Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker has a neat piece on the challenge of blogging and other new media to traditional journalism called "Amateur Hour: Journalism without Journalists." One of the most interesting bits compares the rise of blogs to the growth of pamphleteering and periodicals in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Based…
Category: Information Society
The future of tour guide technology, Part IV
This is the last in a four-part (I, II, III) exploration of guided tour tech. In Part One, I mused about the potential for using ICTs to connect experts in particular disciplines with tourists visiting a particular site on an ad hoc basis. Apparently this coordination problem has been somewhat solved by combining iPods and…
New site provides online tools for human rights defenders
I received in my in-box news about a new online resource for human rights activists called Human Rights Tools created by Daniel D’Esposito , formerly of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The site is basically a set of links and RSS feeds to information useful to human rights professionals in an easy-to-navigate format. …
The future of tour guide technology, Part III
As I was posting the previous entry on guided tour technology, I was thinking that it was more than likely that someone had already developed this. I was right. Not only has someone created a prototype of the kind of 3D-imaging, GPS-enabled, context-relevant goggles I wrote about, but they built it specifically for the city…
Public Access pitted against You Tube in Florida
Steven Clift linked me to an article in the Gainesville Sun out of Florida on a community’s failed attempts to get a public access channel on their local TV. The paper reported that Alachua County commissioners in June joined the Gainesville City Commission in declining to create a public station. What is interesting / dangerous…
Virtual Relay for Life nets $38,000 for American Cancer Society!
Tao Takashi reports on his blog that this year’s Second Life "Relay for Life" benefit for the American Cancer Society raised more than $38,000 this weekend! That’s a tremendous increase from the $6,000 raised last year! I was super busy this weekend, but stopped in briefly to check out all the fun and drop some…
The future of tour guide technology, Part II
In my previous post, I blogged about how in the near future we might see the tour guide industry expand from a location-based vocation to one that might be expanded to include experts from around the world using ICTs. Beyond the use of distributed experts to serve as e-guides, there are many possible technologies that…
The future of tour guide technology, Part I
I’m back from a lovely trip to Italy with my girl Cindy. It was a fantastic trip, from the magnificent art of Florence to fun and sun on the Amalfi Coast to the rich history and vibrant present of Rome. Visiting the ancient city of Pompeii a couple of days ago, it was obvious that…
Chinese hyper-nationalism in virtual worlds
Global Voices Online highlighted today a fascinating controversy in China that arose out of the image of a rising sun appearing in the Chinese multi-player online game “The Fantasy of the Journey West”. Appearing in the Blog East South North West, the blogger reports that there was a mob scene of cursing players at the…
Broadcast radio in the age of the iPod
My friend Swifty pointed me to a sad story about the change in format of WBEZ, the last jazz radio station in Chicago, from music to news / talk. This is particularly poignent as Chicago is one of the great centers of jazz in America. Some loyal listeners have started an online petition to get…