Wired Magazine claims that our use of the Internet is maturing. The article uses the analogy of the car. When cars were new, people went for a drive to go for a drive. As the car became more familiar, it became more of a tool we use to solve transportation problems. The data source cited in this article is a sample of search terms. For example, in 1997 20% of search terms were sex related. Now, sexual topics are the target of about 5% of searches.
The Consumers Union claims that U.S. government Internet policy under the present administration has been a failure and U.S. has slipped to 13th in broadband connectivity.
The situation is complex – companies claim they must invest heavily to serve broad band customers, but rising costs represent a significant barrier to those low income customers who presently struggle to afford even dial-up access. About half of all households with incomes above $75,000 have broadband, but half of all households with incomes below $30,000 have no access of any kind.
The full report can be obtained from http://www.consumersunion.org/pub/ddnewbook.pdf
Regular iTunes user or not, you may want to explore the iTunes site. iTunes makes some free content available and presently is providing material related to the election (e.g., debates).
Today I attended a local demonstration of Apple high end multimedia authoring products (Final Cut HD, Motion, Shake, etc.). These are not of great interest to me because I am not interested in “pro” tools, but the products are certainly impressive.
I did come away with a couple of web links for those looking for demonstrations and tutorials.
Ken Stone offers resources related to Final Cut
Apple offers some great instructional videos for its “pro products – follow the links under the heading “Professional Tools” and then look for the Quick Tour link on each of the pro tool pages. You will find a series of instructional videos.
Ripple Training offers some free training videos.
One of the drawbacks of open source software is the lack of documentation. Not all software is intuitively obvious and those who volunteer their time to develop this software are often more interested in coding than in explaining how what they have developed works.
Enter the Purdue Open Source Documentation Project. The concept is simple – make the development of documentation a technical writing class project.
I do not get to cite my local paper very often. Here is an article that describes some of the consequences North Dakota schools are experiencing because of the delay in releasing e-rate funds.
You may perfectly happy running IE as your browser of choice. I do recommend that you consider options if for no other reason than I happen to feel competition is healthy.
MIT Technology Review provides an analysis of Mozilla Firefox and the potential advantages of an open source browser.