I love these kind of community policing / shaming techniques people employ in New York. I have some insanely noisy neighbors in the building next to me, who I have been incapable of convincing to turn down the music after, say, 2am on weeknight. I hope the folks on Elizabeth street had better luck than…
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. …
FCC to review media ownership rules this Fall
The Federal Communications Commission issued yesterday (July 24) their decision on a new proposed rulemaking procedure on media ownership. A press release details some of the key issues to be considered, including: Local Television Ownership Limit Local Radio Ownership Limit Newspaper Broadcast Cross-ownership Ban Radio Television Cross-ownership Limit Dual Network Ban UHF discount on the…
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…
Kaneva entering the MMORPG market
I somewhat randomly came across the "World of Kaneva," a new multi-user online virtual environment still in development (i.e. vaporware.) Kaneva itself is a channel-based hosting service for videos, blogs, photos and other multi-media content, still in the beta-phase. They appear to be trying to dominate various kinds of e-business at the time, going up…
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…
Mokaflor coffee: it’s not just a beverage, it’s a racist caricature
Cindy was horrified and amused to find in a grocery store in Florence this package of Mokaflor espresso coffee, which depicts a frightening depiction of an African person with an insane smile carrying a cup of joe on a tray. The bow tie seems to imply that the person is supposed to be a waiter. …
Plone Magic!
I’m at “Plone Magic Camp” this weekend to learn about the Plone content management system, programming and designing in Plone. (For web geeks: Plone is an open source CMS built on top of the Zope framework which is written in the Python programming language.) Going to “Magic Camp” I was hoping to get a wand…
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…