PTP Blog

Jon’s got a pointer to an open source version of the popular social-bookmarking, tagging, and folksonomy site del.icio.us.

What’s particularly intersesting is that if you poke around the site a bit, there’s some talk about interroperability between del.irio.us (the open source version), and other social-bookmarking sites. There’s certainly some potential here for different disciplines to establish social-bookmarking sites for that discipline - aggregating links that folks in the discipline find useful - while also maintaining interroperability with other similar sites out there.

I’m not exactly sure if/why this matters, but it’s lodged in my brain so I’m sure I’ll figure it out at some point.

As reported in lots of places AOL has changed their Terms of Service to explicity state that private communications on the AIM instant messaging service are private. This is likely in response to the outcry over the last week about their previous TOS that stated that users of the AIM service had no rights over any of their communication on the AIM service.

There are at least two important points here:

1. This could be viewed as an illustration of what is often called the “power of the blogosphere.” If I’m correct, this story broke on a few blogs and was then picked up by other bloggers and some mainstream news outlets. The outcry is likely what caused the change and clarification in AOL’s terms of service. I don’t want to go too far down the road of “bloggers as a force for justice” but if you’re looking for an example of how blogging can be used to create change, this is a fairly clear cut one.
2. This underscores the reason many techies are advocating for the use of open systems. In my previous post on this topic, I pointed to Jabber and SILC as two examples of Free/Libre Open Source Software that can take the place of propietary messaging systems like AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or the MSN Messenger service.

   If an organization is using instant messaging to coordinate it’s work, this makes clear that relying on a propietary system is probably not the best idea. Even though AOL has modified and clarified it’s terms of service, there’s nothing to stop it from making other modifications that restrict our rights in the future. Users of open systems on the other hand have much more control and protection over the disposition of their chat content. If nothing else, this experience with AOL should make organizations that rely on AOL evaluate the feasibility of using some of the open alternatives.

Hit the read the rest link for the changed text in AOL’s terms of service for the AIM service:
continue reading…

There’s a post up over at benstanfield.com about a change in AIM’s Terms of Service that allow the company to use your chat messages in any way they see fit without your consent.
continue reading…

GlobalLocalPopEd.org is a new clearinghouse website that brings together popular education resources from grassroots organizing groups. From their homepage:

What is GlobalLocalPopEd all about?

Corporate-driven globalization increasingly influences the problems we face in low-income communities and communities of color in the U.S. Faced with the complexity and abstract language of globalization, community-based organizations are using popular education to communicate the issues clearly and to build new grassroots leadership for global justice. This clearinghouse banks profiles of organizations doing effective popular education that links global and local issues, tools and games that dozens of organizations have used in their curriculum, and resources that will help you formulate your own popular education.

Bart’s Preinstalled Environment looks quite promising as a tool for recovery, cleaning off viruses, and other maintenance tasks in a Windows environment.

We haven’t tested it out yet, but will be doing so over the next few days. If you’ve used it, we’d love to hear about it.

Thanks to the ONE/Northwest KnowledgeBase for their pointer to this quite comprehensive run down on Activism on the Internet.

You can get the latest version of this information by sending a blank email to ‘ecpgrant@esri.com’.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
ESRI NONPROFIT/CONSERVATION GRANTS PROGRAM
SOFTWARE/TRAINING DONATION KIT version 3.2003

If you just want to make basic maps for free right
now you can skip all this and check out the growing
list of free web-based mapping services on page 3.

If you just want basic Arcview or a book you can skip
this general form and get the much simpler “ESRI basic
grant form” by sending a blank email to
grant@esri.com
continue reading…