Month: April 2004

Bill Gates, Philanthropist : Gadgetopia:

I am stunned at comments like this. Why do people think that these comments go TO the people that the posting refers to? This has happened several times.

What in my postings makes it sound like it is FROM the subject rather than ABOUT the subject? I don’t get it.

Another example: I posted something about email to the White House once, and a lady wrote a comment as a message TO President Bush, as if he had made the posting himself.

cloudy, chance of sun breaks: the pain of reading someone else’s fan mail:

For some reason, people are posting comments to this entry as if I were J K Rowling.

I did leave a contact address for her, the same information these kids could get from their teacher or parent. I’m sure the Gates Foundation’s contact details are just as obscure.

Why is Microsoft Nastier than Linux?:

I do, in general, advocate clicking banner ads you find even remotely interesting—everyone should click at least one GoogleAd or other banner every online day—your thoughtfulness in responding to these ads helps hone and guide web advertisers into acceptable best practices, and each click helps preserve the free access to information; because it’s easier to ignore, web advertising is less intrusive than television, and because you register your attention by voting with each click, you can personally influence their strategies.

Yes, please.

I think we should probably stop calling it syndication (kottke.org)

Duh. This is one of those ‘elephant in the drawing room’ moments: we all know a thing is there but we don’t acknowledge its presence.

Syndication is defined as  selling (an article or cartoon) for publication in many magazines or newspapers at the same time; “he received a comfortable income from the syndication of his work”.

So unless your stuff is being harvested and republished (the Remix Culture rears it’s head), syndication is not an accurate description: publishing is a perfectly fine one, though.

We see a lot of work being done on clients and new feed formats (the seven nine flavors of RSS and now Atom) but what about tools that take and remix feeds, that take related or similar elements of different feeds and repackage those? Suppose I want BoingBoing‘s Japanese pop culture tidbits, Wonkette‘s laceratingly snarky coverage of the presidential campaign and Gary Murphy‘s notes of networked knowledge applications, all in one feed. Any way to do that without rolling my own tool?

Hmm, sounds a lot like that personalized newspaper we’ve been hearing about since Marc Andreesen was in short pants. But that’s syndication in action.

from a mailing list:

On December 18, 2001, by a vote of 407-0, Congress designated September 11th as Patriot Day. We believe the most patriotic gesture citizens can make on this day is to come together in public places like local libraries. Through talks, roundtables, deliberations, and performances, citizens will participate collectively and think creatively about our country, our government, our community, and encourage and support the
well-informed voice of the American citizenry.

Public libraries provide all citizens open and free access to information. Almost all communities in the US have at least one library. There are over 16,000 public libraries in the US, and that’s not including university libraries, K-12 libraries, and church libraries. In other words, libraries constitute an already existing national infrastructure. Moreover, 96% of all public libraries in the US are wired, partly due to the Gates Foundation’s successful library initiative. Therefore, libraries also constitute a national and distributed media infrastructure.

The September Project has three goals:

1. to coordinate with all libraries — public, university, research;
local, national, global — to foster multiple public spaces for citizens to come together and participate in events on September 11, 2004;

2. to work with all modes of media — popular and alternative;
streaming/digital media, radio, television, print — in order to transform local conversations into national and international interactions;

3. to continue doing this annually and internationally on September 11th.

The aim of The September Project is to create a day of engagement, a day of community, a day of democracy. Our goal is to foster a tradition for citizens around the world to recognize and give meaning to September 11th.

We invite you to visit our web site and to get involved. Although our initial organizational strategies have been focused primarily on the US, our aim is international. Thank you for your time

Remarks by the President to the Travel Pool:

THE PRESIDENT: My response was exactly like then as it is today, that I asked for the Central Intelligence Agency to give me an update on any terrorist threats. And the PDB was no indication of a terrorist threat. There was not a time and place of an attack. It said Osama bin Laden had designs on America. Well, I knew that. What I wanted to know was, is there anything specifically going to take place in America that we needed to react to?

Interesting that in the case of Bin Laden, the administration was content to wait for something to react to, but in Iraq, pre-emption was the preferred course: Saddam Hussein bluffed that he had weapons, and that was enough to launch an invasion. Bin Laden had no weapons but he was on the radar as a threat, with a motive — the release of Sheik Rahman, who plotted the 1993 WTC bombing — and the names of the two eventual target cities were in the briefing.

Op-Ed Columnist: We’re More Productive. Who Gets the Money?:

[According to a recent study,] “This is the first time we’ve ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38 percent.”

The study said: “In no other recovery from a post-World War II recession did corporate profits ever account for as much as 20 percent of the growth in national income. And at no time did corporate profits ever increase by a greater amount than labor compensation.”

In other words, an awful lot of American workers have been had. Fleeced. Taken to the cleaners.

The recent productivity gains have been widely acknowledged. But workers are not being compensated for this. During the past two years, increases in wages and benefits have been very weak, or nonexistent. And despite the growth of jobs in March that had the Bush crowd dancing in the White House halls last Friday, there has been no net increase in formal payroll employment since the end of the recession. We have lost jobs. There are fewer payroll jobs now than there were when the recession ended in November 2001.