Earlier this year a Houston Press reporter drove 1,683 miles in Harris and its surrounding seven counties, visiting 63 school districts to test for compliance with the Texas Public Information Act, which is designed not just for reporters like me but for everyone. Here’s his story, called “Needling the Haystack.” Quite instructive.
Posts under ‘Tools’
Comment Spammer Not Sufficiently Clever
Our comment spam filter is smart enough to have flagged the following item: There are so many reasons for nonprofits to blog that it’s hard to boil them down to a few, but you’ve done a great job. The key to all of them — the nugget of information I think all nonprofits should take […]
Sharing Our Reading Lists
Dave Winer’s new service, Share Your OPML, is going to make big waves in coming months and years. OPML is a format that describes the RSS feeds you’re currently reading. It’s essentially a reading list, but one that can be used in a variety of ways — and shared from machine to machine. Dave was […]
BitTorrent Closing in on Mainstream
Dave Winer: Next steps for BitTorrent. Breadth of support is the most important thing BitTorrent needs. We need easier and more servers and clients, more non-infringing content, and more commitments from the tech industry, government, and eventually, of course, the entertainment industry. It’s a very rational, open technology, quite useful, and with a little more […]
Microformats, a Key Part of the Connected Future
I’ve been studying up on something called “microformats” — open data formats, such as tags, that are going to help make digital information vastly more useful. If you’re interested in citizen media, microformats are important to understand. I’ll be talking much more about them in coming months. Meanwhile, if you’re curious, here are two useful […]
Web Writing Tool
I’m going to look at ajaxWrite as soon as the company’s servers come up for air (they’re swamped at the moment). It’s a Web-based writing tool that emulates Microsoft Word, according to the site created by Michael Robertson and his team. Sounds interesting, anyway…
The Daily Me(s)
Mark Glaser: Digging Deeper::Your Guide to Personalized News Sites. The perfect Daily Me would be the central place that has the news, blogs, discussions, podcasts — everything we want that’s tailored to our particular tastes — in one convenient place. While many sites have tried to reach this ideal, no one site has totally perfected […]
Web Services for Education
Bryan Alexander: Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?
WashingtonPost.com – Raising the Bar
Arguably among the most ambitious newspapers with respect to online development, The Washington Post has been experimenting with new web technologies and is encouraging its readers to engage with the paper’s content in creative ways. First, the Post Remix. As the “Official Post Mash-up Center,” Post Remix has two goals: To spotlight the work of […]
Writely Goes to Google
Anyone under illusions that Google isn’t aiming at Microsoft, though mostly from the side rather than directly into Microsoft’s strength, should note that the search and advertising company just bought Writely, a Web-based word processor that is one of the coolest apps around. It lets people edit together and see each others’ revisions in an […]