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October 31, 2009 • 3:12 am 0
links for 2009-10-30
October 30, 2009 • 3:09 am 0
links for 2009-10-29
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Neighbors for Neighbors operate neighborhood-centric community-generated social networks for each of Boston’s neighborhoods. They function as a springboard for action and provide tools for them to communicate and to organize around their common interests.
City personnel like Neighborhood Coordinators and BPD Captains and Community Service Officers interact with members and help them solve problems and connect them to city resources.
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…conference here to tell Federal employees why they ought to be using "Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology" to make government more open. …They've even got a beautiful website set up to tout the government's use of Flash and PDF, and are holding a conference here next week to talk about how Government should use ubiquitous and secure technologies to make government more open and interactive.
Here at the Sunlight Foundation, we spend a lot of time with Adobe's products– mainly trying to reverse the damage that these technologies create when government discloses information. The PDF file format, for instance, isn't particularly easily parsed. As ubiquitous as a PDF file is, often times they're non-parsable by software, unfindable by search engines, and unreliable if text is extracted.
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These 19 tips, from easiest (and cheapest) to hardest, will help you save money by going green, this year and for years to come. Don't delay: Winter's coming, and lucrative federal tax incentives won't last forever.
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our world just got smaller thanks to a speech-to-speech translation app for your iPhone. You talk in English-it talks back in Spanish. You talk in Spanish-it talks back in English. Simple as that. No data charges required–just your voice.
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As part of a corporate sustainability strategy, there is a growing trend to engage employees on multiple levels, both at work and at home. More and more companies are providing their employees advice and tips on how to green their personal lives. But a key challenge is how to measure and track the benefits of these programs.
AngelPoints, a provider of enterprise software solutions for employee engagement, has recently partnered with Saatchi & Saatchi S, the sustainability strategy firm that helped Wal-Mart create their Personal Sustainability Project (PSP) program, to create a new web-based platform to help make it easier to engage employees in sustainability and to track their progress.
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Feeds. RSS. Atom. Syndication. Subscribers. These are some of the keywords floating around the web and have gained notorious prominence over the years. In this guide, we'll take a look at a number of things including what feeds are, why you need to have a feed for your site, how to set up one and then publish it.
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Mark Pilgrim
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October 29, 2009 • 3:47 am 0
links for 2009-10-28
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graphic editing, color, speed, analytics
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The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously today to outsource its e-mail system to Google Inc., making it the largest city in the nation to make the move and handing the Web search giant a major victory in its quest to become a software provider to the world's cities and businesses.
After more than two hours of debate, council members voted 12-0 to approve the $7.25-million contract that would move all 30,000 city employees to Google's so-called cloud over the coming year.
"The City of Los Angeles, the second largest city in the nation, made a world-class decision today to support a state-of-the art e-mail system," said Councilman Tony Cardenas, who made the motion to approve the Google system.
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October 27, 2009 • 3:11 am 0
links for 2009-10-26
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by Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos (Summary from Y Combinator Startup School 2009: http://journal.markbao.com/2009/10/startup-school-2009-summary/)
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With other companies providing the same goods or services as you are, the competition to reach a large target audience increases greatly and with it, the need for Web designers who can deliver new ideas on web quickly and efficiently.
To do this a Web designer needs the right tools. There are loads of such tools available. Unfortunately, most of them are under copyright law and come with a high price tag.
The solution for this dilemma? Open Source. Such tools provide another approach to web design. It becomes easier as Open Source tools give Web designers practical access to the source code, which means you can customize the tools as needed.
Today we take a look at some of these tools which can ease the job of a Web designer immensely. From text editors and templates to websites and communities, these Open Source resources are some of the finest in the field of Web design. Take a look.
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Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.
This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: "This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House's adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow."
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October 26, 2009 • 3:11 am 0
links for 2009-10-25
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What’s important to remember in light of the launch of Mozilla’s Raindrop, which the company calls an “open experiment in web messaging,” is that for many users, email is broken. Inboxes are flooded with useless information as botnets tighten their grip on the broadband infrastructure, alternative ways to send and view messages are proliferating, and it’s just difficult to stay on top of missives that matter.
