Blurts

This blog uses the b2evolution software. It used to work better. People find your posts in a variety of ways; a) they subscribe to your RSS feed, b) they locate you through search, and c) you send a message to Twitter (or other service) when you post and folks link back through the tweet. The Twitter connection appears to be a big deal for me. I am using this blog in what I would call microblog format – short posts and mostly to link to other resources. When these short posts were announced on Twitter I had the best of both worlds – I had my own microblog and I had my Twitter audience. Then Twitter changed its authentication system and the forwarding of announcements to Twitter stopped. So did many of the hits on my microblog. B2Evolution will soon be out in version 4 and the new version promises to fix the Twitter connection. Good deal.

CNN notes that many of those pledged to support net neutrality lost this past Tuesday.

Republican lawmakers largely oppose the idea of Net neutrality. Though a majority of Democratic lawmakers support the issue — all of the 95 candidates that said they would support Net neutrality on the left-leaning Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s website were Democrats — they have been divided on whether to pass the FCC’s proposed legislation.

We seem to have a clash of values here over what some regard as socialism and others regard as protecting opportunities for all. The flaw in the opportunities of capitalism tend to occur when there are no or few options which is often case with high speed Internet access. Government can function to offer at least one reasonable option. Can, but evidently, not should. Perhaps there is too much money to be made.

It will take a while to sort out what the changes in Washington will mean for technology and education practitioners. This article from the Huffington Post comments on the defeat of Democrat Rick Boucher who chairs the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology & the Internet. According to the article, Boucher backed an open Internet and online competition.

This site attracts a lot of spam. I am not certain why – all comments are moderated and I check any linkls from the comments before I approve. Nearly all comments are of questionnable value and are rejected.

I use opendns as my dns and this provider keys all web addresses as past history (see below – red danger indicator). When I see the red indictor, I automatically reject the post and block future “contributions.”  These spam comments also tend to be positive, generic and brief.

Monday Bloglines, once the leading aggregator for blog content, will be gone. I can be difficult to understand the rise and fall of social sites. Sometimes there is no revenue plan. Sometimes a competitor offers more. I am guessing Google Reader and products built on top of Google Reader just took over.

I thought of the iPad/Mifi combination months ago. I think Verizon/Apple stole my idea.