Here's how to get rid of your digital past.

Here's how to get rid of your digital past. 

Wiping away your digital life means getting rid of the traces you've left – the mistakes you made, the embarrassing photos, the unwise comments, the flawed social media profiles where you've left too much visible.

But how easy is that? The following steps provide a start to reducing your digital footprint and taking back control of your online life.

1) If you have a Facebook account, change every setting in the Privacytabs to "private" or "not shared" or "off" (there's a special "privacy settings" shortcut in the blue bar near the top).

2) Find out what photos you're tagged in on Facebook. These should appear in the Photos tab on the left hand side. If you hover over the picture, a star and a pencil appear in the top right. Choose "Report/remove tag" and pick "I want to untag myself" from the list.

3) If you have a Google Blogger account, delete your profile there. That means that blogposts or comments you've made there will vanish.

4) If you've got a Tumblr or Wordpress blog, delete that too.

Now start using a search engine, and begin searching on your name (put the first name and surname together in quotes; this works in pretty much all search engines to identify that as a phrase you're after). Note that some sites, such as newspapers, generally won't agree to removing your name if you've appeared in a news or other story.

5) If you've posted in forums, go back and see if you can delete your posts. If you can't, try asking the administrators of the sites (nicely) if they can remove your post. Have a very good reason. You should always bear in mind the Streisand effect, which can have the reverse effect – spreading what you don't want to draw notice to around theinternet, with the equivalent of a klaxon attached to it. (In 2003 the singer Barbra Streisand tried to remove some aerial pictures of her California beach house from a collection, via a lawsuit. The outcry meant the pictures were more widely spread, rather than the reverse.)

6) Remove any photos you've added to sites such as Flickr or, of course, Facebook. Try searching on your name in Google Images (put quotes around your name) and see what comes up: then visit those sites and ask if they would remove the photos. Again, be aware of the Streisand effect.

7) Keep doing searches on your name and finding out what turns up, and getting in touch with the owners of the sites. Be prepared to get rebuffed, especially if the site is in the US.

8) Be aware that anything that you've posted outside Facebook, Blogger or Wordpress might still live on in the Internet Archive – which aims to crawl the entire web again and again and store what it finds, for ever. The Internet Archive doesn't have an explicit way to remove sites once they're in its index – which is colossal. And as it sees itself as a repository of the web, which would otherwise be short-lived. It does take a case-by-case approach to requests for removal.

9) Be aware too that even if you remove explicit mentions of your name, a determined searcher may be able to dig up your past through leftover postings and hints of whatever sort. Mentions by other people, photos where even though you're not tagged, you're mentioned in related information.

In this, we've not taken the more extensive move of deleting your Google web search history – though if you don't want to be (silently) tracked by Google, then stop using Google's search (there are plenty of other search engines that won't track you, such as DuckDuckGo.com or Blekko.com. DuckDuckGo is improving all the time, and saw a big jump in traffic with the change in Google's privacy policies last year.

Expunging yourself from the internet is very, very hard. As far as is known, nobody's succeeded – though of course if they had, how would we know?

What other tips, links and suggestions do you have for reducing your digital footprint? Do you think it should be easy for people to airbrush their digital footprint? Leave your ideas and views in the thread below.

CHECK OUT A HOW TO VIDEO http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/video/2013/apr/05/how-to-delete-yourself-from-the-internet-video 

Harlem Shake.... MMU HYPE..

Harlem Shake 

What is the Harlem Shake? 

The Harlem Shake is an Internet meme in the form of a video in which a group of people perform a comedy sketch accompanied by a short excerpt from the song "Harlem Shake". As a meme, the video was replicated by many people, using the same concept, and this rapidly led to it becoming viral in early February 2013, with thousands of "Harlem Shake" videos being made and uploaded to YouTubeevery day at the height of its popularity.

The form of the meme was established in a video uploaded on February 2 by five teenagers from Queensland, Australia known on YouTube as The Sunny Coast Skate. The video started a viral trend of people uploading their own "Harlem Shake" videos to YouTube. The teenagers' video was a follow-up to a video by a YouTube comedy vlogger named Filthy Frank which featured a section where several costumed people danced to the song "Harlem Shake" by Baauer.

Viral spread...

On February 10, the upload rate of Harlem Shake videos reached 4,000 per day. As of February 11, about 12,000 versions of the popular Internet meme had been uploaded to YouTube, garnering over 44 million unique views. By February 15, about 40,000 Harlem Shake videos had been uploaded, totalling 175 million views.

Harlem Shake hit the 1 billion view mark on March 24, 2013, just 40 days after its first upload, according to Visible Measures. From the day when the first video was uploaded until it hit 1 billion views, the videos were accumulating an average of more than 20 million views a day. The time it took for Harlem Shake to hit 1 billion views is half the time Gangnam Style took hit 1 billion views and almost a sixth of the time that it took Call Me Maybe. On April 4, Harlem Shake had 1.21 billion views.

Baauer's single reached #1 on the iTunes America chart and #2 on iTunes in the UK and Australia on February 15, 2013.

The Harlem Shake meme has spread in many countries, including the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and much of Europe, Russia and Eastern Europe, China, India,Latin America,  the United Arab Emirates,and Jamaica.

Best of Harlem Shake Videos 2013

NEWS FLASH... Harlem Shake at MMU 

FIRST year Advertising and Brand Management students got their latest project to a worldwide audience with a little help from Lord Alan Sugar this week.

The students had been tasked with creating and sharing a promotional video as part of their Digital Media and Marketing Platform unit.

Taking to Twitter to market a link to their video, the students got a personal retweet from Lord Alan Sugar’s Twitter account, sharing the video with his 2.8 million followers worldwide.

Brendan Keegan, Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, said: “Around 2.8milllion Twitter users worldwide will have had this video posted in front of them and it soon became evident that the number of viewings rose dramatically.

Competing for views

“There were 17,000 views within 18 hours from the Sir Alan’s tweet - some pretty impressive statistics which we have never seen the like of in past video projects like this.”

The original task was to create an ‘Unboxing’ video - a style of promotional video that displays the unpacking of new products by an expert. The whole process is captured on video with a commentary and is uploaded to the Internet so that viewers can experience opening the new product for themselves.

This year, students were set the challenge of unboxing a Kinder Egg, meaning they had no knowledge of what was inside. The teams were then encouraged to compete with each other to get the highest number of views on their YouTube videos for which there would be a prize presented at the final lecture at the end of term.

Seems like all MMU have gone Harlem Shake Crazy!!! 

     In Creative Advertising.... 

In the Library..    

    In ICE Lesson.... 

Where will you do yours??? DMCM1213?