The Jim Amann for Connecticut Governor 2010 Website
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/30/2008 - 22:27Wednesday Evening, Jim Amann is expected to announce the formation of an exploratory committee for an exploratory committee for a 2010 run for governor. To say that he has an uphill battle may be an understatement. Already there is a Jim Amann for Connecticut Governor 2010 site up. It is worth checking out.
Random thoughts about delegates
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/30/2008 - 21:27On one of the political mailing lists, there has been yet another discussion about the delegate selection process. I wrote an email about it which I thought I would copy to my blog:
The Good Fight
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/30/2008 - 10:34The news: Edwards to Quit Presidential Race.
My comment over on the Edwards Blog:
"Sen. Edwards has fought the good fight as a trial lawyer, as a Senator, in his battle against poverty and as a candidate for President. I am proud to have supported him and I will be proud to support him in whatever ways he feels it will be best for him to continue the good fight."
Glue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/29/2008 - 12:49This morning, I sat down at the computer and fired up pandora.com and started listening to songs that it associates with other songs I’ve expressed interest in. I’ve started flagging the songs that I like there. It struck me that it would be nice if that information could be exported to last.fm. A quick search revealed PandoraFM. So, if you check what I’ve been listening to on my last.fm profile.
Of course this is available as an RSS feed, so I could pipe it into various sites like Twitter, Jaiku, Spock, Plaxo Pulse, etc. Yet there are so many items, I worry about it being overwhelming.
Nonetheless, it got me to think about all the different feeds I generate and how they interrelate. So, I started mapping out various feeds I produce.
Orient Lodge, Flickr, Facebook Statuses, Last.fm,
Bloghud, Blip.TV, Twitter,
Jaiku, de.icio.us, StumbleUpon, ma.gnolia.
As noted before, they are interrelated. My Orient Lodge feed updates my Twitter Feed. It, together with my Twitter feed updates my Jaiku feed. Facebook updates a bunch of feeds as well. One of these days I, or someone smarter than I, will come up with smart tools for pulling all these feeds together.
To further complicate things, I bothers me that if I find a good site, I may want to bookmark it on several social bookmarking sites. With that, I found a blog post that talks about how to set things up so when you tag a page in del.icio.us, it also tags it in StumbleUpon. First test are very positive. Now if only we could add in ma.gnolia as well.
Slowly more of these things will get connected and linked together. Until that time, I’ll play with different types of glue to tie together all of my digital social media.
Serious about Games
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/28/2008 - 21:13Today, I attended Metanomics session with David Wortley of the Serious Games Institute. Wortley spoke a bit about the Serious Games Institute(SGI). I was busy with a bunch of other things at the same time and didn’t give it as much attention as I would have liked. The one thing that jumped out at me was their use of SGI’s use of Forterra. They like Forterra because of its integration with other tools. Hopefully, Linden Lab and/or OpenSim will come up with tools to facilitate creating better objects in the Second Life/OpenSim space.
This was followed by the discussion about Rights and Responsibilities in Virtual Worlds with Jonathan F. Fanton, President of the MacArthur Foundation, Robin Harper, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development from Linden Lab, and Jack Balkin, professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School.
The time was too short and the discussion was too broad to be very interesting. If anything, all that it did was reinforce my opinion about the Lindens being out of touch with the community they created. Robin Linden seemed especially concerned with the privacy. She used it as an excuse for why Linden Lab was not making their jurisprudence more transparent. She also expressed concern about people gathering information about who is visiting their site in SL, and didn’t address the question about how it compared to web sites where even more information could be gathered.
Then, out of the blue on a completely different list, I received an email about Lufthansa’s effort to get people to think about all the European cities they fly to. It is a great little game where you can see how well you know your European geography and improve a little on it.
Here are my initial results:
It seems like a great illustration of a brand using a game to give something back to people interested in the brand.
