Blogs
A conference call with Sen. Edwards
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 03/15/2007 - 12:43This morning, as Senator Edwards heads to his major policy speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, he took time for a conference call with the media. I had received a media alert about the conference call and asked if I, as a blogger, could participate. Sen. Edwards press secretary responded “We are blogger friendly”
As you come to expect with political candidates, the call started a little late. Sen. Edwards started off outlining the speech that he should be giving as I write up this blog post.
He said the speech is focused on the fundamental transformational changes needed here in the States and in the across the world such as dealing with poverty, health care, global warming, a new energy economy, and improvements to education. He went on to say that he would be talking a lot about global issues which would be the newest part to people in the press corps.
Wireless Net Neutrality
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 03/14/2007 - 21:13On February 8th, Tim Wu wrote a blog entry about his beta draft of Wireless Net Neutrality. For a long time I’ve thought that the wireless industry in the United States was not operating in the best interest of consumers, that there actions are anti-competitive. I’ve been concerned about why Europe and the Far East is so far ahead of us in wireless innovation.
Yet most of the time, it hasn’t particularly affected me. Sure, the ridiculous pricing on text messaging discourages me from using text messaging as much as I would otherwise.
Then, this evening, I got an email that changed things. I often use Free Conference.com for conference calls. They sent out an email saying,
As of Friday, March 9, it's come to our attention that Cingular Wireless has begun blocking all conference calls made from Cingular handsets to selected conference numbers. If you call our service, you receive a recording that says, "This call is not allowed from this number. Please dial 611 for customer service".
Earlier this week, Sprint and Qwest joined in this action, blocking cellular and land line calls to these same numbers. This appears to be a coordinated effort to force you to use the paid services they provide, eliminating competition and blocking your right to use the conferencing services that work best for you.
Thinking about grassroots organization
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 03/13/2007 - 10:26Over on MyDD, there is an interesting discussion about the latest straw poll. PsiFighter37 comments about the organizational structures:
The interesting dynamic to observe between the two would be the interaction between the campaigns and the netroots. Edwards' grassroots outreach appears to be largely organized in a top-down fashion. …
Many … seem to be put off by the Obama's lack of active interaction within the netroots. Nevertheless, if one takes a look at Obama's website, it is a highly decentralized, bottom-up organization.
I comment that while I prefer Edwards positions, my preference for a bottom-up type organization. Psi agrees and goes on to say
that the bottom-up directive works well mainly in the initial stages of boosting a campaign's base of supporters and volunteers. When it comes time to hit the streets and knock on doors, there definitely needs to be instructions from the top.
Web 3.1: Real Time Enterprise Internet Presence
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/12/2007 - 11:18Between Twitter messages about SXSW, video streams and online text chats about Freedom to Connect, Blogging the Libby Trial, and preparing for theNew England News Forum, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the Internet and I want to share some of these thoughts in terms of the financial services industry as well as a broader context.
Web 2.0 has already gone from the hot new thing to the Web 2.0 bubble and people are now talking about Web 3.0, the semantic web. I had been talking about my visions of Web 3.0, which are a bit different, and since the marketers have taken Web 3.0, I’ll take Web 3.1.
Yes, the tools that are predicted to make up the semantic web, which will mine and connect data sound very cool and I look forward to using them. As Lars noted the other day, Dow Jones is Introducing Elementized News Feeds for Quantitative Algorithms. The ability to take this information, mash it up with a market data feed, data about positions and trading strategies and any other information that can found is a good illustration of the sort of data mining and analysis that will make Web 3.0 very cool.
Yet there is more to this than simply mashing up data. More and more, the data is becoming real-time. The Twitter messages are coming in as instant messages or text messages, as well as updates to webpages and RSS feeds. Chats, like those that took place on the backchannel for the Freedom to Connect conference are content rich real time data, and many people wanted information coming out of the Federal Courthouse in Washington in as near real time as possible.
Twitter This!
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 03/12/2007 - 08:02This weekend saw an explosion of Twittering for me. One group of friends were all down at SXSW. I’m getting lots of twitters from there. Another group is following John Edwards on Twitter. I’ve started to subscribe to breaking news alerts on Twitter. Then, there are friends that are twittering about the use of Twitter for non-profits, and the group of people just living their normal daily lives on Twitter.
So, what is this Twitter stuff all about? Well, put simply, you can IM, text message, or submit from the web, a quick message that all of your followers will see. They get a choice of seeing it either via IM, text message or the web. It is a pretty cool tool, but there are a lot of things I would like to see enhanced.
