The blogosphere before your eyes?

Bloglines Image Wall is considered by some to be pretty interesting.

Here’s the deal. Bloglines indexes zillions of pages every hour — and just as many images. The Bloglines Image Wall picks up these images as they come in and places them into a constantly updated grid.

You’ll never see the Wall the same way twice – in fact, it changes right before your eyes. Curious, funny, challenging, good, bad, and ugly – it’s all there. The variety alone is fascinating.

Much has been written about this since the release, and adjustments have been made by Bloglines in response to concerns from educators and librarians. Yes, we can now block the image wall URL.

But here’s the rub – that’s not all there is to worry about!

One of the factors in social networking is being able to share! Somehow this was touted as a fair reason to have an Image Wall.  There are some things I never want to share – and the complaints to Bloglines makes it clear that I am not alone in this.

Bloglines, as you know, allows you to have a public profile – others can see what you have in your RSS feeds. As an educator I thought this yet another good example of professional collaboration. In fact, at times I have checked other’s feeds to see what I have missed and what I should subscribe too – a function that Bloglines allows you to do easily.

Here I was happily checking out everything in a subscriber’s folders – his school, his lovel family, concerts, professional readings etc – and then I struck the smut – big time! Should an educator have this stuff in a public place where teachers and students can access it. NEVER. (Fortunately I have been able to block this subscriber from view in my public bloglines account).

What concerned me was that I had a subscriber with that sort of content – porn is considered inappropriate to be housed in the folders of a teacher’s computer – shouldn’t the same guidelines apply online?

So in relation to management strategies in school with Image Wall, Barry Schwartz said is already:

To be fair, you have to agree before entering to “The Image Wall is comprised of dynamically generated images from user feeds and may contain material of an explicit sexual nature or other adult content.” And you must say you are over 18. OK, now what elementary or high school student using bloglines won’t click the agree button?

Like everyone else, I will have to think of moving soon.

In the meantime, please, if you are an educator who’s also into porn, DO NOT make your bloglines subscription public.