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We all have photos and moments from our past we'd rather forget. They show up online when we least expect them, like an un-scrubbable digital tattoo. On Facebook. On Instagram. On Twitter. Mine aren't as bad as others. I once played John Hancock in a community theatre production of 1776 . And despite my best efforts, a photo of me in that powdered wig surfaces every now and then. (It could be worse; it's not a photo of me with my own hair.) It's a digital shadow I can't elude. But it likely won't affect my professional reputation. Unless it appears on LinkedIn. Jian Ghomeshi photo by Canadian Film Centre from Toronto, Canada (ideaBOOST Launch Pad May 8, 2014) [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons I'm better able to move forward from that awkward powdered-wig image than  Jian Ghomeshi, the former CBC radio host whose career imploded when, in 2014, multiple women accused him of harsh sexual behavior. CBC dismissed Ghomeshi from his talk program "Q...

By Greg Rakozy (www.instagram.com/grakozy), via unsplash.com More than one friend of mine likes to post photos to Facebook. Photos of their travels. Snapshots from their parties. Lots of photos. Every. single. photo. Like a sky full of stars, that's too much to absorb. What's worse? Often, they're near-identical images -- group shots of three or four people, taken moment by moment, with little change of gesture or expression. Or the dreaded BOH (backs of heads). Not action photos, which might call for a rapid-fire sequence of images. Just group photos. People grinning for the camera. Do we need to see four, five, or six iterations of the same snapshot? No. That's unfair to everyone who follows you. Sure, social media is a visual medium. Visual communications, from infographics to vlogs, are the common currency of the internet. And, one outcome of citizen journalism and the proliferation of smartphone cameras is that people take countless photos. This isn...

I read about a women's electric vehicle team at the Kate Gleason College of Engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology. I thought it was interesting, and used Shareaholic to post it to Twitter and Facebook. Here's what appeared on my Facebook timeline: Notice anything? Facebook defaulted to the second image on the RIT news story, showing the men's team. The women's team (see the second screen shot below), while visible in the original story, wasn't promoted when shared via social media. Why did the second photo appear in my timeline, and not the first? There may be a coding trick or algorithm that easily explains this occurrence. I'd love to hear more about it. But from my side of the screen -- the side most of us see -- this feels a bit biased. Men in engineering? Run the image. Women in engineering? Not interested. Which is baloney. Especially if the women aren't getting equal recognition. If Facebook arbitrarily selects photos of peop...