Miscellaneous Ramblings

This month:

• Balloon-related health discussions
• Unwanted junk mail (aka "spam")

Balloon-related health discussions

One of the earliest serious discussions recorded in the BHQ archives, that of good and bad health effects of using balloons, has surfaced once again. Ever since the early days of BHQ, we've done our best to keep the health section of the Guide to Balloons and Ballooning up to date. The Balloon Council also maintains information about health effects of balloons. Of course, that doesn't stop new things from developing or new quetions from coming up. Let's rehash some of the things that came up over the last few weeks.

Choking

Statistics show that of all the things in the world, balloons aren't exactly one of the more dangerous things we can encounter. However, like many other innocent looking things, they can be a hazard when mis-used.

Larry Moss, one of the BHQ editors, had a unique opportunity to be part of a focus group exploring ways of reducing choking deaths in children. Rather than solving the problem by eliminating balloons, this one group wants to make balloons safer. These guys are saying, "yeah, we know only a few kids a year choke on balloons [compared to food items like hot dogs and peanuts], but let's see if we can prevent even that." We've all seen the bad press about balloons at times from people that get carried away and claim balloons are deadly and should be removed from the market. When someone came to us and asked for help in finding ways to address the issue while still putting balloons in kids' hands, we wanted to get involved.

The obvious answer is to educate everyone. Every bag of balloons (at least in the US) has a warning label that says they're a choking hazard. We inform parents and kids when performing about the dangers if they're mistreated. But, let's take this a step further. No amount of education will stop everything. A while back on the twister list, someone suggested that we make balloons taste really bad so that the taste will deter kids from putting them in mouths. (Larry asked a kid what taste would deter him from putting balloons in his mouth. He said he wouldn't touch anything that tasted like his school's chicken nuggets.) Then of course there were the people that said they like being able to blow them up by mouth and didn't want this to happen.

The issue is that we can't easily dislodge a balloon that does get into a child's throat. A balloon is a soft, flexible object that can easily conform to the shape of the trachea. It can also rest on top of the epiglottis, preventing it from opening. Either of those scenarios prevents any air from reaching the lungs. The Heimlich maneuver and other forceful ways of dislodging a foreign object won't free the balloon due to its stretchy, conforming properties. Maybe one day someone will find a way of making a balloon that's safer without taking away the properties of balloons that make them fun.

The fact is balloons are dangerous if misused. Let's keep them fun by making sure we educate parents about the dangers. Maybe if everyone is aware of what can go wrong, some accidents can be avoided.

Improving the lungs with balloons

Since there are negatives of using balloons, it only seems fair that there are also positive health effects of using balloons. Several balloon artists have reported over the last few years that while working with their doctors over a period of time, they've been able to show that their lung capacity has improved since learning to inflate balloons by mouth. Using balloons as therapy has apparently been very useful to several asthmatic balloon artists.

Helium and other stuff

A couple other health related topics came up this month. These included air pockets forming under the skin from inflating balloons and inhaling helium. Inhaling helium can be dangerous when not properly regulated (such as with diving equipment) and can be fatal when drawn directly from a tank.

Unwanted junk mail (aka "spam")

This month saw an inordinate amount of unwanted junk mail. This wasn't just with BalloonHQ readers. It seemed that across the board, the amount of spam increased, in part due to e-mail worms or virsuses. As a result, we received a lot of questions about our policies regarding junk email.

We don't sell any information you give us and we don't give lists of names or any other information to anyone. That includes the sponsors. Just because they advertise on BHQ doesn't give them any additional priveleges to get our private member list. If you have any questions about our policies, please feel free to re-read the member agreement that you were given when you signed up. Or simply ask us. We want everyone to be comfortable with our policies. We've got nothing to hide.

The only access anyone outside of BHQ staff has to member names is on the public web site. It's sad to say, but it's expected that many BHQ members are seeing an increase in junk mail. In fact, I'd be surprised by anything else. One of the things we offer to members is greater exposure on the web. We host the directory of balloon artists.

The purpose of the directory is to make it easier for your potential clients to find you and for people to learn about your work and find the appropriate artist for a job. Unfortunately, just as a telemarketer can read through the yellow pages and collect names, someone can collect names from an online directory. So, just be careful of who you do business with. But that goes for the yellow pages as well as the web. (In fact, much of the junk I receive in my e-mail box every day is the same junk that's been appearing on my fax machine for years.)

The directory is set up so that email addresses can only be found by viewing the individual page of each person. There's no way to request a list of every email address in the directory. In other words, it's hard for them to get everyone's information, but not impossible if they want to manually go through each listing. A technically savvy individual could, conceivably, find a way of automating the task of grabbing information, but they still have to go through quite a few steps to get the information they want. No matter what I do to make it hard for spammers to grab lists of email addresses there's always a way around it for those that are determined. You can choose to be listed in our directory or not. That's up to you. Greater exposure to clients means greater exposure to the people you don't want to deal with also.

Those of you that have listed yourselves in the directory, either because you opted for a free listing, or because you chose to be a paid member, had the choice of which information you wanted to be available with your listing. You can change that information at any time and you can change which pieces of information are made public. If you say you want something private, it will remain private. Again, go to the directory and search for your name. When you find your listing, click the update button and make sure everything appears (or doesn't appear) the way you want it.

Now, that addresses the issue of the artist directory. There is one other place that people can find your email address. Remember, several thousand people read the twister and decor e-mail lists here. Every message sent is archived and searchable. That means that if you post a note, your email address becomes public. That's necessary so that other people can respond to the things you say. However, if you never post anything to either list, no one will ever know that you are subscribed to the list and can't get your address from us. A number of people I know have chosen to create special accounts at places like hotmail.com just for their mailing list mail so that it's essentially a throwaway account. Spam can go there and be completely ignored.

There is something else we could do to help the situation, but it's a challenge. We are considering ways of filtering all mail that goes through a BHQ address. There could be greater spam protection by going through us than on your own personal accounts. But there are dangers involved in that. If we place a general purpose filter on all email, it's possible that something that is legitimate will accidentally get blocked. Right now, we believe that it's better to allow all mail through to individuals (we have filters set up for the mailing lists, as that's a professional forum and we can control who uses it) and deal with sometimes deleting junk than possiblly stopping a potential client that wants to reach those same individuals. This is not an easy problem to solve.

Lastly, the question has been raised about what information we share with our sponsors. The BHQ sponsors obviously need to know something about the performance of their ads on BHQ. We don't track who logs in or clicks on individual ads. All the sponsors get is information on how often their ads have been viewed and how many people have clicked on them. We sometimes can give information about trends we see, like which pages have been viewed more often and what events cause people to return to BHQ constantly to see photos, but we don't give them information on who views those pages or who views those photos. And you don't have to be afraid of us one day selling a ton of information we've collected over the years about your web browsing habits. We believe in privacy, so we never collect that information. We can't one day decide to sell it if we make sure never to have it in the first place. Obviously we do have personal information on members which makes it much easier for us to offer support and contact you if we need to, but that stuff is protected. And the most important security issue of all relates to credit card numbers. We don't save them once your online applications are processed, so if one day someone does break in to our server, there's nothing for them to steal.

Hopefully that helps everyone understand what we do with your information and how we feel about privacy. If you have any other concerns, please ask. It's memberships that are helping us grow and keep us online and we want all BHQ members to be happy with what we're offering.