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Archive

December 2005

30 posts

  1. Can Rocketboom Shake up broadcasting?

    The NYT ran this article over the weekend about Rocketboom the pioneering daily video log which is now positioned to be a perfect video download to the new video ipod. As the article reports, with about 100k viewerd, rocketboom could be making big money selling adversing. The video is only a few minutes long and could be bookened with short ads. 100k viewers is up there with a bunch of the cable news programs. Why aren’t there more such video casts? I could see a network of such short spots that users could then assemble their own program from through taxonomic searching. Some of us at CivicActions mused about a system that could aggregate and classify public televisions and public access television programming from around the country. Users could then subscribe to certain terms, or specific feeds, the result would be a show assembled on the fly of segments the user wants to see.

  2. Yahoo is so Web2.0

    As I was riding the subway in my Santa Suit on saturday for Santacon , I was reading the NYT Business section, and there, before my eyes was an article proclaiming that del.icio.us was purchased by Yahoo!? Hopefully this will mean good things for one of my favorite web2.0 sites, but there is a sinking feeling that came with the news. I haven’t really liked Yahoo much in the past few years, but now they own Flickr, and GoodSearch and del.icio.us!

  3. Heavy Metal Jacket

    As some of you know, I am pretty fascinated with teh things you can do with shipping containers. I myself have one that is used for storage. I would love to mae a minimalist cabine with a few somewhere in the woods. Perhaps a combination cob house shipping container house… Anyway, last week's NYT ran…

  4. Corrections and comments

    Figured i would point out a comment i made over on the Village Voice Blog correcting a post about campaign spending in the CCM2 (Rosie Mendez) race . Also commented on a similar post over at the Politicker Lastly a plug for Amanda Hickman who is guest blogging over at the Drum Major Institute about technology…

  5. "There is a virtue we believe in…"

    Last night I attended a gala fundraising dinner for Elliot Spitzer's run for governor. The room was packed, the event raised over $5 million! But what was really apparent is that Elliot is a great speaker. I am not sure that any politicians today will turn phrases that politicians 50 or 100 or 150…

  6. Washington Post makes Congressional voting records available via RSS

    Props to Scott Trudeau for IMing me this blog post on 37Signals about a new service of the Washington Post . The US Congress Votes Database allows users to search votes by member, by congress, by margin and more! Then you can subscribe to an RSS feed. So an organization that wants to spread the word about how congressmen in their area are voting could aggregate the vote feeds for their congressmen on their website!

  7. Grumblings about the Do Not Call list and political solicitations

    If I had a dollar for everytime a voter got angry with me for calling them about an election and said “I am reporting you, we are on the do not call list!” I would have a few bucks (probably more if I put in more time on the phones 😉 I saw this letter in the NYT this weekend unforunately the article is behind a pay wall, but it would seem that it just talked about dreaded tele-marketers. It is the letter that talks about political calls. Recorded political messages are even more intrusive than commercial calls and should be banned. During the past election campaign, all political calls to our household were recorded solicitations.

  9. I’m a Scrum Master!

    As of 5pm Friday, I received my certification as a Scrum Master. What’s that? Well Scrum is a form of project management that focuses on self managing groups and agile/iterative development. Read more about Scrum .

  10. Henri Poole and Mike Gifford Talk About Open Business Models

    While at the Web Of Change conference in September of 2005 I spent a fair amount of time talking to Mike Gifford of Open Concept Consulting about CivicActions and our business model and how it can be a model for new open source web development consultancies. Upon our returns to the real world, Mike wrote me with some questions, at that point I brought Henri Poole, one of the founders of CivicActions into the discussion.