Monthly Archives: January 2006

No Feed For Skype News?

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Wow, I was shocked to just see that the Skype press releases page doesn’t have an RSS feed! May those who enjoy playing “How Web 2.0 Is…” keep this in mind!

I set one up by scraping the page with http://www.wotzwot.com – a service I’ve never used before. I tried Feedfire.com (my old favorite) and FeedTier, but neither could do what I was looking for. So we’ll see about this new service, at least it’s new to me.

Sorry, I forgot to provide the URL for the Skype News feed: Skype News Hope that’s of interest to some one out there!

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Interview with Nancy White

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Nancy White is an incredible woman. She did a long Skype interview with me for Net Squared last week and I hope readers here will go check it out. Here’s more on Nancy from my intro to the interview:

Nancy White provides strategic communication, online community development, facilitation, marketing, and project management services for the community, non-profit and business sectors through Full Circle Associates, her Seattle, Washington based consultancy.

Nancy is on the advisory boards for BlogHer, Knowledge in the Public Interest and works with many other organizations. She helped set up and has been a key facilitator of the March of Dimes’ ShareYourStory blog community for parents with children in neonatal Intensive Care Units.

Google Images China on Tiananmen vs. Our Images of Ourselves

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This is interesting, you’ve read about the bizarre combo of Google refusing to give up US search documentation on one hand but agreeing to censor what Chinese users can see at the behest of the Chinese government on the the other hand. Check out what Google China users see when they do an image search for Tienanmen. That’s a popular page to link to in the blogsphere today.

Witness the shocking difference between that and, for example, a US Google user’s image search results for Christopher Columbus. Comparably benign, are they not?

So while it would be no small technological achievement for Google to successfully hide the images that the rest of the world associates with Tiananmen from the Chinese people themselves, I would contend that they still have a ways to go before they can rival the scale of cultural “information organization”/obfuscation that goes on all the time in the United States.

Like what? US history aside even, how about the following:

  • “Current estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion in illegal funds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half going through U.S. financial institutions.” US Senator Carl Levin
  • “Trafficking of women and children for the sex industry and for labor is prevalent in all regions of the United States. An estimated 45,000 to 50,000 women and children are trafficked annually to the United States…” From Cia.gov
  • “The U.S. has the largest per capita prison and jail population in the Western industrialized world, with approximately 2 million inmates…As Americans continue to recoil at the sight of photographs and videotapes showing handcuffed prisoners piled naked on top of one another, being bitten by dogs, being sexually exploited and subjected to other forms of debasing abuse at the Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq, human rights advocates say similar constitutional violations occur on a regular basis in United States prisons.” via Common Dreams.

We may be able to find these things on the internet in the US (the fact that they are true is bad enough) but how often do we discuss or consider them? Isn’t the effect similar at least?
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From the Garden to the Law Library: Web 2.0 Applied

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I just posted two new interviews over at NetSquared. The first was with Abby Rosenheck from Urban Sprouts, a SF school gardens project with a blog. I think she offers a great explanation of the support-building function a blog can play, especially for a small organization.

The second was with legal blawger Dennis Kennedy. We talked about a whole lot things, but the discussion about OPML was most exciting to me because I’m on an OPML kick these past 24 hours. We also talked about blogging, RSS, wikis, legal research and the law.

Get Lots of Women Tech Bloggers’ Feeds in One (OPML) File!

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Anne Zelenka of Anne2.0 has really pulled of quite a feat and helped answer the question “where are the women bloggers?” in a neat way using cutting edge tools. She created a bit of code that grabbed the blogroll from misbehaving.net, home of one of the most extensive lists of women bloggers, found the RSS feeds for those blogs and squeezed them all into one OPML file. That means there’s one URL to copy and paste into your RSS reader and kapow – you’re subscribed to a huge number of women tech bloggers. Nice! Here’s that URL: WomenTechBloggers

update: Anne says “I don’t think it’s all that useful right now… it’s a huge number of feeds to suddenly start paying attention to. Still, interesting as a beginning exploration.” But I think she’s wrong. My initial thoughts after the more link… Continue reading →

Educational Multimedia: Open or Proprietary Infrastructure?

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George Siemens over at eLearn space likes iTunesU, Apple’s new system to facilitate academic content delivery via iTunes. But a fight is underway between Apple’s use of “Digital Rights Management” (content reuse restrictions) and many folks on the web, now including the people behind the GPL (general public licence) software framework. Will largess and convenience defeat grass roots openness and collaboration? Impassioned discussion on the conflict between the newest version of the GPL and DRM over at the always interesting Dan and Dave Show podcast.

Alternatives exist! Check out the Educational Podcast Network, where you can find everything from the Countryside 4th Grade Podcasts to the School Improvement Industry Weekly podcast.

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Scoble on Web2.0 is Real

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Microsoft super blogger Robert Scoble did a short email interview over at Net Squared and one of the questions he was asked was whether Web 2.0 is hype or for real. Part of his response included the following:

Yes, there’s a bit of hype there, but there’s also a trend that you can’t escape. More and more people are using the Web everyday and for more stuff. We’re now even able to see when our next bus will arrive in Seattle using a Web browser. Is there something unique? Yeah, the bandwidth has gotten better, the browsers with the latest technologies have gotten much more ubiquitous…

I agree that there is some hype (imagine the mockery if I didn’t!) But I think there are major indications that Web 2.0 is a real cultural change underway.

What are my favorite examples of this? The fact that RSS feeds are now available from most major online news sources and search engines is one. The fact that Yahoo has bought Flickr, Del.ico.us and Upcoming.org all in the last year or so is another. (I’m not necesarily thrilled about these acquisitions, but I think they are demonstration of the reality of Web 2.0) The fact that the number of blogs coming online is absolutely exploding and that this is occurring in a number of different contexts. My three favorite examples of late demonstrating the applicability of blogging in a variety of contexts? SciencBlogs.com (a network of science blogs), Blogging for a Cause (cancer support and networking blog) and Blue Fox Farm (a small organic farm and CSA that blogs).

What evidence do you have or is your favorite that Web 2.0 is not just hype? Plus don’t forget to check out the rest of the Scoble interview.

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