"Sharing while caring"

I really think that the Internet is a great source of knowledge and information as well as good clean entertainment for careful users. And like any source of open knowledge, we really have to be careful how we share and disseminate this knowledge.

Social Media is also a great development in and could be seen as Web 2.5 as the next extension of CGMTS (Consumer Generated Media Through Sharing).

But with that I think, comes a very big responsibility for a person when he shares any cool or nice link or Video.

With services like YouTube, you always get supposedly "related" Video content displayed on the same page. This content in many cases is actually related and is totally benign, while in rare cases, the content displayed is totally unrelated and may be considered very offensive, thus reducing the positive value and impact of the original shared content.

To fight this we have to "Share responsibly".

I cannot stress how important I believe this is. Get to know cool safe sharing services like http://www.safeshare.tv/ and others.

It is the least we can do, and most of us are tech savvy and we could easily make it work ^_^

This also applies to the sensitive subject of sharing personal pictures of family and friends on sites like Facebook and even Flickr.

Many might say that this is not the soul of social media. To that I counter argue that this is the true form of social media. The term "social" refers to a society where obligations to other society members exist and protecting other members of society (be it actual or digital) from any harm should outweigh any instantaneous gratification of impulsive sharing. I have had my share of booboos when it comes to this. And I have to apologize to any body I have offended.

This is why I make it almost impossible for outsiders to view pictures of students or friends and family. I like to make personal pictures private and set access through sharing guest passes.

Why? because I totally believe that a personal picture are just exactly that, "personal", and there is a God given right to each and every person in any picture he or she appears in to protect his privacy and to demand that the picture should not be disclosed.

A good piece of advice when dealing with social media is to always know your security settings and know how to limit access to your digital content on the web no matter how trivial or important that content is. Poke around to see how to limit access to only friends and family and make it a habit to ask if it is OK or not to share when you are in doubt :D

And also a very important thing is to never tag anybody in a picture without asking. I really think it might expose personal information that the person may want to keep private.

We all know that "Sharing is caring" and I totally think this is true.

But in our day and age, we should also be "Sharing while caring"...

Let's share responsibly and be the forefront of a new wave of ethical power users of the internet. ^_^