Social media culture is all about transparency: tell the world about your last meal, your current location, your relationships, your likes and dislikes, your hopes and dreams. (So far, to the best of my knowledge, there’s no social network devoted to sharing recent digestive updates. No, I’m not going to go Googling for it.)

But at least you’re conscious of what information you’re choosing to share and with whom… right?

Maybe not. One of the things they tell soldiers in case of capture is to tell the enemy nothing – not even the smallest piece of information. An opposing force could stitch together those small pieces of information into a much bigger and more damaging revelation.

In much the same way, the tiny little personal disclosures we make in our various apps can add up to a surprising degree of exposure. Case in point: “When do they sleep?”, a site that analyzes the timestamps in anyone’s public Twitter stream, and calculates the likely times when they’re asleep.

Maybe you don’t feel that protective of the privacy of your sleep pattern data. Fair enough. How about thieves knowing when you are and aren’t at home?

Please Rob Me used people’s check-ins on Foursquare to figure out when they were away from their homes… and depicted that, tongue in cheek, as a good time for burglars to check into those empty houses. (The creators have since shuttered the site, saying their work in raising awareness has been done.)

I’ve written a few times about the way online participation creates a data mine, requiring only a little digital refining to turn into a solid-gold dossier on our personal lives. And while I’m not one of the folks screaming that privacy is dead, or recommending that you never ever participate in social media, I will say this: bring some intention and awareness to your online activity. And when you ask yourself about revealing a little piece of information, be sure to think about the bigger picture it could help to build.

Alex has adopted the Thesis template for WordPress over on her blog, and I have to say they should be proud of what she’s done with it.

Thesis is a WordPress theming system that allows users to do a huge amount of customizing without having to do much or even any programming… but if they do want to crack open the nearest O’Reilly book, well, Thesis is happy to accommodate. And Thesis has recently added new feature that makes it dirt-easy to create an automatic dropdown menu from nested pages or nested categories. But what if you want to do something a little more ambitious?

Alex wanted to have a menu of selected categories, and have the titles of the three most recent posts in each category drop down when you roll over it.

Here’s the effect she’s going for (there’s still some styling work to do, but you get the idea):

So how did we do it? By inserting this snippet into the custom_functions.php file:

I owe a debt to gjchandler, who posted a code snippet I wound up adapting for the submenu.

While I do get to jump into PHP pretty regularly, it’s usually pretty linear, and I don’t often work with arrays and loops. So this was a lot of fun. And I’d love to hear if it works for you

(Just remember: unless you’re using Thesis version 1.6 or above, you’ll get the whole list in your menu for every category item, and kaboom goes your layout. Yikes!)

Twestival – the Twitter-organized fundraising evening that happens the same evening in hundreds of cities worldwide – is coming again to Vancouver, this time in support of Concern Worldwide. And I’ll be there once again, doing standup comedy about social media.

Get your tickets here… and we’ll see you at the CBC’s Audience Lounge, at their Georgia and Hamilton studios!

March 25, 2010 – 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Apparently so. First up, the National Cartoonists Society has announced their full slate of nominees for their annual awards. They had already announced nominees for their coveted Reuben Award (named for famed brush-maker Coveted Reuben… oh, wait…) – including Dan Piraro, who gives us the wonderful one-panel Bizarro. (Full disclosure: he linked to one of my cartoons a year or two ago. And by “full disclosure”, I mean “To brag,…”)

And the Canadian Comic Book Creator Awards Association has announced the nominees for their annual Joe Shuster Awards (named, one assumes, for comedian Frank Shuster’s cousin… oh, wait…).

The Canadians, forward-thinking folks that we are, have a webcomic category. And the nominees are:

Attila Adorjany – Metaphysical Neuroma
Kate Beaton – Hark! A Vagrant
Andy Belanger – Bottle of Awesome and Raising Hell
Rene Engström – Anders Loves Maria
Karl Kerschl – The Abominable Charles Christopher
Gisèle Lagacé and David Lumsdon – Eerie Cuties and Ménage à 3
Tara Tallan – Galaxion
Steve Wolfhard – Cat Rackham

I intend to check all of them out; I hope you’ll do the same – especially Kate and Rene, who broke my heart with the conclusion of ALM last month.

(Glass ceiling alert: Note that the Shusters’ webcomics is the only category nearing gender parity; only a handful of women are scattered through the others in either list. Look at the lists of juries, jury chairs and directors, and you’ll get a picture of a still-overwhelmingly male-dominated world. I’m kind of stunned.)

Stop the Presses: How to Save Newspapers by Ted Rall

I’m sure this is all said with love.