Yearly Archives 2007

A really effectively introduced final session now underway here at PDF 2007, with former rivals Zack Exley (Kerry '04) and Mike Turk (Bush '04) talking about the bureaucracy that challenges the Internet operation in a campaign ... and how the phenomenon tracked pretty closely to the emergence and integration of an IT function in any corporate structure. "And it's not just the net" that struggled due to integration issues, Joe Trippi's pointing out, "they have problems decentralizing anyway. ... But there's more integration of the web teams this year with the rest of the campaigns. Light years ahead of 2004." You get all sorts of cripes-I'm-not-the-only-one chills leaving the grit and the grind of your day job as Internet Director at a large organization for a day, and getting to hear these folks all talk about the challenges of "integration." Not a word that made its way in to public…

A colleague beefs: I called Nokia today and in one message they said go to "nokia dot com backslash support" but to add insult they said in a subsequent message go to "nokia dot com forward slash support" And jeez ain't she right?? And this isn't just the problem of people saying "backslash" (\) when they mean "slash" (/), though I could go off on THAT for an hour, too. This is the problem of people who CONSUME things talking like the people who MAKE things. Raise your hand if you've ever talked about a "shot" in a movie ... I certainly have ... as in "Didn't you love that shot where Riggs jumps on a motorcycle and starts chasing the bad guys while behind him there's an airplane taking off? Man, what a great shot!" The general public adopted the word "shot" some time in the 50s or 60s,…

So low income clients have equal access to online legal services. At the NTEN conference today I attended a session on Net Neutrality. A raft of important and often-used scenarios were mentioned to illustrate the dangers of a world where ISPs could favor some content providers over others, for instance by giving visitors to AOL's video service faster downloads than visitors to YouTube. There is no shortage of arguments for Net Neutrality law, but the single most compelling argument I'd ever heard came from session attendee Joyce Raby, of the Legal Services Corporation. Namely, that without Net Neutrality, a low income person using a library or Internet café to access legal services from a site like lsc.gov might have a slower connection than an attorney at a firm researching similar information from a legal site that had paid to be more accessible. My ACLU tie makes me think of this…

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