Archives for 2005

I read about this somewhere

December 1, 2005 by Michael Boyle

I read about this somewhere

yesterday (can’t remember where) but it has to be seen to be believed. The Liberal Party of Canada has a section named “blogs” on their main website but it consists of the most amateurish, poorly-executed waste of space possible. It’s really hard to imagine that professional political consultants can stay in business without having learned a single lesson from the (at least) two Canadian Federal elections and three US Electoral cycles since the advent of Blogs as a useful form of political communication.

Oh hang on, there is something more poorly executed – the Liberals’ podcasting page looks even worse.

I’ve been trying out

December 1, 2005 by Michael Boyle

I’ve been trying out

the new version of Firefox that was released the other day, and I note with displeasure that the close icon is still not on the tab you want to close itself, but over on the right-hand side. Otherwise it’s fine, though I’m not likely to move from Safari, which I switched to a few months ago.

Fun and interesting:

December 1, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Fun and interesting:

A Tale of Two Fish: A Short Story about Copyright and Fair Use. Even more, though, it’s about Creative Commons. From Yiibu, which calls itself “an open content company”.

Just in time for

December 1, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Just in time for

the Christmas shopping season, two stories about abusive Internet retailers: Thomas Hawk’s PriceRitePhoto story about a bait-n-switch camera store and Cameron Barrett’s UrbanFlorist.com scam story. The message here isn’t to avoid shopping on the net, but to remember that Google is your friend, and before shopping with a company you haven’t used before, it’s worthwhile to check around before putting in your CC #.

Something interesting I missed

November 22, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Something interesting I missed

last week was Nicholas Negroponte’s unveiling of the $100 laptop designed to meet the needs of people in relatively poor countries. The other day, Patrick noted that “… the minimum order [of the computer] is a million units, thats 100 million US dollars” and that this seems to be quite a massive outlay for some poor countries. While that is true, one of the characteristics of such states is that there is a struggling “official” market system with thriving black markets of various kinds. The point of the huge investment that has to be made is not to make the barrier to entry too high but rather to ensure that the computers become so ubiquitous that the market value on the street trends towards 0. One thing is sure – it will be very interesting to see where this goes. I wonder if CIDA or the IDRC in Canada has any formal involvement with this project? Canada has been involved with many computing and networking initiatives in Africa, and it seems that this would fit in quite well.