james nunn | blog

In the latest edition of Newsweek (April 3, 2006), there is a story titled “The New Wisdom of The Web” by Steven Levy and Brad Stone.  In this story, a number of new startups are discussed, and how they are changing the way the web impacts our lives.  New online services like MySpace (Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million last year for this), Flickr (Yahoo recently aquired this for $35 million), Dabble, del.icio.us (Yahoo owns this too now), among others were highlighted to explain how the web is becoming a more dynamic, or living, environment.  One of the points of the article explains that many have termed this new phenomena, Web 2.0 – however, suggests that a more appropriate name would be the Living Web.

Some outstanding claims made in this article include the figure paid for MySpace by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, that recently MySpace signed up 270,000 new members in one day (a Monday), the more interesting fact that Flickr started as a Canadian company, AND had the first photosof the September 2004 Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta; before any news wire.

Trailing this article is a listing of new innovations that are already (or soon-to-be) launched on the web.  These include Digg (a techie news site), Plum (a online collection/organization tool), and Jajah (a telephone service that uses landlines).  There are others, and I’d recommend reviewing the article.

This answer came to me during my third class for the day – Sociology of Community Organization.

It appears that we don't trust the government, as they don't trust us. Of course, one could argue that the government doesn't trust 'us' because 'we' are untrustworthy – but that doesn't as comfortably as the other assertion.

Sociology is creating more chicken and egg scenarios as each class passes.

Mundane life, part 1: Mowed the grass, pulled some weeds (badly in need of this), and edged the lawns.

Now I ache.

Watched the OutFoxed! DVD this evening.  Like F.9/11 it shares a lot of insight into the way Fox does business, and the bias that exists with their reporting.  A lot of the focus is on the tag-line “Fair and Balanced” which throughout the movie is disproved many times.  One of the areas of concern is the distorted view that Fox viewers have of the world.  One survey asks if the US had proof that Iraq had WMD's and the Fox News viewers reported a huge 67% (or somthing) and NPR/Public Radio viewers were down around 5% (I might have got some of these wrong, but it was that obvious. 

Another part of the show that is quite interesting is when you hear some of the phrases that are used on Fox very frequently, however you don't realize how often they are used until they are all put together. 

“Some people say…”