticipated list of the 13 scariest Americans. This Halloween, amuse and terrify yourself by perusing this list of 13 people who are the most likely to destroy the environment, invade your privacy, fuck the poor, and run for president.

Recently I have amused myself by fantasizing about the GooTube meme dying, much in the same way I fantasize that I don’t exist in the same universe with other celebrity pairings like TomKat and Brangelina. At least GooTube hasn’t gone to Africa to adopt an orphaned startup yet.

Luckily, as of today, the GooTube meme is so dead it’s moved beyond the flogging stage. That leaves us with nothing but questions about what Google plans to do with its newly-acquired video sharing portal full of barfing kitten videos and clips from The Colbert Report. Will it turn billion-dollar baby YouTube into a new place for ads? (Obviously.) Will it turn YouTube into a test case to make better intellectual property law? (Hopefully.) But there’s an even more important question, which is whether Google will sacrifice YouTube’s best feature: video findability. Now there’s a wonky cliffhanger. Want to know more? Read my column.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about why I love geowanking, which is a highly technical term for digital map geekery. I went to the first Bay Area meeting for members of the geowanking e-mail list, a group I’ve always adored. I had a blast meeting (in person) a bunch of philosophers, computer geeks, and geo-data experts who are about to change the world by giving everybody the ability to access and reshape maps in real time. What makes the geowankers especially appealing to me are their populist values:

Geowanking is all about making maps democratic and creating representations of space that reflect ordinary people’s lived experiences. The idea of letting a real estate agency call the shots on where your neighborhood’s boundaries are is absurd to a geowanker. Why not just build a digital map in layers so that you can see the real-estate-defined neighborhoods, then click into another layer that shows what ordinary people on the street think are the boundaries, then move to another layer to see where all the rivers run underneath the city?

Read more about the geowankers saving the universe.

Last weekend, I took a walk through San Francisco’s Western Addition and Richmond District neighborhoods, and discovered something weird: there are a lot of RFID tags ground into the sidewalks. As more and more consumer items are “smart tagged,” I suppose it’s bound to happen that litter will go high tech.

Here are several pieces of RFID litter that I snapped with my handy Treo 650.

Some people doubt the existence of the enigmatic Edward Champion, host of the Bat Segundo literary podcast. But I know he is real. In fact, he came to my house with his cool podcasting gear and interviewed me about my book Pretend We’re Dead, asking some extremely unexpected questions about The Man with Two Brains. We also talked about H.P. Lovecraft, serial killers, robots and whatever else popped into our heads.

Listen to us!

This Saturday I’ll be appearing at two completely unrelated events. From 2:30-4 PM, I’ll be moderating an extremely interesting panel at a Bay Area Video Coalition event about youth and technology called True2Life. The panel is called “Shake-up in Cyberspace” and will feature:

• Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube
• Josh Felser, co-founder of Grouper
• Eve Batey, formerly a blogger at SFist and now for the SF Chronicle
• Youth marketing blogger Anastasia Goodstein
• Danny O’Brien, who is the Activism Coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The panel will be an informal discussion, with lots of questions from the audience, so come out and chat with us. The event is at Ruby Skye in San Francisco.

Later that evening, I’ll be part of a stellar lineup of authors at the Seal Press extravaganza during LitQuake’s famous LitCrawl. In January, Seal Press is publishing the book I co-edited with Charlie Anders called She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology and Other Nerdy Stuff. I’ll probably be reading a short chunk of my article from that book. Come see me and the Seal Press crew from 7:15 - 8:15 at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco.

This week, I wrote my column about a peculiar problem posed by Web 2.0: what happens when you can’t find somebody you know is online because there are so many other people who share their name? I had this exact dilemma when I tried to find an old high school and college friend of mine, Lawrence Kim. (He also goes by Chong Kim, which turns out to be an even more common name.) During an initial Google search, I discovered that a Lawrence Kim died in the Twin Towers, and that there are several Lawrence Kims who work in universities — for some reason, university home pages tend to get highly-ranked on Google, possibly because students are linking to class pages or because Google is OBSESSED with academia.

I also searched for my friend in Web 2.0-ville, via Technorati, LiveJournal, and MySpace. I tried (gasp) real-world contacts too, but the only person I know who also knew Chong lost touch with him years ago. So I decided to try the “push” method of searching and write about trying to find him, since the usual “pull” methods of search weren’t working. So far, no dice. Anybody know where to find the Chong/Lawrence Kim who went to Irvine High and UC San Diego? I’m pretty sure he’s some kind of engineer these days, since that’s what he studied in college. But he could be a music composer, for all I know. Maybe he’s joined the CIA or SD-6, and that’s why he’s disappeared!

I’m certainly not the first person to observe that information noise, even if searchable, is no better than a lack of information. And that’s precisely the stage we’re at now with searchability. Unless somebody is particularly well-published or well-referenced on the Web, their identity is drowned out.

Last week, New Scientist published my investigative article on how several large US companies monitor their employees on corporate computer networks (and off them, too). The biggest payoff in my research was when I got a rep from Wavecrest, a company that sells cheapo network monitoring software, to tell me all about how Procter & Gamble uses its system to surveil what all 100 thousand of its employees are doing on the Web. I kept calling P&G for comment, but got shuffled around for two weeks — and then, literally one day before the article went to press, I got the Panic Call. One of P&G’s reps had finally figured out what I was writing about, and wanted to assure me the story wasn’t true. When I confronted her with the evidence, she got very quiet and said she needed to talk to “someone else.” Later that day, she acknowledged that P&G is a Wavecrest client and that she wouldn’t deny their story, but added P&G had “no comment.” Heh.

I got some interesting information on corporate surveillance at Bank of America, Kaiser Permanente, and Yahoo!. In addition, Google’s corporate blogmistress admitted that the company has a special e-mail list where employees send personal blog posts for “vetting.” (Sadly this detail didn’t make the final article.) She also said Google routinely reads the blogs of potential employees before hiring them. Yes, we all know this is true on a common sense level, but it’s another thing to have someone officially admit it.