The Top Ten Internet Controversies of the Twenty-First Century

Our top ten:

• Censorship
  - Great Firewall of China
  - Amazon removes sales rankings of gay and lesbian books
• Copyright
  - Filesharing gets hammered down for copyrighted materials
  - Google Books indexing copyrighted material
• Privacy
  - Google Street View invades privacy
  - Facebook’s Privacy Policy changes
• Social Networking
  - Protesters use social networks during Iran elections
  - Blogger, Dooce, gets fired for blogging about work
• Access
  - Internet Service Providers throttle bandwidth consumption
  - Climategate

Listen to the episode here:

Download the MP3 File

This was inspired by, and based on, the blog post 15 Biggest Internet Controversies of the Past Decade.

Feed the World: Blogs and More

If you're publishing information on the Internet, how are you pushing it out regularly to people who are interested? Web feeds (blogs are the most common example) are a powerful option - even better than e-mail now, for a number of reasons. Web-feeds are a way to publish content that is frequently updated. Publishers syndicate their web-feeds, and consumers subscribe to publishers' feeds.

Listen to the podcast episode here, or download the MP3 file:


MP3 File

Publishing your feed:

• Blogs - create your own using free tools like Blogger
• Podcasts and vodcasts - create them using a low-cost service like Hipcast.com
• Twitter (your tweets, mentions, hashtags, searches)
• Google publishes its Google Alerts with feeds now, not just e-mail
• Some Web forums use feeds so you can monitor certain discussion topics
• Last.fm lets you publish your favourite music lists
• Use page2rss.com to give people a feed to any page on your Web site
• Use Posterous.com to create a blog by e-mail

Subscribing to read feeds:

• Google Reader is a free browser-based service from Google
• OutLook, Thunderbird and other e-mail programs have them built in
• Get iTunes for podcasts
• Gihan has his own iPhone app (Search the iTunes Store for Gihan Perera)
• Get widgets (e.g. from WidgetBox) to embed in a Web page
• Also embed in Facebook and Ning profiles
• The "Thinking Ahead Journal" is a weekly magazine of Gihan's clients' blog posts (this uses Tabbloid.com)
• Create your own newspaper at Newscred.com
• Tie feeds together with services like Twitterfeed.com

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On-Line Collaboration: The Tools

In our previous podcast we discussed the principles of on-line collaboration. In this episode we look at some practical tools for making this work in practice.


MP3 File

Web sites we mentioned in the podcast:

Setting up the project:

• Creating the workspace: Ning, Wiggio, Twitter
• Forming the team: Outsource using Elance.com, Guru.com, Rent-a-coder.com
• Project planning: BasecampHQ.com

Scheduling meetings:

• Send around meeting invites using Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc.
• TimeBridge.com allows you to nominate up to 5 possible times for a meeting
• Tungle.me (and many others) allows you to show the team when you're available for meetings

Conducting on-line meetings:

• Teleconferences, Skype
• Webinars: WebEx, Netmeeting, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar

Informal discussions:

• Discussion forums are useful for asynchronous discussions (Ning provides this facility)
• Chat rooms are good for synchronous discussions (Ning provides this facility)
• Bubbl.us for collaborative mind mapping
• Wallwisher.com to create your own bulletin board - example:
  

Document sharing

• Google Docs: A web-based office productivity suite, i.e. a word-processor, presentation tool, spreadsheet etc.
• Wikis: Web sites for collaboratively editing a collection of interlinked web-pages (e.g. Wikipedia)
• Use a Wiki farm for hosted wikis
• Use Rapidshare or Dropbox for sharing big files

Document management:

• Help desks and issue trackers: Bugzilla, Trac
• Google Docs provides revision control