“Most of us receive messages from many online sources — email, instant messages, tweets, Facebook messages, links,” writes Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker on her blog. Raindrop is a new kind of message manager, capable of sifting and sorting messages in many ways. From its open-source core to the very problem it tries to solve — frustration over email glut — it will be important to many users. Here are four reasons why.
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October 24, 2009 • 3:12 am 0
links for 2009-10-23
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This blog focuses mostly on the value to organizations of allowing their employees to access the social web. It is equally important, though, to grasp th degree to which employees are desperate to use these tools — not to waste time, necessarily, but in many cases because they help employees do their jobs.
The “Government of Canada 2.0″ blog recently published an instructional guide to help employees of Canada’s government get unblocked. The blog is hardly an official government vehicle. In fact, it’s upfront about being “in no way endorsed by the Government of Canada.”
The post, “Strategy to get your Internet unblocked,” is “a bullet-point strategy to possibly unblocking Internet sites. I’m taking a business-oriented approach here, and broad general steps.”
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Raindrop is a new exploration by the team responsible for Thunderbird to explore new ways to use open Web technologies to create useful, compelling messaging experiences. Raindrop's mission: make it enjoyable to participate in conversations from people you care about, whether the conversations are in email, on twitter, a friend's blog or as part of a social networking site.
Raindrop uses a mini web server to fetch your conversations from different sources (mail, twitter, RSS feeds), intelligently pulls out the important parts, and allows you to interact with them using your favorite modern web browser (Firefox, Safari or Chrome).
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October 22, 2009 • 3:05 am 0
links for 2009-10-21
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“People give their loyalty to those who give them security and opportunity,” she said.
As for technology in government, she said that it should be used to make government more comprehensible, accessible and transparent.
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Local Businesses Can Benefit From Mobile Social Networks
The nearly mainstream social web is now evolving and graduating to mobile devices. This emerging space of mobile-based social networks are empowering customers to find the best venues and prices, and offering savvy companies unique ways to cater to this new medium. Yet, despite the emergence of applications like FourSquare, Yelp, and recently launched GoWalla, there are risks as customers talk directly to each other and opportunities for businesses who harness the tools. Local businesses should approach the mobile social networking space by first listening to their customers, responding to commenters, provide special offers to advocates, and prepare for pricing to be impacted.
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October 21, 2009 • 3:10 am 0
links for 2009-10-20
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Free e-books work for me. …
Still, this business of my giving away e-books is a controversial subject. I encounter plenty of healthy skepticism in my travels, and not a little bile. There's a lot of people who say I'm pulling a fast one, that I'd be making more money if I didn't do this crazy liberal copyright stuff, or that I'm the only one it'll ever work for, or that I secretly make all my money from doing stuff that isn't writing, or that it only works because I'm so successful. Of course, when I started, they said it only worked because I was so unknown.
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October 20, 2009 • 3:05 am 0
links for 2009-10-19
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There are lots of ways governments try to address complex issues. One of the more popular is to set up boards or commissions. The logic is pretty straightforward: Legislators simply don’t have the time to concentrate sufficiently on all the individual issues that require targeted attention. A commission can do that and out of the spotlight of politics. But some of these institutions aren’t particularly effective. What’s more, they cost money year in and year out. It’s kind of like buying a horse to pull a carriage: You have to feed the horse every day, even if he never actually comes into contact with a carriage.
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Heather Armstrong had had enough. The mother of two had just spent $1,300 on a brand new Maytag washing machine to replace a rickety old one, only for the new model to faithfully conk out.
After a repairman had made several visits to no avail, she resorted to calling a helpline, and got a wary customer service representative who wasn't helping. Armstrong, a little fed up at this point, finally said the magic words: "Do you know what Twitter is? Because I have over a million followers on Twitter."
To the detriment of Maytag parent company Whirlpool, the rep said that she did and that it didn't matter, a sentiment that was echoed by her supervisor. Armstrong went straight to her keyboard. "I had exhausted all avenues and I had given them chance after chance to make it right," she says from her home in Utah, adding that she hoped "the right person would hear it and help me."
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Creative Scotland will be a new organisation with creative practitioners at its heart: an organisation designed to listen to the needs of professional practitioners and use that intelligence in its role as advocate, champion, investor and broker. Over the next three months, we’ll be listening to your perspective on Creative Scotland’s four priorities: creative practitioners, accessibility, participation and international activity.
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