Ken Camp follows up on his follow up to his provocative post that says that Telco 2.0 is not a winning idea. He compares telcos to five attributes of social media companies:

Five words that do not describe telecommunications or the telecom industry – Participation, Openness, Conversation, Community and Connectedness. The industry, the whole construct of that framework is to control four of those by ensuring there is no community in the first place. To embrace community is not to become Telco 2.0, but to create something entirely new.

Ken worked in the industry for twenty years, btw.

[Tags: telcos telecommunications fcc policy social_networks social_media ]

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“Oh, I just love snow”

Fine. You can have all of mine. Here’s a shovel.

Me, I don’t care for the stuff. Sure, I liked sledding when I was a kid, because sledding takes all the skill of falling down, and, by the way, works on the same basic principle. But now, slipping downward without the ability to stop is pretty much just a description of living day to day, except sledding is colder.

As for all that great cardiovascular exercise that shoveling is supposed to give you: Then why don’t you see snow shoveling machines in health clubs? The answer is simple: It’s. Bad. For. You.

Yes, snow is pretty. See, I’m open minded. And then, after a couple of hours of city traffic, the pretty snow is like the white handkerchief a doctor has a smoker blow through to show the damage the tobacco is doing. Snow is white so that it can display the city’s sputum ever so much more clearly.

Bah.

[Tags: snow winter whines ]

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JP Rangaswami chooses his favorite among the 151 responses to Edge’s question: “What Will Change Everything? What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” JP chooses Chris Anderson’s essay on Web-empowered teaching. (This is the CA of TED, not the CA of Wired.) JP also recommends reading all 107,000 words of all 151 responses, which I have not done. But it’s a great pool to take a random dip in.

[Tags: edge teaching education future jp_rangaswami ]

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Feeling enabled by magcloud — a you-do-the-content-and-we’ll-do-the-rest service — Shannon Clark is thinking of starting a magazine. An actual magazine, with articles and pages and possibly staples. It’ll be on things he finds interesting and aims at being high-quality stuff with a relatively long shelf life.

This is the sort of thing that shouldn’t work, and then on rare occasions does.

[Tags: magazines media shannon_clark magcloud ]

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Remember Northern Light? That was the search engine that did an amazing job of dynamically clustering search results into folders based on their topic or area. That same type of functionality is now open sourced at Carrot2. Jon Lehto, of Monster.com, who pointed this out to me, notes that Carrot2 ” builds categories from search results (configurable number), and the user doesn’t need to ‘own’ the search data.”

BTW, Northern Light is still around, although not for public Web searching. Instead “Northern Light provides strategic research portals to global organizations.”

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous search carrot2 northern_light ]

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Eugenio Tisselli Vélez has posted an analysis of a tag used in Germany to protest a restriction Flickr placed on photos tagged as unsafe. Among its conclusions:

The analysis of the data shows that protestors most likely disseminated the use of strategic tagging among their contacts, rather than within a particular specific-interest group. A list of contacts is much closer to a hand-picked ensemble of friends than one of such groups, and therefore represents a bigger influence for the list’s owner.

[Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tagging folksonomy flickr ]

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This widget comes via Ask Your Lawmaker. (Thanks to Deborah Elizabeth Finn for the link.)

[Tags: egov transparency everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I’m on a mailing list where one particular member is so abusive of those who disagree with him — which includes most of the people on the list — that reading his latest post reminded me to donate to the ACLU.

In fact, I’d like the ACLU to send this guy a message saying that “A donation in your name has been made as a response to your behavior on the ______ list.” It wouldn’t change his behavior, but such an option on non-profits’ sites might spur some more giving. (Citing the venue where the obnoxious behavior occurred would be optional.)

Of course, you can already make a donation in someone’s name at many sites. I’m not suggesting a new facility. I’m suggesting a way to market it.

(During the Howard Dean campaign, some contributor to the blog’s comment thread started the practice of responding to trolls by kicking in another few dollars to the Dean campaign, and thanking the troll for the spur. I loved that idea.)

[Tags: marketing aclu ]

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There are lots of ideas, resources, and discussion about how to reform the FCC at the aptly named Reforming the FCC site put together by Public Knowledge and Silicon Flatirons.

[Tags: fcc net_neutrality ]

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Einstein’s brain has its own Wikipedia entry. There is in fact a Wikipedia category for articles about famous body parts. Without referring to that page, what body parts of which individuals do you think deserve their own Wikipedia entries?

[Tags: wikipedia body_parts ]

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