It’s simple. Curtail and clampdown on the freedom of expression and you risk social, political, economic and cultural violence. The RSF’s list of countries that aggresively filter the Internet is not surprising. As I’ve noted before regarding our own dalliance with filtering child pornography, Australia presents a particularly disturbing example to the world in this [...]
Archive | March, 2009
Google Noticeboard
The kind of product and service that you really need to see to get your head around, but the blurb sounds very interesting. Google Noticeboard is an application that helps people access and share information over the Internet using public digital noticeboards. Using Google Noticeboard, communities can access a variety of relevant information. People can [...]
Western Provincial Council candidates go online: So what?
Duminda SIlva was the first that I know of to launch a website to support his campaign. The bloke looks like Queen Elizabeth on a bad hair day. He has an interesting track record and his (erstwhile) website claims his “foundation” has “donated 9,850 families”, which makes about as much sense as why anyone who [...]
And it’s offline again…
Why am I not surprised? Tamilnet.com is inaccessible once more from Sri Lanka. Anyone able to explain why it was accessible for over 12 hours over the weekend gets a drink on me. Vive la censure!
Media trends and developments in Sri Lanka
A presentation made to the Sri Lanka College of Journalism, the Sri Lanka Press Institute and the Press Complaints Commission of Sri Lanka today, on their invitation, to help them strategise curriculae development and institutional development over the next 3 years.
Tamilnet accessible once more from Sri Lanka?
As suddenly and mysteriously as it was taken off, Tamilnet.com is accessible once more from my SLT ADSL connection this evening. Perhaps the boffins at the MoD forgot to send their weekly memo to ISPs asking them to block the site? Tamilnet has been inaccesible over any wired or wireless Internet connection from all ISPs [...]
Planning for when the cloud goes down…
Computers will crash. The cloud, which runs on computers, will crash. Once you realise this, planning for when the cloud does go down becomes just another way of ensuring business continuity. I’ve covered this in a post I wrote when WordPress.com went down.
Crisis Information Management: The potential and the pitfalls
A very brief presentation I gave to representatives from UN agencies in NY recently on how the web, mashups, mobiles and other technologies that facilitate rapid information generation from the ground is changing the game in how they first know about and subsequently react to crises and emergencies.
Ushahidi helps develop Crisis Information Management demo tool
From the ICT4Peace Foundation came news today of its collaboration with Ushahidi. The ICT4Peace Foundation, Geneva has mandated Ushahidi to develop an ICT4Peace Crisis Information Management Platform Demonstrator (CIMD), based on Ushahidi’s existing platform with the following features and functionality. A product that is able to be deployed in the field with a minimum of [...]
Soon a mobile phone for every person on Earth?
Or at least, a mobile phone accessible by everyone on Earth? According to the ITU, there are now 4.1 billion mobile phone subscriptions, up from 1 billion in 2002. Whether you use it to record yourself being raped (a novel idea coming from my own country), against terrorism, for terrorism, for peacebuilding, to bear witness, [...]
