Brooklyn
BloggEd: Oregon Budget Woes
I find it somewhat ironic and somewhat wonderful that I get the New York Times
delivered to my door in Portland, Oregon. I find it so for two reasons. First,
I love The Times. Have since I first went to college at Indiana and would wait
at the student union as it was delivered late in the day to the bookstore. Now
it comes to my door each morning, and I like that and I marvel at it. Secondly
I find it ironic because I have come to know Joe Luft of Brooklyn BloggEd through
our weblog work. From reading someone’s site you get to know the person and
you see what he or she cares about. I think Joe cares about kids, and as an
extension, cares about the children of Oregon. I believe that because he has
on several occasions pointed to articles from The Times about Portland and Oregon
and our pathetic school funding situation. The irony is that in the morning
Joe walks out and picks up the paper, 3 hours or so later I do the same and
we open it up and we read the same articles and we both shake our heads.

I ‘m glad he does. I’m glad someone out there is watching. Like in many states
we are mortgaging our future in the name of tax cuts and tightening our belts.
Joe and I have lamented about Oregon turning into a west coast Mississippi.
For a long time the worst thing you could say about a state is to compare its
education system to Mississippi. For a number of years everyone laughed at those
jokes… I think now in retrospect, a more nervous laugh, but a laugh none the
less. Now through the hard lens of experience… well it isn’t that damn funny.
We owe the children of Mississippi and their hard working teachers and families
an apology. Because you realize these are real students, these are real families,
and these are real communities that are experiencing this pain. It’s not
funny to have an education system that is wanting.

Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor’s eJournal - iTunes Music Store, a Tryout

The best feature, of course, is breaking the industry’s album mentality into what customers have wanted for years: individual tunes. (I’m of two minds on this, having recorded two albums when I was playing music for a living (a long time ago, sigh). One of the albums was designed as a complete work, and I believe it holds up that way and should be listened to as a single piece. The other had several tunes I would cheerfully omit if I were downloading it today. Of course, it’s the customer’s choice, not mine, right?)

I have been playing with the new iTunes and Apple’s Music Store for the past few days. So far I’m liking it. One feature that I find interesting is the ability to share/stream my iTunes library over the net. I can also connect to others. For example look at the screen garb image to the left. You will notice that I am connected to a co-workers iTunes library at work and also to another iTunes user out on the net. We are sharing our music, but not by copying, but by streaming it to each other…

Jon Udell: Blogs and InfoWorld
Jon Udell explains to another writer why blogs are important to InfoWorld, and in doing so gives a great introduction on why organizations are finding weblogging to be of value.

View image Just downloaded my first album from Apple’s new music service. So far I’m impressed.

mamamusings: blogs 101 Elizabeth Lane Lawley has posted some basic weblog links for a talk she will be giving. Others comment on similar resources they have produced. A good link for those looking to introduce others to weblogs.

matt jones | work & thoughts Matt Jones comments on the use of Hydra at ETech and how it differs from some of the other collaborative tools being used there. I’m looking forward to showing the students in my Pacific University class Hydra and letting them play with it a bit next week.

Trevor Smith has posted session notes from the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. These were taken by several folks collaboratively
using a Rendezvous aware application called Hydra. Hydra
is a Rendezvous based collaborative writing application. If you are a Mac OS X user, you should check out this program. I plan to use at a meeting on Monday.

O’Reilly also has some of the presentation
slides up on their site. Others will follow in the next few days.

Final Thoughts…
The atmosphere at ETech is part summer camp, part doctorial dissertation. Lots of very interesting and creative people. It’s funny, you turn around and the
guy next to you in the coffee line looks familiar. You nod hello and get your coffee… walk away… and a few minutes later it hits you… "Hey that
guy is Jeff Bezos!…"

I posted earlier about Tom
Hoffman’s session. Tom is doing some very interesting work. If you ever run into him, be sure to ask him about his Steve Jobs moment…

The collaborative nature of the sessions was something amazing. Between IRC, Confab,
iChat, Hydra, the Wiki, and yes even the speakers at the front of the room… information was flying around. It was a great experience. This would be a great
venue for education folks to hook up at. A lot of the technology that was being discussed will find its way into schools… of course we all know the old saying
about the overhead projector and how it took 20 years to get it from the bowling alley to the classroom. Would be fun to work with folks to shorten and shape
the migration…

I am attending NECC in June in Seattle with a group of folks from work, and plan to introduce them to some of the tools
used at O’Reilly ETech.
Maybe even set up a Wiki for the event. If others are going lets get together and play a bit…