Archive - 2008

Date

January 19th

Iraq's future was the focus of Paulo Casaca's talk in Second Life

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/19/2008 - 20:33

(Initially published in SLNN.COM)

Steering clear of direct criticisms of current United States President George W. Bush, the first member of the European Parliment to speak in Second Life, spoke about the need for reconciliation within the borders of Iraq.

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January 18th

Media and Democracy

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/18/2008 - 23:27

So, the candidates are "whining about the media", according to CNN's Jack Cafferty and he asks, "Is it the news media’s job to keep all the candidates happy?"

Sounds a little defensive to me, sort of like Cain responding to the Lord about the location of Able after Cain had murdered him, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

So, I left my comment there. We'll see if it makes it out of moderation.

To the extent that the media is a corporate entity, its responsibility is to maximize shareholder value by reporting what is titillating and entertaining. To the extent that it is the fourth estate and crucial to a successful government, it has a responsibility to educate and inform.

It seems as if too much of media is focus on the titillating and entertaining, on the horse race aspect of politics, the mudslinging and playing gotcha.

So, perhaps the question shouldn’t be, “Is it the news media’s job to keep all the candidates happy?” Perhaps the question for everyone who calls themselves a journalist should be, which do you love more, your paymaster or your country.

Unfortunately, I see too little love of country.

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SLNN Reporters Notebook – 1/18/2008

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/18/2008 - 11:49

My recent article about businesses seeking clarity from Linden Lab has brought about a raft of reactions. There is a small group of people, primarily people who lost money in banks that are complaining and objecting to banks in Second Life. There is another small group of people who have profited from banks in Second Life, or who believe that banking contributes to the Second Life economy that are arguing in favor of banks in Second Life.

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January 17th

Social Media Developments

Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 01/17/2008 - 16:31

It has been a good couple of days for geeks. First, I got an email from Matt at Spock. Recently, my wife disappeared from Spock. I sent a few emails asking what had happened and Matt responded that in the early days of Spock, they would create search results for people based on information from people’s address books. However, the data in the address books end up not being very good, so they stopped the practice. Then, they started cleaning out those entries. Apparently, Kim was one of the few people loaded from an address book that then went in, set up an account, and added data. Since she was loaded initially from an address book, they deleted her, and I was disappointed to find that my profile no longer listed my wife. The have restored her userid. We put in a bunch of new data and everything seems fine.

One of the criticisms of Spock early on, was that people joined Spock simply to get rid of bad data about them. Hopefully with the cleanup completed, people will join Spock as a means of organizing and presenting good information about themselves.

Then, I got an email from MyBlogLog. Their API has entered a limited invite-only beta. I’m busy trying to finagle an invitation. I did a bunch of extracting MyBlogLog data early on and build some interesting graphs of social networks. The new API looks like it may provide a lot of interesting opportunities to mash up different social networks and see how everything inter-relates. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

Next, I saw a Twitter message that the Yahoo Developers Network now supports OpenID 2.0. So, now I can tie my MyBlogLog development together with OpenID.

For those a little less geeky, I got a message on Facebook about the Newstrust blog. Tish Grier is doing community development for them. It will be great to see that community grow.

So, lots of fund new stuff for geeks, if I can only find some time to be geeky.

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