enviable stuff

omewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon -- circa 2009.

1. URL-shorteners are bad for the Internet. They centralize linking, and make it more fragile, and more controllable. Wait till the Chinese govt finds out about them.  

2. When bit.ly breaks, it will be an outage that may be bigger than Twitter going down. Not only do we lose the present, but we lose the past too. One big URL shortener that dominates the others is itself a dangerous thing. 

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed ★

Facebook is a good match for FriendFeed, insofar as I’ve never understood why I’d want to use either of them.

Learning Webs (chapter 6) Illich writes “A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.” His second point in that sentence seems to be what you have found a tool for.

A comment on the CogDogBlog post on imagined twitter app to pair learers and teachers, links Lllich to Web 2, interesting that Illich uses 'Learning Webs'

Becoming familiar with QR codes and folksonomies is likely to be much more beneficial than worrying about SCORM

Are iPods in the classroom a distraction? Perhaps. Pencils - now those are real distractions - always having to sharpen them, kids throw them, they write inappropriate notes with them, they can use them to cheat, they poke each other with them, they get pencil lead stuck in their fingers, they steal them, etc. I think we should ban 'em. Now, am I trying to convince everyone to run out and buy ipods for all students? No, I'm not. I am suggesting, however, that they're worth exploring. This website will link to general information and educational apps for the ipod.

Interesting looking wiki.

I see it: NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn't been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown. Why? Because blogging isn't easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it's to easier things that people are turning.