paulcanning: Google Reader clips catch up

Thursday, May 22

Google Reader clips catch up

er, way behind here what with other work to do and all that. So quite a lot, some may become posts, starting a new Firefox Scapbook thread sounds like a good idea ...

Questions to the Prime Minister!
Simon D reports that the PM is inviting questions to him via YouTube. And here's the man himself

TechPresident noted that "the Brits are continuing to lap the U.S." and "In the U.S., we’ll have to first get around those archaic rules barring Congress from even using YouTube. Then we can talk about those conversations."
Testing Color Contrast for WCAG 1 & 2
Via Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design very comprehensive and useful - and often forgotten - stuff
CRM turned upside down and inside out
Ruth Kennedy @ IdealGovernment pointing out that bizness has moved onto VRM from CRM and maybe government should pay attention ...
Google Translate adds 10 new languages...
As well as translations between languages. Still no Persian ...

Italian's Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face
From the New York Times. Yet more from what some US commentators are calling 'The War on Tourism'. Quite astonishing warning for those visiting the USA. Whether you're besuited, connected, whatever - beware, the sadists seem to run the border posts. Comes after the news of them stopping firetrucks and ambulances. Plus, if one of the 20% of British adults who smoke, be prepared for harassment.
Here come the tube-steppers
via Delib, their final 'Opinion Tracker' analysis for the Mayoral elections showing "what looks like a final surge of buzz and positive sentiment for Boris".
What did happen to all those London mayoral votes?
via The Register. They observed the election count, done using machines, and didn't see fraud. But I was reminded of another recent experience — The Bedford Elections 2007 and the electronic counting fiasco.
Becta asks EC to probe Microsoft school deals
via The Register. Another multi-million dollar fine on its way?
The Day Is Coming
via John Battelle's Searchblog. He reports on a Bloomberg story via IWantMedia: 'Google is considering running display advertisements alongside the results of Web queries for pictures, moving beyond text-based ads. "There's lot of potential for advertising revenue there," says VP Marissa Mayer. Google is seeking new revenue sources as its growth slows.'
"Gagging librarians is horrendous." The Internet V. FBI: Net Wins
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has withdrawn a secret demand that the Internet Archive, an online library, provide the agency with a user's personal information after the Web site challenged the records request in court.
Danny Sullivan also covers it here.

The Food Vision project
via IDeA Knowledge. Website "promoting good practice and projects that deliver safe, sustainable and nutritious food and improve local community health and wellbeing. The case studies and toolkits within the site are designed to help and inspire those intending to set up similar initiatives." Phew! Hardly 'plain english' and government creating another website? Shurely shome misshtake?

Web Accessibility - The Power of Five
via E-Access Blog Socitm says that five errors account for 76% of all website accessibility failures, and it asked Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility Services at the charity AbilityNet, to describe their impact. Robin is blind and uses the popular ‘JAWS’ screen reader software to access the web.
2 Spanish visions and values of Government 2.0
via Benchmarking e-gov in web 2.0 'The people at Goldmundus have started an interesting exercise. They propose future narrative scenario of an ideal government 2.0, based on the possible usage of web2.0 tools such as Twitter and GCal in government.I really like the idea. '
Crime mapping for London, Boris? We’ll start the clock now
via Free Our Data: the blog - they can foresee 'issues' ...

Councils Urged To Mix Technical Web Tests With User Tests
via E-Access Blog - accessibility is a social issue as well as technical!

Voter File 2.0: Catalist, Democratic Tool
via techPresident
Catalist is building on the lessons of 2004 (where Democrats had a database meltdown) and working to build a 50 state national database with the names of 180 million registered voters, plus 75 million unregistered people (for use by voter registration groups), enhanced with commercial data, specialty data (like who owns hunting licenses), integrated it with the Democrat's VAN application, and with a tool for subscribers to mine the data. Catalist's goal is to be a permanent piece of progressive infrastructure.

Don't cry for her, Democratic Party
via Citizen Crain "The festering Clinton boil is finally being lanced within the Democratic Party, at least for this election cycle" - Kevin hopes this finally breaks her stranglehold on GLBT.

BBC's embedded player boosts traffic by 50%
via PDA by Jemima Kiss
Change 101
via BuzzMachine - Jeff Jarvis
I’ve been teaching the faculty itself in all the tools of online: blogs, wikis, RSS, video, SEO, and on and on. The best part of this has not been my colleagues’ receptivity to, curiosity about, and eagerness to adapt the tools themselves in their classes but the discussion we have shared about the impact of these tools on journalism and education. We’ve had rich back and forth on the new architecture of media and news that the impact of this change on journalism education.
Here’s the Keynote we’ve been using as notes for this discussion.