WiredPen

This announcement from Newsvine, which was recently purchased by MSNBC:

If you see a segment on the NBC Nightly News you want to discuss, simply head to the new Newsvine-powered NBC Nightly News Discussion Club at nightly.newsvine.com and an inventory of every single video clip from the most recent broadcast will be waiting for you to replay, forward to friends, or start a discussion about. The launch of the Discussion Club coincides with the unveiling of a brand new NBC Nightly News site and embeddable video player…

One of the biggest problems mainstream media companies have with opening up material for public discussion is the incredible amount of dreck that comes through from what we like to call “drive-by commenters”… That’s why we have the Code of Honor. That’s why Newsvine has never sought to be an anarchistic free-for-all community, but rather a place where intelligent people gather to discuss intelligent things. Does this always produce respectful, insightful discourse? No. But the water level here is much higher than it is almost everywhere else on the web.

This is certainly not the first attempt to marry the idea of “conversation” envisioned by Web 2.0 technologists with “TV news” … but Newsvine is a unique environment. Here’s hoping they pull it off!

The XO computer arrived sometime Friday. We got home late from a birthday event … so I didn’t open the package until this morning, right before we left for a birthday breakfast. I took it along, because it was a geeky group.

The universal response (including mine when I opened the box) … “It’s so cute!”

Fortunately, there was a nine-year-old at the breakfast … he sat down and explored and announced “cool!” every now and then. He figured out the mike … and recorded a snippet of the dinner table conversation (Iowa caucuses) … then got my attention with an urgent “Listen!” We (the adults) were appropriately impressed.

First impressions: Very sturdy! Boot-up is fast (about 90 seconds to complete boot up, but clear indication something is happening from the get-go with a “clock-like” series of status dots). Well-designed icons for applications (very learnable if not immediately recognizable), well-designed hardware (the games guy at breakfast immediately “got” the thumb toggle on the left of the screen border).

We weren’t able to figure out how to connect it to the wireless network; that’s next. The XO people assume (correctly, given how these were ordered) that anyone receiving this has an internet connection and another computer, even if it’s at the office.

I knew that it wasn’t going to be here by Christmas but I was not expecting it because of this 21 December mail:

As soon as your order ships, you will receive another email from us with tracking information as well as information on how to take advantage of T-Mobile USA’s offer to provide one year of complimentary access to T-Mobile HotSpot.

That “it has shipped” mail never arrived! Or it went into spam and is “gone” because I regularly delete the gmail spam folder.More (including pix) later. But it’s really a giggle!

Added:
Safari doesn’t do WordPress in visual mode, I just discovered. No graphs!

All I can say is that we adults were stupid. To connect to a network, click “Neighborhood” and all available networks show up. Our home network is there — and so are two other mesh networks! Does this mean two other homes in our neighborhood have this computer?

Addition #2:
The “it’s shipped” email was sent Sunday! Still haven’t gotten it connected to the Internet; issues with Airport Extreme networks, according to OLPC website.