Gregory Heller Get in touch

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725 posts on careers, communication, technology and civic life, since 2005.

  2. 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!

  3. 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.

  4. Google and Privacy

    This is a good op-ed from the NYT about Google and privacy. People love google and seem to ignore the fact that they are pretty bad on privacy, with tracking cookies, saved search history, merky privacy on google desktop serach and then the “never delete your mail” gmail pitch. I heard someone from EFF talk at NTEN regional SF talk about email privacy and wire tap laws. As the op-ed states: The government can gain access to Google’s data storehouse simply by presenting a valid warrant or subpoena. Under the Patriot Act, Google may not be able to tell users when it hands over their searches or e-mail messages.

  5. Donating the Advertising revenue your eyeballs generate

    I just saw this article on DailyCandy.com about GoodSearch.com / GoodSearch is a search engine, now powered by yahoo that donated profits from advertising revenue to the charity of your choice. GoodSearch has a goal of donating 50% of revenues to charity, however in the fine print there is a caveat about a lower percentage in the first year. Anyway, seems like a good idea, wish you could choose your own favorite search engine though and not be forced to use Yahoo. This kind of reminds me a bit of the Interra Project where you decide where a percentage of the profits made by your shopping go.

  6. A New Battelfield: Ownership of Ideas

    Noel pointed me toward this article in the Internaltion Herald Tribune about intellectual property. I have pulled out just a few quotes below: “In certain cases,” said Elsa Lion, an analyst at the London research firm Ovum, “technology companies are beginning to realize they have more to gain by releasing patents to the general public than by hoarding licensing income.” Companies, even those the size of Intel, could one day be blocked from marketing a particular product whose design is made up of hundreds of thousands of patents just because an opportunist has claimed ownership of a single patent, said Adam Jaffe, dean of arts and sciences at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and a patent expert.

  7. Sony / BMG shoot own foot with DRM

    Just saw a snip on the Black Friday Morning News about the Sony / BMG DRM fiasco (apparently Sony wasn’t sure that installing spyware on their cusomters machines was a bad thing). Anyway, some “industry analyst” made a comment that I hadn’t thought of: “Sony just gave kids another reason not to buy CDs and to download music instead” I guess because I have never really been an [illegal] downloader of music, I hadn’t thought about this impact. But why should kids today buy music when the music companies are going to mess up you machine?

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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 ]