Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Via ONE Blog, Santorum-Durbin The Senate Budget: Who helped and who still needs to hear from you!. The Santorum-Durbin amendment passed unanimously by "voice vote." Many amendments are handled this way when it is clear the amendment will pass or fail. It saves time, avoiding a recorded vote. However, many Senators were crucial to getting the amendment adopted, by either cosponsoring or lending their verbal support. If your Senator appears below, please thank them for helping fight global AIDS and extreme poverty! They are... Alaska: Senator Lisa Murkowski California: Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer Florida: Senator Mel Martinez Georgia: Senator Johnny Isakson Illinois: Senator Richard Durbin (amendment sponsor) Indiana: Senator Richard Lugar Maine: Senator Susan Collins Maryland: Senator Paul Sarbanes Massachusetts: Senator John Kerry Michigan: Senator Debbie Stabenow Minnesota: Senators Norm Coleman and Mark Dayton Missouri: Senator Jim Talent Nebraska: Senator Chuck Hagel Nevada: Senator Harry Reid New Hampshire: Senator John Sununu New Jersey: Senator Frank Lautenberg New York: Senator Hillary Clinton North Carolina: Senator Richard Burr Oregon: Senator Gordon Smith Pennsylvania: Senators Rick Santorum (amendment sponsor) and Arlen Specter Rhode Island: Senator Lincoln Chafee South Dakota: Senator John Thune Also, Senators Mike DeWine (Ohio) and Patrick Leahy (Vermont) sponsored and passed an amendment to ADD $77 million to the International Affairs account to support global health programs for children. They also deserve thanks for this important amendment! Others still need to hear from you that you want America to do more to fight AIDS and poverty: Louisiana: Senator Mary Landrieu, who passed an amendment to CUT $77 million from International Affairs, the same part of the budget that Senators Santorum and Durbin were trying to increase. Nevada: Senator John Ensign passed an amendment to CUT $153 million from the International Affairs account. Oklahoma: Senator Tom Coburn initially blocked passage of the amendment by voice vote.   [] 8:25:20 PM

E-mail From the ONE Campaign Dear Gary: You did it! Working as ONE, call by call, you let our leaders know that you wanted America to do more to fight AIDS and extreme poverty-- and they heard you. Late last week, the Senate agreed to two amendments that will add hundreds of millions of dollars to the fight against AIDS, TB and malaria and save the lives of mothers and children around the world. Thank you for speaking up and standing by four Senators who worked together to do the right thing: save lives. Senators Santorum, Durbin, DeWine and Leahy demonstrated real leadership by doing something we don't see everyday: reaching across political divides to help people in the world's poorest countries lift themselves out of poverty. To see if YOUR Senators supported this life-saving funding, check out the ONE blog. http://www.one.org/blog/ Your calls helped change minds and votes, proving that when we come together as ONE, we really can do more. Thank you! The ONE Team 8:03:52 PM

Bambi Francisco on Google Finance Review, comment from Bambi Francisco. Google's vertical move. Thumbs down for Google Finance. Why? Just because it's Google. And, we've come to expect a lot more... like some video integrated somewhere. Google launched on Tuesday a financial news vertical. Besides an interactive map that shows when stories published... [Bambi Francisco] 6:35:44 PM

People Like Us Collective People Like Us - Limited Edition Clothing Label. In a world filled with mass produced clothing made by under paid workers, it's nice to see smaller companies trying to make clothing for people who care about individuality, who have a respect for design, and who support young artists. People Like Us is a Sydney based clothing label that offers limited edition clothing, so you have something truly unique. Their designers work together to come up with creative concepts and innovative design. People Like Us Clothing comes with info on the artist who designed your gear as well as a little history about how they came up with the concept. For more information on People Like Us, visit www.peoplelikeuscollective.com [Grooveeffect] 7:36:03 AM

