Found this today: Tapestry – Your Favourite Comics by RSS
Tapestry is a series of RSS feeds for online comics. They help you keep up to date from within your favourite news aggregator, especially if you happen to miss a few days. Works great with the liferea reader. (Tapestry folks — you should add that to your list.)
Category Archives: Online Life
Community Doesn’t Generate Income?
I came across this article in PC World about the rising usage of Usenet. The story talks about reasons for this, and has this quote from Forrester Research: “Community just doesn’t generate much income.”
There is where I disagree. The Internet itself developed as a new tool for communication — for building communities, and helping those communities function (yes, even when it was ARPANet). And everwhere you look people are building communities online: Usenet is one prime example, but I can also site the proliferation of IM/IRC systems, web forums, communities surrounding prominent sites such as EBay, the entire Weblog phenomenon, and several others.
To Forrester I say: Check out this new thing called “The Internet.” You might find a whole new world — er, community — out there.
Online Collaboration Shapes Politics
David Weinberger has an interesting article about the blog for Presidential candidate Howard Dean. Apparently, “Dean’s campaign shows the smart mobs, hive minds, have more benefits, power, energy, vitality and adapability than the single mind of any political advisor.” David goes on to say “they’re viewing the Internet not as a cheap way to reach the masses but as a way to let us talk together.”
New way to find a job: Blogs
It looks like my former employer, Quovix (a great place to work, BTW) decided that they’d try something new and look for applicants by posting a blog entry.
I think the idea is great, especially if the people that read your blog are the same group that you want to hire. Of course, this might not be for everyone — I can imagine whole sectors out there that don’t have people that tend to be into blogging — or even Web surfing, for that matter.
The World of Ends
The World of Ends has been getting a lot of attention lately. It’s an article about how we think about the Internet, and mistakes that keep getting made because of the wrong paradigm. Of course, there are also people disputing the claims made there. Well worth a read even if you disagree.
A Fresh Look at the ‘Net Tax
Recently, many U.S. states and large bricks-and-mortar retailers are again pushing the “Internet tax” — an effort to add sales tax to online purchases. This gets debated every few years, it seems, and we see similar arguments each time.
What the sates and existing retailers miss is that the sales tax is really a local tax. If I live in Lafayette, Ind. and drive to Chicago, IL for a day of shopping, I’d pay Chicago’s sales tax. And that is only right. After all, I’m contributing to the wear of Chicago’s roads, I’m benefiting from the police officers keeping the area safe, I could benefit from the fire dept. if there was a problem, and their snow crews let me travel around.
But if I sit at home and place the order, I’m doing none of those things. Without stepping foot in Chicago, I don’t benefit from their roadways or safe streets. The people that do — perhaps UPS, which delivers my package — already pay local taxes (fuel, sales, etc.) and that cost is passed along to me as part of the shipping fee.