Tongue Trip

I'm beginning to like the idea of business figures in office:

Check this out.

Then compare it to this. 

first gizmo project, now ajaxwrite

what’s next? webthingy

http://www.usaid.gov/multimedia/video/marshall/movie2.html

The U.S. is at the vanguard of online video technolgy,and this is how its government puts together a multi-media package to showcase its achievements and values? What’s the opposite of viral?

Collaborative open-source documentary film-making:

The Echo Chamber Project 

Daniel Akst in Slate reviews alternative methods for charity giving and concludes that microfinance is the best option available.

Given that charitable giving usually involves a non-transparent NGO with unverifiable overhead, the fiscal clarity and direct to recipient approach of microfinance are undeniably attractive. However, it’s important to also recognize the limits of microfinance - specifically, that it doesn’t scale up to SME finance or strenghten local financial institutions that can evaluate and finance SMEs. If you help a fisherman in Uganda purchase a boat, that’s great, but Uganda’s problem is not a lack of fishing equipment. In a sense, what’s good for the individual in this case may have little impact on society. Microfinance has a thousand individual success stories but I have yet to see a communal success story involving microfinance.

And microfinance does little to challenge the cartelized structure of the banking industry which obtains in many developing countries, in which loans are restricted to all but an elite group of borrowers. Even in countries without cartelized banking industries - very few banks give loans of $100. Microfinance might be transparent, but it has almost no knock-up effect to help the overall financial sector become more transparent and efficient.

Microfinance is successful on its merits - and attractive to donors - because it directly targets individuals. Accountability and transparency are easy to measure. However, this quality also limits is effectiveness because directly targeting individuals entails avoiding institutions. And in developing countries - or any country - the latter matter before everything else.

A great site - interesting content, well-organized - but I can’t help but think that it’s missing some appeal to the senses. This is cerebral chocolate.

http://www.scharffenberger.com/

You’d think they were making watches.

Charlie O’Donnell writes on his blog:

“But free necessitates some kind of advertising, and that’s where the party ends for an educational web app. Schools have gotten a lot of heat for bringing corporations anywhere near the classroom and so the market shys away from such a thing.

But this is hypocritical and unrealistic.�

I agree and left this comment:

Corporations are already deeply embedded in the classroom – in the form of private sector textbook publishers. And the corporate profit structure is present in a way that’s deleterious and distracting to students.

Ridiculously overpriced textbooks result in a) primary and secondary schools (in the US, but especially in developing countries) that cannot afford the price and therefore either go without textbooks or with very outdated editions shared by multiple students, and b) college students that have to take on jobs in order to pay for textbooks.

In the current profit flow – money goes from student to private sector textbook publisher. Why not invert the funnel and make it go from sponsor to student? In short, students pay dearly and directly to corporations for their erstwhile freedom from corporations.

Certainly, in cases where the choice is between no textbook and sponsored educational material (either print textbook or videogame), the choice should be obvious.

It may not be appropriate for the social sciences, but I don’t see the harm for the hard sciences and math where it’s unlikely that Pepsi cares much about the way fractions are taught.

Larry Page in Time magazine interview, February 20, 2006, in response to a question: “Is there a grand strategy for Google?”

Check out NY-based Pace University’s homepage.

A link to a few student blogs located here is placed on the center of the page. It’s simply a different take (or evolution, depending on your viewpoint) on the standard student profiles universities have been using in their promotional materials for years. Interesting nonetheless, though no doubt spurred by, then scrubbed by the PR office first. It may be artificial, but if you’re a prospective student unfamiliar with Pace and you’re surfing through 100’s of sites trying to narrow things down - the blogs may just keep your attention a bit longer, keep your clickstream suspended on the Pace site, and force you to take a second look at a school you may have previously glossed over.

Their PR person writes:

“Sure, the catalogs and program descriptions are great reading material and all, but does ‘Applied liberal learning is emphasized through an experience-based education encompassing practical application in the classroom, service learning, and internships,’ give you any idea of what your next four years here are going to be like?”

Good point. The mass of university websites are fairly identical and fail to help students differentiate one school from another. Take out the names and addresses from a university homepage and it would be pretty hard to pick out one school from another. This probably doesn’t do the trick, but it’s an interesting attempt to provide some character. Probably especially helpful for a commuter school that doesn’t have a strong identity.

In any event, it does make you think about how high school students are gathering information about their college choices - are they going to MySpace and searching on the profiles of students at campuses to get a better feel for the type of student a school attracts? High school students can already view public ratings of their teachers at sites like Rate My Teachers.What if you had a site called Rate My Institution? … the questions go on…

As services like Shopify (for physical goods) and Jyvepro (for spoken services) further democratize and decentralize the act of selling on the Internet, trends first precipitated by eBay and later amplified by Google Ads, it will be interesting to see whether Root/Exchange, by design or circumstance, becomes a marketplace that exclusively serves the large companies that currently dominate lead transactions, or if it develops over time to mirror the equities markets, which are for the most part equally exploited by large institutional investors and smaller players down to the individual level. In the beginning at least, I imagine it will be restricted to larger players, but if the Root Exchange is designed properly and provides a transparent marketplace, it will become a useful tool for all types of sellers and fully reflect the structure of Internet commerce.

Full disclosure: I do not work in lead generation or online advertising. Feel free to point out any errors of assumption or conclusion in the comments.