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Archive

January 2007

48 posts

  1. Freecycle

    Anyone who has talked to me recently has probably hyeard me start blabbing about freecycling and freestores. I am very interested in it as a way of reducing waste and waste handling related problems (filling landfills). I was excited to see that NetSquared had an interview with the FreeCycle Founder I was super surprised to read him say that he thought his org was doing “the best work with new tools”. Since I first discovered Freecycle.org I have been dissapointed in the lack of new web technologies in use. For most of its life Freecycle has basically just been soem yahoogroups that have sometimes hundreds or even thousands of posts a day. Watching the New York and Brooklyn Freecycle lists is a full time job.

  2. Workshop on iNames

    Kaliya Hamlin just pointed me towards this: Invitation to learn more i-names and datasharing using XRI and XDI by Andy Dale on the afternoon of Monday December 5th. Who will find this workshop useful? Those who want to have data from web-based applications (i.e. transaction processing, membership management) as well as basic forms (i.e. registration, surveys, etc.) integrate automatically with the back-end databases. Unfortunately, I will not be able to make it Alameda for this event, but lookforward to somethign similar in NYC.

  3. ActivistCash.com goes after progressive organizations

    I just wanted to carry this over from my personal blog. Dan pointed this site out to me, and I felt the need to share with others…. ActivistCash.com goes after progressive organizations – I am a big fan of sunlight. I believe it makes the best disinfectant. And there is nothing wrong with sites like fundrace or guidestar or the center for responsive politics or they rule that all try to point out the influence and sources of money for politicians and other organizations. But ActivistCash.com is a little different. The site claims: ActivistCash.com, a project of the Center for Consumer Freedom, provides the public and media with in-depth profiles of anti-consumer activist groups, along with information about the sources of their exorbitant funding. But is does so with well written but heavily biased narratives about individuals and organizations. It is the kind of site the left needs to go after the bevvy of right wing organizations that are funded by the same cabal of ideologues. Everyone should take a look at the site and see what the enemy is saying about your favorite organizations, especially environmental organizations… [ Read the rest at GregoryHeller.com ]

  4. Structured Blogging

    Yesterday I saw a post about StructuredBlogging on Bryght’s Blog and on Kaliya’s blog and they piqued my interest. I was kinda surprised that I (or we) hadn’t heard about this conference before it happened because the concept of making blogs even more useful by structuring them with more machine readable data is really great. So I just poked around a bit on the Structured Blogging site and now I am thoroughly intrigued.

  5. Psychographic voter profiling

    Throughout the NYC mayoral campaign I kept on talking to people about how much Bloomberg was spending on “list development” and how outrageous the amount seemed. It was $5 million in May! Well the NYT ran a story earlier this week exposing what the money was going to : [Voter] Lists like this usually include voters’ personal data – the magazines they buy, the cars they drive, their political affiliations. But as the cost of compiling Mr. Bloomberg’s list inched up toward $10 million, not even aides to President Bush, who perfected this sort of voter identification last year, could figure out where the money was going.

  6. Friendster? Spamster?

    Friendster caught some flack recently for “re-inviting” people who had not responded to previous invites from their friends. The temptation is strong to abuse email addresses of people who have not opted in to your site or list. Friendster spokesman Jeff Roberto called this a misconception. “We’re not in the business of spamming,” he said. The campaign, he added, was a one-time mailing to people who were once invited but never joined the network. I would like to point out that a generally accepted definition of spam includes: any commercially oriented, unsolicited bulk mailing perceived as being excessive and undesired. I would add: or any advertising email that comes from a source with which the recipient does not have a pre-existing commercial relationship.

  7. Burried under email? Not Me.

    “You have to be smart about how you use e-mail,” said David Strom, editor in chief of Tom’s Hardware Guide, a technology review Web site. “Otherwise you let it ruin your life.” This recent article from the New York Times struck me. As a virtual worker who interacts with my coworkers, clients and other business associates almost exclusively by email, i really don’t feel buried under it. Which is not to say I am not addicted to it. Checking email is one of the first things I do in the morning and one of the last I do most nights. Perhaps the single greatest reason why I don’t suffer from the stress detailed in the article is because there is not much “one-up-manship” in my email exchanges, nor the competition embodied by so much corporate emailing (according to the article).

  8. Open Document Format and Open Data Formats

    Big guns in the software industry are massing behind OpenDocument as government customers show more interest in open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s desktop software. Oh how those words (from a CNET/NYT article last week) danced across the screen to my delight! I have been waiting for, and wondering when(and even nudging in the case of the NYC Council) government purchasers were going to get hip to the benefits of open source software and open data formats in this county. You have customers like Massachusetts asking for choice and the ability to play vendors off each other, and at the same time, you have vendors looking at an opportunity to compete on a Microsoft control point.” I followed this development a few months ago (can’t find the link)and hoped that it would open the door to open source government procurement policies, and it looks like it might be.