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Photo Tagging: A New Art Form?: "Between emails and instant messengers, the Internet has done much for productivity. Business moves faster. And people are connecting around the world. And now, a Canadian company is leading the way for a new kind of art form of sorts — it's called tagging."
Tod Maffin of CBC Radio looks at the use of tags in the photo sharing tool, Flickr. His audio report also discusses the use of tags in del.icio.us
On The Media -January 7, 2005: "In the wake of the tsunami, a tidal wave of information. Also, the legal storm over age discrimination allegations at the Weather Channel and more harsh accusations about the New York Times. All that plus a nice chat with Mr. Magazine on the first-ever podcast edition of NPR’s On the Media." (Via On The Media from NPR/WNYC.)
This week's On The Media has several interesting conversations regarding the South Asia Tsunami and how the Internet was used to share information and to reach out for donations. Also discussions about the democratization of media... The show includes discussions with Ester Dyson, Jeff Jarvis and Tod Maffin of CBC Radio. Maffin does a nice job explaining the recent phenomena of Podcasting and how it is being used by people to time shift content. He also tries to explain why he likes to listen to The Dawn and Drew Show...
BBC NEWS | Education | 'School in a box' for Sri Lanka
The BBC has a report on a UNICEF effort to provide school supplies to teachers in Sri Lanka in an effort to help get schools reopened next week in tsunami damaged areas. The report has images and a listing of supplies in the box. This type of tool was first used to help children of refugees in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami BlogNews and information about resources, aid, donations and volunteer efforts. Kind of a grass roots effort to disseminate information about the disaster, relief efforts, missing persons reports and on the ground reports...
Flickr: Sarvodaya's Photos I was looking on Flickr this evening for images posted from the tsunami areas in South Asia. I did a couple of searches of Flickr tags and under the tag tsunami I found some images posted from a user called Sarvodaya. Turns out that Sarvodaya is a development group in Sri Lanka. Since Wednesday the organization has posted over 215 images on their Flickr site and have created a weblog with updates and pleas for donations.
In addition I found a Flickr group called Hands to S. E. Asia and there found a listing of more images from the area. One member named Heterotopias has posted 59 images in a group call E.S. Asia Quake & Tsunami. With all the talk of citizen journalism and such, these kind of images and tools bring home the stark reality of the situation. The images are harsh in their depiction of the situation there. These are not just pictures of upended boats or damaged houses, but rather they show in very stark terms the human suffering that is taking place. Sometimes you wish you had a filter... This is something that I really have a hard time comprehending...
Update: Flickr TsunamiMissing tag and Flickr Tsunami Missing Group Images of those reported missing... Also yesterday the Flickr Blog pointed to some of these and to a few others too...
WorldChanging: Another World Is Here Worldchanging is a multi-author web site that focuses on technology, the developing world, and solutions to problems. With the recent tragedy in South Asia the articles and posts here have been very informative and timely. The most recent post points to W. David Stephenson's list of 10 key security model elements and discusses them in terms of a warning and response system for any kind of emergency or disaster.
A quick look around this morning finds that some very popular sites such as Amazon, Apple, Google, A9, Yahoo and others have rewritten their home pages to point folks to South Asia Response Fund locations. Amazon makes it very easy with one-click giving...
Update: More places to make donations...American Red Cross: donate to the International Response Fund, United States Agency for International Development, Donate to the International Response Fund, UNICEF: Support South Asia Tsunami Relief Efforts, Center for International Disaster Information
Today Will Richardson wrote about how information from the tsunami effected areas of the Indian Ocean is being published by not only traditional news sources, but also bloggers and how a tool such as RSS can be used to help one keep up to date with the latest information. He points to a New York Times piece which highlights some specific sites that illustrate this point. Will's post also contains a link to a Google News Feed he created using a form off of Justin Phlister's site. This form creates an RSS feed based on Google News search criteria.
While reading some of the weblogs pointed to in the Times article, I came across AlertNet. Reuters AlertNet is a humanitarian news network. It aims to keep relief professionals and the wider public up-to-date on humanitarian crises around the globe.As you can imagine, the Alertnet site is publishing quite a bit of information on the Indian Ocean earthquake.
It was originally set up as a response to the Rwanda crisis of 1994, the Reuters Foundation became interested in media reports of poor coordination between emergency relief charities on the ground. It surveyed charities on what could be done to remedy this. The conclusion was that there was a need for a service that would deliver operation-critical information to relief charities worldwide, incentivise relief charities to swap information with one another, and raise awareness of humanitarian emergencies among the general public.
AlertNet attracts upwards of three million users a year, has a network of more than three hundred contributing humanitarian organizations and its weekly email digest is received by more than 10,000 readers.
After a bit of hunting around, I also found an Alternet RSS feed from Newsisfree.
The Graphing Calculator Story I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.
Facinating story behind the classic Macintosh application, Graphing Calculator, and the guys who kept working on it and got it included on the machine even after being laid off from Apple...