Tag Archives: technology

Bora Zivkovic, A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem:

What Seed Media Group should be doing, what every media group should be doing, is become a tech-oriented company (one of the reasons PLoS is successful is that it is essentially a technology-rich publishing company, with an incredible and visionary IT/Web team working with the editorial team in driving innovation).

Quite similar to what Michael Young of The Times said in March. You are not a newspaper, you are a news organization. You are not a media company, you are a technology company.

The importance of Google’s Living Stories

Google, in collaboration with The New York Times and The Washington Post, dropped a bombshell today in the battle for the future of news: Living Stories. The new project is described as “an experiment in presenting news, one designed specifically for the online environment,” and… Continue reading →

Covering Science and Technology: So you want to be a tech writer?

David Wolman and Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) led the conversation for the last panel this afternoon. Informational interviews are a key part of finding stories, David says. He consumes a lot of coffee, talks with people about what they’re working on, and then also asks about… Continue reading →

Flaw in DuckWeb was caused by lax security practices

On Tuesday, July 21 around 11 pm Pacific, I stumbled across a serious information security flaw in DuckWeb, the University of Oregon’s student information portal. For some of the work I’ve been doing with Publish2, I’ve been paying close attention to the composition and beauty of URLs. When printing out my degree audit for a trip down to Eugene the next day, I realised that the print version of the degree audit had a unique string of digits at the end of the URL. Curious, I changed the last two, refreshed, and ended up with someone else’s degree audit.

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In the interest of sharing my favorite podcasts of the previous year with my friend Shane, I thought I might open the recommendations to all. While on the drive home to turkey day, these are three “world changing” conversations you should consider listening to:

Howard Bloom on “The Global Brain” – IT Conversations

Howard talks with Jon Udell about collective consciousness and self-organizing species, and why the mass collaboration we think is emerging right now isn’t really all that unique. Shane, DJ, and I did discuss the episode on a Fertile Ambition call a month or so ago, but we ran into a headlock about the multi-tasking theory Howard presents.

“Is Aid to Africa Doing More Harm Than Good?” – Intelligence Squared U.S.

Brilliant arguments both for and against, and listening to the entire debate lends a better understanding of what the difficulties are in helping to bring basic needs to Africa.

Daniel Suarez on bot-mediated reality – Long Now Foundation/ FORA.tv

So thought-provoking I’ve listened to it twice. The first time put me in a trance for part of a train ride back down from Seattle. In short, the premise is this: we’re creating untold numbers of automated bots, or narrow artificial intelligence, on the web for specific purposes. When left unchecked, as many are, these bots have the potential to cause very messy situations which could have negative real world implications. One of the author’s proposals is to build a second, secure network of only verifiably human entities.