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Monthly Archives: November 2007
Give One, Get One
For less than $10 a week for a year, you can help jump start the One Laptop Per Child Project during a “sponsor one, get one” promotion. From 12-26 November, donate an XO laptop to a child in a developing nation (specifically, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti or Rwanda) and receive one in recognition of your $400 contribution. (tip)
Read a (reportedly unedited) review by a 12-year-old.
This project is the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. (TedTalks) The organization has incredibly low overhead: “One Laptop Per Child is able to allocate 95 cents of each dollar raised to acquire and distribute laptop computers for children in need.” And the cost is low because the computer uses open source software. Continue reading
Another MS Newspaper Doesn’t Get It
Way back when (2005), the LA Times tried an experiment with wikis without really understanding what wikis are all about. It looks like the Cleveland Plains Dealer has done the same thing with a four-reader political blog.
Jay Rosen at PressThink has a must-read set of “rules” for any traditional news organization that is considering formalizing readers into bloggers.
Jay focuses on the concept of transparency. What I don’t understand is why online media aren’t using hypertext as a means to provide transparency for every by-lined story. This isn’t the first time I’ve expressed this lament, and I’m certain it won’t be the last. But here it goes.
With the web, we are no longer constrained by physical limits (inches in newspapers, minutes in TV and radio). Thus there is absolutely no reason not to hyperlink a reporter’s name (or a columnist) to a bio that explains why they are qualified to report on this topic and where they might have bias.
For example, when someone extols the virtues of (or pans) a new product by Microsoft or Apple, I want to know a) how long they have been a consumer/analyst of these products and b) how many of “the other guy’s” products they have used. I want to know if they own stock in either company. In the case of a major newspaper columnist endorsing or panning a candidate, I want to know the connections. Think Robert Novak at the time of Valerie Plame: who knew of his past (negative) association with Republican presidential campaigns?
This is no different from the type of transparency that Jay outlines — and the fact that it’s not used (shout if you’ve seen it anywhere) speaks volumes about where publishers and producers see themselves relative to their readers/watchers.
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Cable Faces Rude Awakening (Maybe)
I think it’s a little early to be opening bottles of champagne, but the general tone sounds good.
The [FCC] conclusion that the cable industry has grown too large will be used to justify a raft of new cable television rules and proposals. They include a cap that would prevent the nation’s largest cable company, Comcast Corporation, from growing, and would prevent other large cable companies, like Time Warner, from making any new large cable acquisitions. [...]
[T]he agency may adopt rules necessary to promote “diversity of information sources” once the commission concludes that cable television is available to at least 70 percent of American households, and at least 70 percent of those households actually subscribe to a cable service. [...]
The commission is preparing to take steps to make it less expensive for rivals of the largest cable conglomerates to buy their programs — so that, for instance, a satellite company would find it less expensive to buy programs by the Turner Broadcasting System, a unit of Time Warner.
This follows a FCC ruling last week which prohibits”[c]ontracts between cable TV operators and apartment building operators that limit competition” and “extended its earlier number portability rules to clearly include VoIP.”
New Web Word Processor
Ready to add Flash to your web-based word processor? If so, sign up for Buzzword, <http://preview.getbuzzword.com> launched by Virtual Ubiquity.
Interface is very different from GoogleDocs. I saved the “welcome” document to my hard drive as an RTF — the result is a bit ugly in Word (Mac, Office 2004). I was not able to save a second time: clicking on “Document” caused the drop-down menu to “go up” and “under” my tabs on Firefox. More indepth review later. (Tip)
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