AttentionTrust and GestureBank AttentionTrust and GestureBank. In the moment at SDForum SearchSIG the other night when Seth Goldstein announced the funding grant of the AttentionTrust by the Omidyar Network, a spontaneous burst of applause erupted. Months of discussions and diligence by Omidyar had resulted in a profoundly important ratification of the Trust's mission and its principles, and the folks in the room recognized both the logic and the significance of  Omidyar's support. As cofounder with Seth of the Trust, I've been there from the earliest germ of the idea at Etech 2005, Seth's first statement of the guiding four principles in an email, and the moment in the parking lot at a Kelsey conference as I drove away from a meeting with Seth and suddenly realized the Trust was the way forward to declaring our rights as metadata creators. I could have just turned around and driven the 500 feet back, but instead I called him on the cell phone. It was there that the Attention Recorder was born. At the Web 2.0 conference last year we launched the first iteration of the Recorder extension during the first public board meeting of the Trust. In the discussion that followed, Tim O'Reilly suggested the possibility that the Trust's opportunity could be similar to that presented by Richard Stallman's positing of the beginnings of the open source movement. Could be, Tim cautioned. But in that moment, I began to think of the lessons learned by the advance of open software, standards, and services. In that context, the Omidyar action can be seen as a bootstrap of one of the signal successes of Web 1.0 by an emergent Web 2.0 construct, Attention. If RSS is, as Bill Gates said today at Mix'06, "the start of the programmable Web" then Attention rights follow as the start of the user-in-charge. No wonder the SearchSIG audience, filled with VCs, mashup artists, and Attention startups, broke into applause. When executive director Ed Batista messaged the Trust board with the good news about the Omidyar commitment, I felt just such a surge of delight, and not surprisingly, not a little pride in what Seth and I had started. But also a sense of responsibility to do whatever I could to justify the faith Omidyar has placed in our grassroots efforts. With the Trust on firm footing and the existence of the ATX recorder extension the "teeth" that underlines our rights to our own attention, what could I now do to close the virtuous circle of user empowerment? Gestures. The third leg of the tripod, the other two instantiated by the Attention Trust and the Recorder. Why gestures? If the Trust asserts the right to control your metadata, the Recorder provides a reference implementation for each of us to insert ourselves at the beginning of the chain. But applications need an open stream of data to bootstrap the intentions of the users-in-charge on an aggregated basis. In turn, users need a way of influencing or guiding the services gleaned from the open pool to their individual needs and perspectives. Seperating attention streams into two channels, one of anonymized aggregated metadata owned by its contributors, and one of gestures and private metadata owned by the gesturers, creates a powerful tool analagous to the fundamentals of free software and open standards. This is GestureBank, which I have been developing to stand atop the now secure foundation of the Attention Trust and its gifted open source Attention Recorder extension to Firefox. And the teeth: You can use GestureBank and its services only when you contribute to the open pool of data. And of course, join the AttentionTrust and uphold its four fundamental principles– Property, Mobility, Economy, and Transparency– just as Gesturebank does while building on top of the ATX Recorder and developer toolkit. We've announced a private beta you can join by sending email from a Gmail account to gesturebank AT gmail.com. The Gmail requirement is to ensure that we can establish a live connection with each particpant via Gchat, which manages a persistent integrated store of IM and email communications. I've been working with Robert W. Anderson, a developer who I met at a blogger dinner in Berkeley (more specifically in the back parking lot during a vigorous debate with Robert Scoble about the fate of Microsoft Office,) who has been volunteering his ideas, advice, and nonexistent free time much to the dismay of his wife and children. The day after SearchSIG I drilled down with Dan Farber, Mike Arrington, and Dana Gardner, all of whom were at the event, on the just-released edition of the Gillmor Gang. I have no idea if GestureBank will be successful at creating and maintaining an open pool of anonymized aggregate attention metadata, but given the Omidyar validation of the seminal AttentionTrust effort, I wouldn't bet against it. In order to ensure that there is not only no conflict of interest, but not even the appearance of such conflict between the Trust and GestureBank, I tendered my resignation from the board and as President as soon as I heard from Ed Batista that the Trust's immediate (and I hope and trust, long term) future is assured. I have been careful not to talk too much about the GestureBank project as it began to develop, particularly as the buzz around attention began to mushroom and accelerate as RSS pushed many of us to the brink of information overload. With the AttentionTrust now endowed with enough resources to maintain a significant mediating role in the service of these essential first steps in users' control of their metadata and digital identity, I am confident that GestureBank's commitment to seeding an open pool of anonymized metadata under the control of its contributors will produce a further critical acceleration in the values and goals of the AttentionTrust.   [Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter] 7:22:43 AM

CNET News.com Advocacy group shames adware advertisers. Center for Democracy and Technology lists advertisers who, it says, help fund the widely despised software that pops up ads on PCs. [CNET News.com] 6:39:29 AM