Blogs

Interviewee: Steve Hargadon

Site discussed: http://www.refurbishedcomputers.us/

Service Used: http://frappr.com

Steve Hargadon is a commercial computer refurbisher based in Sacramento, California.  He sells computers to public schools in need of affordable resources and has worked in the past with Net Squared's parent organization, CompuMentor.

Some time ago Steve visited Canada and learned that the Canadian government's computer refurbishment program has supplied public schools across the country with about 25 % of their computers in use.  He found this quite inspirational, but was frustrated that there was insufficient infrastructure in the United States to donate such a large quantity of computers.  He believes that not enough networking has been done.

We need your help planning the conference.

• Who would you like to hear at the conference?
• Who would you like to meet at the conference?
• What would you like to talk about?
• What would you like to learn?
• How can the conference help us accomplish NetSquare's goals?

To give us your thoughts/suggestions/needs/desires, use our Conference Suggestion Box. Or, you can contribute to the Conference Discussion Blog.

To read about the Conference, including your suggestions and postings, see our Conference section. 

The New York Times runs a story this morning titled Google Offers a Bird's-Eye View, and Some Governments Tremble

...since its debut last summer, Google Earth has received attention of an unexpected sort. Officials of several nations have expressed alarm over its detailed display of government buildings, military installations and other important sites within their borders.

Poetic justice, if you ask me. They've been scanning us long enough!

Our own Jody Mahoney sent in reports from WSIS (the World Summit on the Information Society conference held in Tunis in November).  Now she's written up her thoughts as Notes from Abroad: Human Rights and Web 2.0. Jody writes:

Freedom takes on a new meaning in a place where you encounter checkpoints and controlled entries at every turn; where sharpshooters cradling automatic weapons line the road for miles and armed police and national guardsmen are present everywhere.

Britt Bravo (see Accidental Techie), talks about the Net² community on Odeo. The sound is a bit echoey, but you can hear her OK. There are other raps by Marnie Webb and Chris Messina, all collected here. More of these, please.

This isn't exactly breaking news (in fact, I think it was mentioned somewhere here before), but I'd managed to miss these pages, so it was news to me. As was Odeo, which looks pretty neat. Please don't hurt me for admitting that I haven't beta tested every new tool that's hit the web in the last year -- I'm already clicking as fast as I can! <g>

Earth Share Washington www.esw.org is a federation of 66 environmental organizations around the state. (See the group's profile in Net² in Action.) ESW focuses on delivering work-place financial donations to its member organizations from supporters around Washington.  Their web site has been built using the Movable Type blogging system for the last two and a half years. The Movable Type system has proven very valuable for the organization, increasing their number of page views by a factor of 7 times that of their old site.  Because of the limitations of Movable Type, they are now looking into using a full service Content Management System and are inclined to implement the open source system Plone.

For all the border-busting placelessness the internet enables, there are still very interesting and diverse implementations of web tools new and old that are tied to specific geographic locations.  How are blogs being used in Japan?  How do people in Iran using tagging?  What sorts of ways has RSS enabled new work to be done in Brazil or Argentina?  Unfortunately, those questions are far easier to ask than they are to answer - as far as I can tell.

For political news delivered by blog, the group Global Voices (see profile in case studies) is a great source of aggregated content from all around the world.  But what about news about the tools themselves and how they are used?

A friend of mine who is the Executive Director for a school gardening nonprofit in San Francisco, just started a blog for her organization that inspired me to create a quick guide to starting your basic blog.  I am very much an Accidental Techie, so take my instructions with a grain of salt. 

I can't believe del.icio.us is down. I was in the process of using some of those links to write blog posts and share with other people.  I guess that means I am taking a break from blogging and social bookmarking.

However, even though del.icio.us is down. I have an account on suprglu and I am able to access the links I saved on del.icio.us from the time I started using suprglu. At least I am able to access some of my bookmarks.

I need to start saving my bookmarks in another place in case this happens again.

How is everyone else surviving without del.icio.us? 

By the way, for those of you who use Bloglines, it will be down for a day. Yes, another website will be down. At least this one has a schedule for when it will be up again.

This morning's Seattle Times has a story titled Web 2.0 mania revives dot-com investing, which explores

...a growing movement online that's not only reviving investment in dot-coms, but, some say, is changing the very nature of the Web itself. The phenomenon has been called by different names. One has stuck: Web 2.0.

Like everyone who has struggled with precisely what this phenomenon entails and where its boundaries lie, author Aman Batheja grapples with definitions -- but also offers as concise a synopsis as we've seen anywhere:

At its core, Web 2.0 is about two things: The first is a new era of Web development where many of the basic building blocks to creating new online tools have already been designed and are freely available....

The other major component of Web 2.0 is a new breed of social software that encourages users to create a site's content and use it in different ways.

The article mentions a British blog called Web 2.0 Central, which, in its own words "profiles companies and startups building web based applications using technologies like Ajax, Ruby on Rails, Flash, RSS, Open API's and assorted web based application development tools." Definitely worth a look.