Brokekid.net

Dear Guys,

A friend of ours, Joe, has committed himself to participating in the 2005 Minnesota Red Ribbon Ride, July 14-17, 2005. It’s a 4 day, 350 miles bicycle ride challenge to raise funds for 9 Minnesota-based AIDS service organizations.

This isn’t the first ride Joe has participated in. He has ridden in 27 such charity rides. You can make sure it’s not his last ride by pledging your support to help him reach his goal of $3,000.

Your pledge of $5 or $100 would greatly be appreciated by Joe and all of it goes to AID service organizations.

It’s easy to pledge, just click on the link “www.redribbonride.org” then type in

First Name — Joe

Last Name — Ede

Personal ID Number — 99

Team Name — RAAN

Then click on “Find A Participant” icon and it will take you to Joe’s name. Then click on Joe’s name to bring you to his pledge page.

Or you can click on this link —

Why am I doing this? I’m doing it because Joe is a good friend of mine and this is an easy way for me (and YOU) to help less fortunate guys.

Joe will be taking a video camera along on his trip and recording his daily adventures so you can follow his travels.

Won’t you please take the time to pledge your support and help Joe out?

AIDS

The Zoomer

The Zoomer is one of oki-ni’s latest products–a 50cc scooter collaboration with Honda. Very limited edition, only 15 Zoomers will be available and oki-ni will be selling 5 of them each month for the next 3 months. It’s available in 3 colors, plasma yellow, black, and camouflage green (shown). Each Zoomer comes with a limited edition numbered key ring and an invitation to a private Zoomer exhibition.

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(via joshrubin.com) | Cool

Kevin Kelly has posted a detailed explanation of the process by which you can get your self-published DVD, CD or book listed on Amazon. It’s a great idea for those evangelical, get-the-message-out micro-publishing projects that have more than 10 or 20 potential customers — you can print a couple hundred media objects at your local print-shop for a fraction of what a vanity press will charge, and then turn over all the post-office and payment crap to Amazon.

1 Get an ISBN (for a book), or a UPC (for a CD or DVD). For one book it costs $125, for one CD, $55, for one DVD, $89.
2 Get a bar code based on the ISBN or UPC. Costs $10, or may be included in UPC.
3 Sign up with Amazon, $30 per year.
4 Duplicate your stuff; include the bar code on the outside.
5 Ship two copies to Amazon
6 Send cover scan
7 Track sales
8 Resgister it (optional)

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(via boingboing.net) | HowTo

Last weekend, I stayed on the remarkably comfortable sofa of Ben Hammersely and his fantastic wife Anna S’derblom, in Florence, Italy. Florence has lots to recommend it, but possibly the most fascinating thing I saw that weekend was the project Ben was working on for the Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the world. Ben has helped the Observer web-ify itself, with a vengeance.

The weekend paper is now supplemented by a daily blog, with podcasts and moblogs. Trackbacks and comments are on and unmoderated. Keywords are tracked and displayed in a “folksonomic zeitgeist.” Headlines from competing papers and Technorati link cosmoses are pulled in and displayed on the front page. No paywall. No adwall. No wall.

That’s just for starters. We spent many exciting hours sitting in cafes, talking about what comes next — conversations I’m not at liberty to repeat. But basically: put together a wish-list of features for a clued-in media organization to embrace, then square it and square it again in a relentless pursuit of Web-gonzoism. That’s what’s coming down the pipe.

I read a lot of newspapers on the Web, and this is something new and wonderful. Check it out. Link

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(via boingboing.net) | Internets

An anonymous reader writes “DailyKos is reporting that a group of senators and representatives including Hillary Clinton, John Kerrry, and Tubbs Jones, have proposed an ‘open-source’ voting bill. This bill (The Count Every Vote Act of 2005) corrects many of the problems in the last election. Notably, it requires paper receipts, and that the source and object code of all electronic voting machines to be open and readable by the public. ” Commentary on the bill available at the Miami Herald.

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(via politics.slashdot.org) | Politics

The good folks over at Think Progress highlight an innovative progressive proposal: State Sen. Ken Toole of my new hometown of Helena, Montana has introduced a bill that would impose a gross proceeds tax on “big box stores” like Wal-Mart. The tax, however, would only kick in if these stores did not pay their employees an entry level wage of at least $22,000 a year, counting both pay and benefits… It’s an innovative idea, especially when you consider that under the current system, Wal-Mart’s wages are so low its workers often have to collect welfare benefits. In other words, Montana taxpayers are being forced to subsidize Wal-Mart’s mistreatment of its own employees.

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(via theregular.org) | Wal-Mart

“It’s like taxonomy.”

“Oh, not tsunami?”

“No.”

“I’m an idiot.”

I had been writing about, talking up and describing folksonomy for weeks to those that would listen. “What is it again?” I would go on explaining it over and over until the listener finally understood; the whole time I was pronouncing it like folk-tsunami. I first heard the term shortly after the new of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I suppose I started calling it folk-tsunami after that, it made sense.

Folksonomy refers to collaboratively categorizing content, whether it is text, web pages, still images, video, etc, by choosing key words to “tag” the information. Web sites such as Del.icio.us, Flikr, Technorati and 43 Things allow you to label and search content according to these “tags.” An example of this would be to look up the tag Nintendo at Technorati and will give you stories related to Nintendo. Some of the stories will be current while others may be of interest. Folksonomy is an interesting and innovative way to organize content on the web.

Now that I know it’s not called folk-tsunami, I kind of like that term better. The potential that folksonomy has for classifying and organizing all content on the web is amazing. It’s like a tsunami, crushing, huge, powerful.

I’m not sure how to equate the power of folksonomy exactly. It’s useful in terms of finding the information you need but different from Google. Maybe the closest I can come is this, Google helps you find the haystack, folksonomy helps you find the needle.

This powerful new way of classifying information is just another development in web technology. I’m not sure where this technology will take us, but its effects will be amazing.

Folksonomy

BobPaul writes “ZDNet is running an article about VISA’s plan to incorporate RFID tags into Credit Cards so that “consumers need only wave credit and debit cards within a few inches of a reader to complete a purchase. And for purchases of less than $25, no signature is required.” VISA claims their system is very secure, stating that “Each transmission between card and reader has a unique code that cannot be reused even if it is intercepted,” but isn’t that very similar to how TI’s car RFID system was made?”

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(via yro.slashdot.org) | RFID