Updated Pal-Item website disappoints
Posted Fri, 09 May 2008 02:05:09 +0000
Last week, the Palladium-Item - Richmond's daily paper - launched an updated website. Here's my initial review: Good: The site clearly continues the paper's commitment to encouraging conversations and interaction between people who track what's going on in the community. As I did in 2006, I commend them for this. The abuse reporting system in the [...]

Links for the Week - April 28, 2008
Posted Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:12:37 +0000
The "pros and cons of a global distributed network" edition: Do you depend on Gmail or Google Calendar? Did you know they're not ready for production use yet? The Rockridge Institute, a progressive think tank (THE progressive think tank for many) abruptly closes its doors because there wasn't enough money coming in. But as a [...]

Mainstream media adopts the dehumanizing 'illegals' label
Posted Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:52:08 +0000
It was frustrating but not surprising to see today that CNN has joined the list of mainstream media outlets who have adopted the harmful framing offered up in the debate about the U.S. borders, by beginning to use the label of "illegals" in their reporting. It may seem like a relatively small difference between [...]

Using Stock Photos to Show You Care
Posted Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:41:44 +0000
One of the funniest parts of browsing the Internets is when I come across the funny stock photos of professional people in various professional settings, used by site owners to put a "human face" on their web presence in the most generic way possible. It began with using the headshot of the attentive [...]

On Doing It Myself
Posted Tue, 15 Apr 2008 03:27:36 +0000
I think one of the more dangerous ideas prevalent in our culture is that "you can't do it yourself, so you always need to buy something or pay someone to do it for you." As our society becomes more and more dependent on complex machines, systems and skill-sets that fewer and fewer people understand, [...]