Category Archives: News

Join us for Net Squared live online!

Way too busy right now to post much here, but for those of you not able to make it to the Net Squared conference next week in person – there is another way! Check out http://netsquared.org/remote to see the live online sessions planned. We’ve got people from Bloglines, Creative Commons, Meetup.com and many more fascinating organizations. I hope you’ll check out the conversation and join us for a chat or two.

Associated Press partners with Technorati

Here’s some big news, the 440 news outlets around the country that use the AP’s news module will now include a list of the most blogged about news items of the day on their sites and display inbound links to each individual article as discovered by Technorati. I wrote about it over on Social Software – and it will be interesting to see what other people think. I think it’s great – especially for local-issue bloggers. The barrier between traditional and new media is being broken down more every day.

Here’s some free advice: nonprofit organizations wanting to do issue-based outreach with their blogs would be well served to subscribe to the feeds of organizations like the AP, either for search terms or through a filter. For high-priority items, if you’ve got a fast blogger on your team, set up an RSS to IM/SMS alert system for selected filtered feeds. That way your blog will be amongst the first to cover AP stories of interest. That’s how I wrote about the Technorati/AP partnership announcement before any other blogs did.

Interesting note: when this type of alert system sets me to write a particular post and I’m looking to cover the news first, I ping the key ping servers manually with Pingoat to come and index my new post instead of relying on automated pinging systems. Google Blogsearch has found my post about this partnership in its search results, but despite pinging Technorati specifically, Technorati has yet to discover the post I wrote linking to its own blog. Hmmm…

Another note, this on Memeorandum: the Technorati blog post I covered is on the top of the page, this blog – which does not link to the Technorati post but to the Social Software post that does – is second in the conversation, and the Social Software post I made is third. Interesting. A number of conclusions could be drawn from that.

One cool teacher on the congressional move against social networking sites

A group of primarily Republicans calling themselves the “Suburban Caucus” have moved to require schools to block access to all commercial web sites that enable the creation of web pages by students, user profiles and the ability to communicate between users. Otherwise they would lose their federally subsidized internet access. It’s MySpace-o-phobia gone nuts. It’s despicable, but I’ve never liked school much anyway. I wrote a snarky post about it over on Social Software last week and some very interesting commentary has emerged in the comments section. The best commentary I’ve seen yet, however is from the Cool Cat Teacher, Vicki Davis. Davis is an outspoken Christian, a private school teacher in Georgia – and she’s got a long, scathing critique of the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) congressional proposal. I highly recommend checking it out. Vicki points to some great resources on the topic and her post is a good place to start if you want to learn more or help do something about it. Thanks Vicki!

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Net Neutrality debates in audio and video

Two weeks ago Britt Bravo made a good post over at Net Squared that included some lists of people likely to be effected by the current debate over net neutrality. If audio or video is a way you take in information, I can’t recommend highly enough this recent episode of Radio Open Source on net neutrality. I thought it was going to be boring but it was hot. Big thinkers on both sides of the issue fighting it out and lots of easy-to-understand info and history. The PR guys from the telecom industry on the show are smart, too.

Here’s a pretty good short vid on the topic. See the above podcast to hear the best of the other side of the arguement.