Assignment Zero is an attempt to crowdsource journalism which has a great deal of long term potential. Crowdsourced journalism won't replace paid journalism but it will develop compelling content less influenced by corporate advertising dollars... it's partnership with a for profit company might change this over time. In contrast, NewsCloud is a crowdsourced editorial site like Slashdot's Firehose effort i.e. aggregation by the people. Members pick and rank stories assembling the news of the moment in real time - again less influenced by corporate money. While it's unclear yet whether Internet users want to participate in editorial or journalism tasks, aggregated editorial is a lighter workload for casual users whereas sites like Assignment Zero will require more intense commitment, more so than Wikipedia. It's cool that both Assignment Zero and NewsCloud are open source platforms, former is based on Drupal, latter is based on its own emerging OS platform.
In today's Los Angeles Times, CEO of the Gates Foundation Patty Stonesifer acknowledged there will be no change to the Gates Foundation's investment policies, contradicting earlier reports by the Seattle Times and Los Angeles Times.
The stories you told of people who are suffering touched us all. But it is naive to suggest that an individual stockholder can stop that suffering. Changes in our investment practices would have little or no impact on these issues. While shareholder activism has worthwhile goals, we believe a much more direct way to help people is by making grants and working with other donors to improve health, reduce poverty and strengthen education.
You're missing the point. The Gates Foundation tells the Seattle Times one thing, the LA Times then reports the same thing... and then the Gates Foundation changes their plan. My source said that BillG pulled the rug out from under the folks who had made the earlier statements - either that or it's incredibly manipulative PR that apparently backfired thanks to Slashdot linking to this this.
Also - the new Gates statement apparently throws up its hand - oh my god - socially responsible investing is too complex - we're only capable of curing aids and malaria. The obfuscation is offensive.
I wrote an article on this for the Seattle Weekly:
http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0504/050126_news _investing.php
Gates and Microsoft are very aggressive in business and don't believe corporations should be regulated to prevent public harm except in the most eggregious cases. The problem is they don't seem to think predatory lending, stomping out the open source community or polluting third world countries is eggregious.
When my house was robbed, I found my $2,000 LCD monitor on ebay complete with picture of serial number on the back which matched (except for one number slightly too fuzzy to verify a match). This was the week after the robbery. When I called the detective assigned to my case, he did nothing with the information. He said finding my monitor in the hands of a fence would do nothing to catch the people who robbed me. Yeah, but investigating the case might have helped... I learned from this experience that the insurance industry subsidizes the majority of property crime in this country because we're certainly not funding the police well enough to do much about it.
In case the ad changes, I've posted an archive visual here. Pretty funny that Microsoft is paying to show ads to Slashdot readers reading about hating Microsoft.
Citizen Microsoft details how Microsoft has dodged taxes by operating out of Reno, Nv. and abused its clout in Washington state in many of the same ways other corporations do in their hometowns.
The traditional mainstream media is essentially a monolithic workflow stack for reporting information that depends on scale for advertising revenue. The Internet doesn't change the basic structure of the operation - or its incentives.
In contrast, the future of journalism online is like to be distributed, more like honey from a beehive. In this spirit, we released our platform to the open source community this past week. There is much work to do.
We're like a tenth of a nanosecond past the big bang of online journalism.
Slashdot Mirror
Assignment Zero is an attempt to crowdsource journalism which has a great deal of long term potential. Crowdsourced journalism won't replace paid journalism but it will develop compelling content less influenced by corporate advertising dollars ... it's partnership with a for profit company might change this over time. In contrast, NewsCloud is a crowdsourced editorial site like Slashdot's Firehose effort i.e. aggregation by the people. Members pick and rank stories assembling the news of the moment in real time - again less influenced by corporate money. While it's unclear yet whether Internet users want to participate in editorial or journalism tasks, aggregated editorial is a lighter workload for casual users whereas sites like Assignment Zero will require more intense commitment, more so than Wikipedia. It's cool that both Assignment Zero and NewsCloud are open source platforms, former is based on Drupal, latter is based on its own emerging OS platform.
You're missing the point. The Gates Foundation tells the Seattle Times one thing, the LA Times then reports the same thing ... and then the Gates Foundation changes their plan. My source said that BillG pulled the rug out from under the folks who had made the earlier statements - either that or it's incredibly manipulative PR that apparently backfired thanks to Slashdot linking to this this.
Also - the new Gates statement apparently throws up its hand - oh my god - socially responsible investing is too complex - we're only capable of curing aids and malaria. The obfuscation is offensive.
I wrote an article on this for the Seattle Weekly: http://www.seattleweekly.com/news/0504/050126_news _investing.php
Gates and Microsoft are very aggressive in business and don't believe corporations should be regulated to prevent public harm except in the most eggregious cases. The problem is they don't seem to think predatory lending, stomping out the open source community or polluting third world countries is eggregious.
When my house was robbed, I found my $2,000 LCD monitor on ebay complete with picture of serial number on the back which matched (except for one number slightly too fuzzy to verify a match). This was the week after the robbery. When I called the detective assigned to my case, he did nothing with the information. He said finding my monitor in the hands of a fence would do nothing to catch the people who robbed me. Yeah, but investigating the case might have helped... I learned from this experience that the insurance industry subsidizes the majority of property crime in this country because we're certainly not funding the police well enough to do much about it.
In case the ad changes, I've posted an archive visual here. Pretty funny that Microsoft is paying to show ads to Slashdot readers reading about hating Microsoft.
Citizen Microsoft details how Microsoft has dodged taxes by operating out of Reno, Nv. and abused its clout in Washington state in many of the same ways other corporations do in their hometowns.
The traditional mainstream media is essentially a monolithic workflow stack for reporting information that depends on scale for advertising revenue. The Internet doesn't change the basic structure of the operation - or its incentives. In contrast, the future of journalism online is like to be distributed, more like honey from a beehive. In this spirit, we released our platform to the open source community this past week. There is much work to do. We're like a tenth of a nanosecond past the big bang of online journalism.
count Fair point though.