Tuesday, December 30, 2003

College Savings Plan The Governor is promoting while the analysts are dissing.  And the reporters aren’t asking the right questions.  Wonder if Wooten believes that it is the government’s responsibility to explain that these savings accounts may not be all that they can be?  Oh, the Athens article actually addresses the question.   Do this for an exercise.  Look at the Governor's Press release.  The look at the Morris, AP and AJC articles covering the press release.  Do you see any value add?  At least enough to justify the price of subscribing, the dirty ink on your fingers, and all those ad inserts you throw away?   Plus, look at the Augusta edit of the Morris piece -- it leaves out the last two paragraphs which mentions criticism of 529 plans.    Now, go to Google News and search on 529 Savings -- as of now (12/30/03 10:30 am est) you will see 110 articles on the topic.  A web search gives you 226,000 hits.  With this kind of source material available, why trust an editor to include all points of the story?   Getting connected knowledge             Recommend a read of The Great Library of Amazonia (Wired).  Here’s what I learned: ·        the process of publishing (I did not know that “many publishers do not have push-button access to the digital files.”) ·        discusses how Amazon built its amazing book archive (scanned a lot of em) and the copyright work-around to enable public viewing of the information. ·        Key point is the acknowledgement that current technology cannot replace the book for its physical attractiveness – but you can “enhance” the book with electronic aids. ·        The fact that a majority of college students search the internet for sources without consulting libraries is disturbing – that is a rather narrow-minded focus for research. ·        $12.6 billion spent on library and academic collections – little spent on digitizing books (hmm… yet legislators want to mandate electronic texts for learning). More resources ·        Gutenberg Project ·        Million Book Project ·        Eldred Case ·        Lawrence Lessig (Copyright philosopher for the 21st century) comment [] 10:30:37 AM

What we do online... "Pew Internet & American Life Project: America's Online Pursuits: The changing picture of who's online and what they do" [Daypop Top 40] To the reading list! comment [] 10:29:21 AM