High altitude platforms

We talked a bit about high-altitude platforms in class last week, and I promised to make up a teaching note on the topic. I did, and posted it here.

Map of community and municipal networks

Last week we spoke of community and municipal networks. Freepress maintains a map and description of them. I also added this link to our WiFi hotspot note.

Speaker of the House a blogger

Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House of Representatives has just started a blog.

Check out his welcome message.

Do other politicians have blogs? How might they change politics and political discourse?

Hosted applications: software as a service

Technology review just published an article on Salesforce.com and their success as a provider of Internet-hosted applications.

They are a successful company, and are encouraging software developers to use their tools for their own hosted applications. Perhaps their tools will turn out to be the "Visual Studio" of the Internet.

We have a related course note on Hosted applications: software as a service.

Home connectivity options

This article surveys home connectivity technologies. It covers both home LAN and broadband connection options.

Contextual search

I added a link to Yahoo's Y!Q search to our note on search applications. Y!Q searches consider the content of the Web page you are reading when you do the search.

Sites for hosting video

Here is a New York Times article on low-cost video. It lists several sites where videos may be hosted:

• BLIP.TV Service for users who want to integrate video clips into their blogs. www.blip.tv
  
• CLIPSHACK Basic, simple user interface. Limit of 50 megabytes of storage. www.clipshack.com
  
• GOOGLE VIDEO Accepts clips of unlimited length and makes them searchable. video.google.com
  
• OURMEDIA.ORG Stores videos in the Internet Archive, which is intended to be a permanent online trove. www.ourmedia.org
  
• PHANFARE $6.95 monthly fee covers unlimited video posting, but individual videos may not exceed 10 megabytes. www.phanfare.com
  
• VIMEO Circles of friends and family members can easily keep up with and comment on one another's clips. www.vimeo.com
  
• YOUTUBE Site keeps track of most-viewed, most-discussed and best-rated videos; organizes similar clips into "channels," like sports or humor. www.youtube.com
  

The video team should check this out.

Industrial strength AJAX

Here is a link to a video demo of a fully functional, browser-based messaging client. (If you do not already have it, this demo installs a video playback program before it runs).

The demo is from scalix.

Dan Gilmore on the future of journalism

Last night we talked about the influence of blogs on conventional journalistic media. Dan Gilmore is a widely respected print journalist who is very much interested in this topic and largely moving to online journalism. He gave a talk on the topic at Stanford last week.

The title of the talk is "We the Media: The Rise of Open-Source, Grassroots Journalism"

RSS tutorial

Last night someone asked about RSS, real simple syndication. Here is an RSS tutorial.

There are many RSS readers available -- which one should we use for this class?

Reed Hundt: "Limits on wireless leave U.S. at risk"

Reed Hundt, past FCC Chairman, published an article in the San Jose Mercury arguing that ad hoc wireless networks played an important role during huricane Katrina, and that state laws banning municipal networks are a mistake. He feels the federal governmnet should encourage municipal networks with matching funds.

Using the Net to share bicycles

This article describes a unique application. Thousands of commuters in Lyon, France, are using pedal power instead of gas, under an ambitious new program that lets people rent bikes from public racks at low cost.

I have seen similar Web sites for sharing cars and airplanes, but don't recall where.

About this blog

This blog covers Internet applications and technology and their implications for individuals, organizations and society. Check the tag cloud to the right to see some coverage key words or skim over the last 5 or 10 posts to see if they sound interesting.

The blog supplements my classes -- letting me incorporate relevant current events -- but it is open to anyone interested in the (admittedly broad) topic. I do a couple of posts per week and welcome your suggestions and feedback.

I have a couple of other blogs, listed on the right, which might also be of interest.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.