Community phones connect SA townships: “Old cargo containers in the South African township of Langa are offering people a chance to connect to the rest of the world. The metal boxes are home to community telephone shops offering cheap calls in one of the oldest and poorest townships in the Cape Town area.”
Cambodians share in the digital economy: “It just struck me seeing all the internet cafes and English schools - while they believed in the promise of globalisation, it hadn’t brought them any benefits yet”.
Brazil bets on Linux cybercafes: “Unemployed and living in one of the poorest areas of Sao Paulo City, which has a high rate of violence and little to do, 19-year-old Jose Antonio de Oliveira Silva used to spend most of his time at home. But that all changed with the opening in Cidade Tiradentes of a “telecenter”, a free internet cafe set up by the local authority.”
Computing power aids India’s milk farmers: “Its recently installed computerised and automated milk collection centres are helping India retain its new-found position as the world’s largest milk producer.”
Let it snow let it snow, er wait: It’s snowing again in NYC - I like it, it never snows that beautifully in Belgium. I wish I had my camera so I could take some pictures.
Simon outlines a content management approach that provides versioning, extremely easy content creation and can be implemented very quickly. He created 2 wikis, pointed both of them to the same database, and used one for editing (I assume with a password) and one for display (hiding all the wiki-like links and editing the template to look more like a site).
I like it muchly.
Mark Shuttleworth is spending 100.000 US$ next year on programmers for various open source projects (mostly in Python). Very cool, and to be imitated.
Ten Years of My Life: a picture a day for ten years.
peterme.com: My cup runneth over.: (in the comments) “Categorisation tools help, but isn’t it always the questions which are key?”
Oh boy! The new Battlestar Galactica comes with chicks, and: “The look and feel of the four-hour miniseries contrasts not only with the original, but also with the rest of science fiction television at large. Grand, cinematic, Star Wars-like battle tableaus have been replaced with a “reality space” aesthetic.”
keep for later: can blogs make a (political) difference?.
kuro5hin.org: “A few people have, in the past and for a variety of reasons, requested that I remove all of their postings from the site.”
Donna thinks my book looks good :)
WorldChanging: “CIDA City Campus in downtown Johannesburg is the first university in South Africa to offer students a free, ‘open-access’ education. It was founded five years ago by an amazing man, Taddy Blatcher, with no resources. He literally announced that the school was open for students without having a building, professors, a curriculum or anything else that might be useful in providing students with a four year business degree. By the time his first batch of students turned up he had most of those things in place (including a building donated by an investment bank which was unused due to crime in downtown Johannesburg).”
OK so I’m linking to every single post at worldchanging. So what.
Fatema Mernissi: “But to better understand the empowerment dynamics of satellite broadcasting, one has to keep in mind the intense competition not only among channels but also among satellite operators which is forcing everyone to switch as fast as possible from manufacturing propaganda to responding attentively to the citizens’ needs for credible communicators. And of course the Sheherazade profile, the brainy, self-confident storyteller is in big demand.”
An unexpected side effect of changing a site to a new system and thereby breaking all the old URL’s, is that Google ads no longer shows up the relevant ads it did before. The difference is really quite dramatic, and translates in a clickthrough rate that has halved from 1.5% to 0.7%. I guess I just have to wait until Google spiders the site again.
Great ideas 101: “People would like to do this in their 40s; we’re starting it when we’re 20,” says Sharma, a finance and international business major. “Just to see someone who’s my age, who’s my peer saying, `I’m starting my own business, and if you want you can join me,’ I said, `Wow.’ You see someone around you doing something and doing so well, and you think, `I can do that too.’ “
Fast Company | Practical Radicals: “Ever since she arrived as a child from Mexico, Maricela Gallegos has heard the same question: Couldn’t she Americanize her name? “Mary” would be so much easier to pronounce. “I say, No, my name is Maricela. All my brothers and sisters changed their names. They always said to me, ‘Why do you go against the grain? Roll with the punches.’ But I could never do that. I’d be shortchanging myself. [...] I was trying to conform enough to be effective, but not so much as to be co-opted. [...] I compromised myself in exchange for the power of the institution”.
A story on people who change the rules slowly, from the inside.
And continuing the theme: ongoing · Taxonomy Madness: “So, a reasonable person might ask: ‘Why all this taxonomy work? What is it being used for?’”
Feature Myths Over Miami: “To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building — always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. “They eat light so they can fly,” eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army’s emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. “There’s a lot of killing going on in Miami,” he says. “You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories.” The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters.” (Discussion here.)
Metadata and Search: Global Corporate Circle DCMI 2003 Workshop: “One audience member noted that a multi-year trial of decentralized metadata creation in his organization had yielded virtually no usable records, because authors were simply not interested in metadata.”
Lou on Shirkey’s recent metadata writings. Lou’s an insightful man with tons of enterprise experience, so I’d listen to him at least.
(via Simon) Disinfopedia: “Welcome to Disinfopedia, a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.”
Technical Information For The Jhai PC And Communications System: bicycle-powered wireless internet: “The Jhai Remote Village IT system was designed in response to the expressed desire of villagers in Phon Kham and four associated villages for a telecommunications capability, specifically the capability to make local calls and to make calls overseas via the Internet.”
Kevin Kelly — Help Wanted: who rejects technology?
Kevin Kelly — Cool Tools. A keeper.
I’ve seen various, slightly differing solutions to the too-many-tabs-to-fit problem recently. Amazon does a “more tabs” thing at the right, the new AOL has an embedded tab scrolling thing (the tabs that are not embedded don’t scroll, thus allowing for a selection of more important tabs that are always visible), and SAP has a scrolling tab solution without the tabs that stay (couldn’t find a screenshot…). Point to other solutions in the comments and I’ll add screenshots.
It seems like the too-many-tabs problem is slowly coalescing towards a standard solution for websites.
I’ve seen the Mac solution below being used on a weblog at one point, but I can’t find it anymore. Anyone?
My girlfriend is working on a 10+ page paper, and she asked me advice on how to work on multiple topics at the same time in Word, cross-referencing them and referring back and forth.
I’m happy to say that I must have learnt something as an IA, because I told her to chuck the computer and user paper. I even resisted the urge to go into a rant on why a computer screen was not the right tool for this task, no matter how good the software. She quickly worked out a system that worked for her, and all was well.