Category: News-Politics

FCC will investigate Comcast on Net Neutrality

Thank you if you were one of the more than 23,000 people who demanded the Federal Communications Commission stop Comcast from blocking Web traffic. The FCC announced that it would investigate the cable company’s Net Neutrality violation.

The FCC is seeking public comment before it decides to punish Comcast. By speaking out now, you can force the FCC to stop all the would-be gatekeepers from tampering with the free-flowing Internet: Here’s a link that will let you comment to the FCC: Protect the Open Internet.

For some background on this issue, see Comcast: The Hammerer and the Hammeree.

Perhaps you’re not a Comcast user and think that this doesn’t matter to you. A leaked memo from Time Warner shows they are considering the same dirty trick. See ars tecnica for more.

Useful links for the New Year

  • Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, a NY Times article, talks about why even the most expert of people need to bring in fresh perpective from outside their “box” when innovative thinking is needed. Very interesting ideas on how the brain works. I posted a few thoughts of my own about this at BlogHer.
  • Adding Avatars and Gravatars to Your WordPress Blog gives you step by step instructions from Lorelle.
  • Time Magazine says these are the best 50 websites made in 2007. What do you think?
  • Indexed asks a pertinent question about the way culture intersects with education in “Cause, effect, or both?”

The Power of Natural Systems

black hole energy jet

Scientists put this composite image together using photos from the orbiting Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Dan Evans, the study leader at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge explained, “What we’ve identified is an act of violence by a black hole, with an unfortunate nearby galaxy in the line of fire.”

That’s right. A black hole is blasting an entire galaxy. According to a report in The Washington Post, “That energy, often in the form of highly charged gamma rays and X-rays, shoots out in powerful jets that can be millions of light-years long and 1,000 light-years wide.”

I don’t know what you think about when you look at this stunning image, but I wonder about the life forms that might exist in that far off galaxy. I marvel at the power of nature to prevail over puny organisms with an agenda of its own, planet Earth included.

Today’s useful links

Wikipedia Competitor Being Tested by Google is mentioned at the NY Times. The service, called Knol, allows multiple entries by competing writers and develops a sort of reputation rating for the authors. The article mentions some of Knol potential competitors, but does not specifically mention eHow. Since I’m an eHow writer and am getting familiar the user generated content there, I would certainly consider eHow competition for Google’s new service, too.

Letting Them Know It’s Christmas in Liberia by Kim Pearson isn’t the kind of link I normally provide here. It has nothing to do with web design, and everything to do with the spirit of Christmas. It begins, “This is a story about an extraordinary young woman—really, three extraordinary young women—who will make you believe in angels all over again. At its center is MacDella Cooper, who literally walked out of the Liberian civil war at the age of 13 to triumph in the fashion world and create an eponymous foundation that brings the treasures of home and love to so many of the children she left behind.”

Hannah Montana Tickets on Sale! Oops, They’re Gone. I was royally ticked off because I couldn’t connect by Internet or phone to ticket sales for Hannah Montana tickets for over an hour, at which point they were all sold. I immediately went to eBay and found some already there for about $250 each. How can a slimeball profiteer get a batch of tickets when someone like me who just wants to thrill some of Miley Cyrus’ pre-teen fans cannot? The New York Times has the sordid tale. A plague upon StubHub and their damnable software.

Too Much Accessibility by Patrick Lauke has slides, audio, and information about getting carried away with a little accessibility knowledge and making a mess of things.

LinkedIn vs. Facebook

For a while, people were saying that Facebook was going to bury LinkedIn. Then the advertising program Facebook Beacon backfired and garnered lots of negative feelings and privacy concerns.

See How To Block Facebook’s Beacon if you would like to know how to keep Beacon from tracking both Facebook members and nonmembers.

Now LinkedIn is undergoing a metamorphosis with new principle officers, a new look, and all sorts of plans to stay relevant, according to this article at Business Week.

I’m an infrequent user of LinkedIn, but I am a user. I’m not actively trying to create new contacts or find new jobs. However, LinkedIn is a dignified way to do that, for those who are interested.

I’m not on Facebook. I’m far beyond the college days and far from the target user there. I know many university students and instructors who may be reading or using my books are Facebook members. After all, Facebook is huge: anyone interested in technology can’t help but keep up with what’s happening there. To me, Facebook is a wild and wooly place where youthful folly has a way of haunting users later. LinkedIn doesn’t do that kind of damage.

I don’t think Facebook’s misfire with Beacon was needed to keep LinkedIn viable or necessary. The two sites serve two distinct audiences. There’s plenty of room for both.

Today’s Useful links

Ensuring your HTML Emails Look Good and Get Delivered by David Greiner at Think Vitamin is informative on its own. Its also part of the new Email Standards Project campaign to bring mail apps into the standards fold, so you’ll find out what some of the current problems are in getting HTML email to look good.

Tiny Bubbles: SVG Version at Burningbird requires that you watch what happens for a couple of seconds. It’s a good demo of the very interesting effects Shelley Powers has done on her blog with SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). The clock in the sidebar is created with SVG, too. She has a book coming out from O’Reilly about SVG very soon.

Google Information for Webmasters tells you how to remove websites, cached pages, dead links and other material from the Google index. You can only remove your own info, no one else’s.

The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard is a “20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns.” This film makes me think of a serious problem that prevents change: we operate out of a split mind. One side of our mind wants to consume, consume, consume for the lowest possible cost. The other side of our mind wants to do the right thing for the common good and the planet. But acts we take as a money-saving consumer are exactly the wrong thing for the common good and the planet. We need to talk about and deal with this split between our behavior and the desire—no, the urgent need—to do the right thing.

Got Fear? This site was set up to prepare for the upcoming session “Who’s Afraid of Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and the Big Bad CMS? A Digi-Drama About Fear 2.0” at the January 2008 annual meeting of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative. They want to hear from you about your fears (and the fears you’re observing at your institutions) about the role of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in higher education.

This week’s useful links

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) at Dive into Mark is about the new Amazon Kindle eBook reader. I confess that reading it gave me goose bumps.

Green Computing Part 3: The Whole Machine is one of four posts on green computing. This post supplies information about the greenest computers and many ideas about what to do with old computers.

Customizing WordPress: Edit Theme Stylesheets by Miraz Jordan tells you step by step how to change the CSS.

Web Worker Daily has the goods on two new free/inexpensive alternatives to Microsoft Office. They are ThinkFree Office and Software 602.

Kaltura is a site for creating group videos. They announced this week that the New York Public Library’s treasure trove of 600,000 digital images can now be incorporated easily into Kaltura’s group video projects.  You can start a video, post it on your blog, and let your readers contribute to creating it.