Earlier today, I participated in a panel discussion at BlogHer on Mommyblogging: Public Parenting and Privacy.  The other panelists were Chris Jordan, of Notes From the Trenches; Crystal, of Boobs, Injuries and Dr.

Is the future really free? It seems we've entered an age where there's a land-grab happening for personal data and attention time. Look at all the web start-ups backed by venture capital. They aren't investing out of philanthropy. There's value there. YouTube is "free" but Google paid over a billion dollars for it. Why? Here's a hint: It's not about the Tube.

So in case you missed the news, Facebook's Beacon has been refactored into an opt-in program, making it, of course, much less interesting to the marketeer forces eager to monetize our friendships. And so the pro-Beacon lemmings have realized nobody's following them. And so it begins: People starting to realize what "free" services really mean. I wonder at how clueless Facebook was about this.

A new report from Pew Internet gives us the latest information on Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency. This is a 50 page document, so I'll just point out a few of the highlights. The first conclusion deals with the proliferation of personal information.

When Pudding Media unveiled its new free VoIP service at the DemoFall 2007 last week the reaction was fast, furious, and not particularly flattering.

Many of us conduct our lives and our business though our computers. If you want privacy, you may need to rethink that behavior. Choosing a cell phone over an email or online chat gives you no guarantee of privacy either. If fact, you may not find privacy anywhere. Let's start with divorce.

The web and social media have turned many of us who never dreamed we'd be speaking in public into public speakers. It's turned us into online job seekers and buyers. It's taught us how to take a computer to a public coffee house or bookstore to do our day's work in a crowded place. This week's look at the blog world offers up some ideas on those topics.

TANSTAAFL. But you wouldn't know it by looking at all the new sites, services, widgets and what-not catching buzz waves these days. It's nice to be connected in all these new and interesting ways, nice to have "free" alternatives to pricey and often overrated software, nice to be able to find information so quickly. Yet these "free" services and applications almost always come with a hitch: your information, your behavior, your data are being tracked, collected and kept -- and often shared with or sold to unknown others.