Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Blogs in developing nations

BBC News posted African Bloggers Find their Voice, a survey of African blogs and their implications for politics and the media. The article has links to several African blogs and to Harvard's Global Voices site which follows and encourages blogs in developing nations.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

Assessing the Wikipedia

The British science magazine Nature published a comparison of Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica based on the number of errors in selected articles in each. For more on Wikipedia assessment see these links.

Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Inmarsat: global mobile connectivity

Inmarsat offers global access to portable computers using LEO satellite. For terrestrial mobile connectivity options, see this class note.

Monday, December 12, 2005

Doug Kaye: audio production how-to

At the November 2005 Portable Media Expo, Doug Kaye of IT Conversations gave a talk on what IT Conversations does and will do in the future, open source audio production software tools they are developing, the management of his volunteer organization and many how-to tips on audio editing and production for podcasts. This 24 minute excerpt includes only the how-to portion of the talk in which Kaye tells us how to produce MP3 podcasts. Check the full, hour-long talk for the other topics.

Protopage -- a useful tool?

The Protopage service allows you to create and maintain a site with text, graphics and links very simply using your browser. Can you find applications for it?

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Problems with AJAX

User interface expert Jakob Nielsen points out some flaws in AJAX. With AJAX, there is no longer a one-one association between a URL and a Web page, the Back button does not work, some browsers have problems, etc.

Thursday, December 01, 2005

A false Wikipedia "biography"

In our homework survey, we found the Wikipedia to be quite accurate and complete; however, errors can go undetected for some time. One example is the Wikipedia biography of John Seigenthaler. It has been deleted now, but, for 132 days, the Wikipedia falsely linked him to the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and made other completely inaccurate assertions. This erroneous biography was copied verbatim to other Web sites.

In response to this incident, Wikipedia began requiring registration before posting a new article. And, finally, the man who made the false post has apologized.

Don't take the Wikipedia or anything else on the Web as The Truth. Can you find any errors in the Wikipedia?

Portable Media and Podcast Expo

The Expo was held in November 2005 in Ontario, California. The keynotes and sessions covered podcasting and audio technology and business and the future of media. Many sessions were excellent, and they are all online. Here are direct links to recordings of the Friday and Saturday sessions.

Doug Kaye on the value of free content

I posted a 3m 19s excerpt from Doug Kaye's keynote address at the Portable Media Expo held in November 2005. Doug talks about the value of free information. He feels you maximize the value of content by making it free with no impediments (like registration) to accessing it. If you like this excerpt, listen to the entire talk in which he describes his IT Conversations project and his (ambitious) future plans.