I came across wRadr just after I had read about Microsoft’s Vine. I am not convinced that Vine is all it is hyped out to be. I don’t know how to pronounce wRadr, or why there is this fetish in the US with truncated names of this nature that sound as they have been born [...]
Archive | April, 2009
Microsoft Vine: An inebriated approach to emergencies
Microsoft Vine is a programme and service I first saw demonstrated at Microsoft HQ in Redmond two weeks ago. Since then it’s gone to a public beta for testers around Seattle and there are some reports that Facebook integration is present and Twitter integration planned. However, all throughout the presentation in Redmond and now looking [...]
Online Dispute Resolution (ODR), the financial downturn and innovation
Tucked away recently in the Real Estate section of the New York Times was an article that resonated a great deal with the evolution of Online Dispute Resolution since 2004. The E-Mail Handshake is a fascinating take on how the current economic downturn is influencing modes of communication in real estate deals. In the current [...]
The problem of comments
Comment is King in the New York Times uses the case study of an American political journalist living in Poland writing to the Washington Post and Slate to highlight the problems associated with comment moderation on websites, as well as the poor quality of comments found in online news sites. I can fully identity with [...]
Second Life runs out of steam?
Highlighting the Second Life, the BBC noted recently that, It was once the most talked-about web development on the planet, but it has gone very quiet of late. After the gold rush of companies seeking to establish virtual premises in the 3D world, many have now pulled out or left their digital empires to mothball. [...]
News Timeline on Google
Google News recently introduced a feature that leverages its exhaustive archives of news as well as priviledged connections to content providers. Called Google News Timeline, this is a beta version of a tool that could be of tremendous value for researchers looking for coverage of a particular issue over a period of time across a [...]
Mapping violence during elections and voter education
This is not the first time I’ve helped plot violence related to elections in Sri Lanka. In my first post I noted that the map helped journalists better understand the degree of violence on the ground. Things are no better in the lead-up to the Western Provincial Council elections. Just like previous maps, this map [...]
First Monday features academic paper on Internet and Democracy
Perhaps it’s Obama’s Presidential campaign and interest in e-government that’s fuelling a number of academic studies and articles on the impact of the Internet on democracy. I wrote about Evgeny Morozov’s Texting Toward Utopia: Does the Internet spread democracy? yesterday. Morozov’s article ended thus, The problem with building public spheres from above, online or offline, [...]
Sunday Leader and Psiphon win Freedom of Expression awards, but in UAE you can’t access one
After reporting that it was shortlisted in late March, I’m happy to see that the Sunday Leader has won the journalism award in the 2009 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award. The Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression awards honour those who have made outstanding contributions to the promoting of free expression. As I [...]
The Internet strengthening democracy?
Rarely does one find an article as sober and compelling as Evgeny Morozov’s Texting Toward Utopia: Does the Internet spread democracy? published in the Boston Review. The article’s echoes Smriti Daniel’s conclusion in an article on Facebook activism in Sri Lanka published recently in Sri Lanka’s Sunday Times, which ended by suggesting that “while it [...]
