Dismay as BBC Gets E-learning Go-ahead. No bias in this headline! The BBC has won the right to provide free digital educational resources to schools, as it should. The thought of making it illegal for a government to provide resources to its own schools is ridiculous. Sure, industry calls it "anti-competitive," but by this logic any government service (into which industry decided it would like to offer its services) is anti-competitive. Sorry, it doesn't wash. Industry doesn't have the right to prevent a people, acting through their government, to provide for themselves. By Richard Agnew, NetImperative, January 9, 2003 [OLDaily]
Not all government services are this lucky. For instance, PubScience was killed because members of the Software & Information Industry Association lobby didn't like competing against it.
"Jon makes some significant points I tried to make lately. The best bloggers have yet to blog. Tapping into other communities outside the blogosphere through weak ties brings numbers and diversity. Weak ties form strong ties, virtual or in-person. The tools and perception of networks will grow, but this fundamentally about the building of a network society."
[...] Topics are great for aggregate blogs that assemble posts about coffee shops, Austin events, or other specific subject.
Threadneedle is better for aggregating a human conversation, whose topic meanders under a named thread.
A topic-focused blog won't get you a human conversation (that would be ai-complete). A human conversation won't get you a subject-organized index (not without editing after the fact).
She's also thought up a perfect application of blogchannels: Book-specific blogchannels, which could be coordinated with AllConsuming. Or would they actually compete with AllConsuming? Anyway, can't wait to see that happening. Phillip's working on it.
