The Wrong Tail
Guy Kawasaki goes for the Long Tail’s throat. Excellent read.
Blogger Demographics
InfoWeek –
…only a minority of bloggers is interested in topics other than themselves. Only 11 percent focus on politics and government, 7 percent on entertainment, 6 percent on sports, 5 percent on general news, current events and business; 4 percent on technology and 2 percent on religion, spirituality or faith. Smaller groups wrote about a specific hobby, a health problem or illness, or other topics.
Interesting enough.
Education Database
…the Bush Administration’s Commission of the Future of Higher Education, to essentially create a national data base of secondary-level student records, caught my eye. The commission wants to compel colleges and universities to provide each student’s academic, financial aid and enrollment data – right down to attendance records – to an organization that would allegedly use the data to build a huge database capable of tracking – at least initially – about 17 million university students. Add into this soup a student’s K-12 data, and even their career path, and we’ll be able to track students alright. Practically from cradle to retirement.
The Education Department claims the data can be used to better test educational theories and set spending priorities. Some proponents claim the data can be used to grade an individual college’s performance, track college transfer students and drop out rates at specific schools. Or, the data collected could be used to determine whether financial aid pays off.
Keeping the principle of “information wants to be free” in mind – the government gaining access to the full data of the prime demographic without any payoff to said demographic does not seem like a good idea.
Smaller Open Source Groups
WaPo- Connectivity was the only reason these two were found. (Emphasis mine)
Two Georgia men previously accused of contact with Islamic militants were charged with plotting attacks against civilian and military targets, including the U.S. Capitol and World Bank headquarters, according to an indictment handed up yesterday in Atlanta.
…allege that Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, underwent “physical and rudimentary paramilitary training to prepare for participation in violent jihad” both overseas and in northwest Georgia.
When they stop making the same mistake we won’t be able to do much about these attacks. Local level troop presence (in the form of extra and vigilent patrolling by police) and rapid effective response networks is where money should be being pumped right now.
Bill Gates Seeding Innovation
Seattle PI – Maybe this will compensate for the idiocy of the stem cell veto – one of the few issues I vote on –
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is awarding $287 million over five years to 16 research teams — four of them in Seattle — that have agreed to collectively veer off the beaten path.
…To begin with, the participating researchers all have to collaborate fully — sharing raw data and even experimental materials — rather than continue to compete as independent labs.
Brilliant.