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 

The pros and cons of the digital-only future

The pros and cons of the digital-only future 

A reader gives his views on the impact of smartphones and tablets on gaming, and suggests that a digital-only future is not necessarily a bad one.

Is the extinction of physical media really a bad thing?

Andy_b720 made some interesting points in his feature a few weeks ago. I do however think he has underestimated companies like Microsoft and Sony, who are probably well prepared for the dramatic changes in the industry which are happening right now.

Reading through the Underbox of andy_b720′s feature made it clear that a lot of people only want to play games if they can have a physical device sitting under their TV which plays physical media games. Maybe a lot of these people took his suggestion towards tablet or phone gaming to mean actually solely playing a game on the touchscreen of one of these devices. I didn’t.

Within the next several years it will be probably be possible to have a phone size device as powerful as the next generation of consoles sitting in your pocket streaming games to your TV. You will be able to control these games with a standard controller that will be wirelessly linked to your phone and whilst in play the experience will be no different to playing a game on a home console from a Blu-ray or DVD. What’s more is that these games will still be Xbox and PlayStation games.

This isn’t some random hypothesis, simply the logical progression of technology based on exactly what has happened since the first computer was birthed.

Computer technology has always and will always get faster, smaller and more streamlined. It will continue to converge, it will become more accessible and change to suit the needs and lifestyles of the people who use it.

Physical media will eventually disappear because it is simply more convenient to not have to physically buy, store and use a disc or cartridge.

I currently use Blu-rays to watch my movies. This is because I’m obsessed with picture and sound quality. I could (pay to) download or stream a film to my laptop and connect it to my TV but I don’t because my laptop’s video card won’t process 1080p video at quite the same quality as my Blu-ray player. Most people I know though think I’m mad and quite happily watch new releases streamed or downloaded in frankly awful quality and it doesn’t seem to bother them one iota.

So try telling one of these people that one day they might have to download or stream the next Call Of Duty or FIFA and not have a physical copy to keep or sell on. Their reply will probably be, ‘So what?’

People will even argue that the decline of physical media is an attempt to stamp out second-hand sales. It’s not, the death of second-hand sales will be more of an unintentional by-product of the move away from physical media. I’m not saying it won’t have positive repercussions for publishers and negative ones for consumers, just that these are not the reason a downloadable future is happening. It is simply because technology is, almost of its own accord, moving to fit the needs of the consumers who make up the greatest percentage of its revenue.

Now this is not me saying I’m happy to lose the ability to sell my games on. I wasn’t happy to have to pay for a DVD player and buy movies I already owned when DVDs came out. I’m sure thousands of people who worked in the VCR production industry lost their jobs. But it wasn’t an evil plot by sinister corporations that did this, just side effects of the inevitable transition from one technology to another.

For the last few years people have tried to compare the sale of games to cars. That people would be outraged if they couldn’t sell a car on. Last time I checked cars cost thousands of pounds and are made to last years. Games cost between £20 and £40 new and most go down to around £10 after a year or so. If cars could be downloaded and only cost a fraction of what they do I’m sure people would be happy enough to buy new each time.

But that day will never come, there will never be the equivalent of a download in the car industry so it’s a ridiculous comparison to make. People are not being robbed of the right to sell their game on rather simply losing the ability to sell it on as a new form of media takes over.

The way I see things going is that Sony and Microsoft’s next generation platform won’t be limited to the physical consoles they announce/have announced this year. Microsoft are already playing with SmartGlass technology and I’m betting with the NextBox any screen-based device will be able to be used as an alternative to your TV, Wii U style, for when the TV is in use. Sony still haven’t even showed a physical console and maybe that’s because this generation won’t always require one.

With the current Xbox you can already access your Live account from your phone. I’m assuming the next one will allow you to go even further. Whilst it might not be available from the get go I’d like to think that all you’ll need to play games in the future would be a wireless controller, access to a tablet device or Internet-enabled TV and an account with Sony or Microsoft’s online service. We could still have the physical console under our TV at home but as the generation moves on and the online service becomes more reliable this will become less and less of a necessity.

People will bemoan the reliability of such structures based on the relative unreliability of today’s Internet speeds. I’ve said it before that within the next decade Internet will be just as reliable as your electricity source and so fast they’ll stop even talking about speeds anymore. Already people I know have 4G capable mobiles which stream Internet to their whole house many times faster than my own home broadband.

So rather than the death of home consoles that andy_b720 predicts I think it will be more of a case of the home console becoming invisible. Sony and Microsoft will no longer need to make expensive machines and ship them around the world. They’ll keep that technology in their own HQs and just sell us controllers and online subscriptions. The industry won’t crash because enough people want to play games, big blockbuster games but it will shed its reliability on home-owned technology. This if anything might even make the industry more sustainable from a financial point of view.

There are many things I’ll miss if we eventually move away from the physicality of game and console ownership. I’ll tell my children of the joy of game stores, the smell of instruction books, the endless hours trying to get the cellophane of a new game. I’ll tell them how wonderful it was to unbox a new console, to set it up and sense its power under the TV. I’ll lament about how my shelves used to be filled with rows of games making it easier to show of my manly geekiness to any guests.

There are a lot of things that will make me miss the way things were. But I don’t think I’ll miss them as much as I enjoy playing games themselves. Because that’s what matters to me, playing games. If I’m enjoying the experience I’m far too busy to be thinking about how I bought the game, what technology is powering it or whether I’ll be able to sell it on afterwards. If the game is good, the graphics are great and the controller works well then nothing else really matters to me.

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?