The River

Heard a really interesting story on NPR the other day about the roles blogs are playing in a protest at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf in Washington D.C. No doubt the growth of blogging in the deaf community has also helped the controversy reach many more ears through the mainstream media. (Protestors are speaking out against a new president set to take office in January.)

Some of my earliest experiences online, well, on BBSs, anyway, were courtesy of two blind co-workers of mine at Taping for the Blind in Houston. It might seem counter-intutive that a computer screen was liberating for these sight-impaired folks, but the digital format made for easy amplification and translation via text-to-speech technology. Yes, I know there are still many battles to be fought for accessiblity online, but it’s certainly better now than it used to be in those days (early ’90s).

FM’s own Justin Watt, using Google’s new Co-Op project, has created the Federated Media Search Engine, which searches all of our authors’ sites. Nice!

I only heard this weekend that Dynamic Logic’s COO Tom Deierlein, who was called up by the Army to go to Iraq about a year ago, was shot by a sniper in September. He’s OK, and seems to be in good spirits, but he’s got a long road to (hopefully) full recovery.

The company has set up a Web page for Tom where people can comment and share well wishes.

Just wanted to post to say you’re in my thoughts, Tom, and I’m hoping you heal quickly and remain in good spirits. It sounds like you were doing great work over there, especially in helping poor children and needy Iraqi families. Sorry things turned out the way they did, but am happy you’re back in the U.S.

The Emoboys. The Lonelygirls. The Proudparents. The Oldsters. Yes, they are the YouTubers, captured poignantly (and appropriately) in a video posted by Pete Blackshaw over at cgm. As he says, it’s great stuff for cultural anthropologists. And aren’t we all playing that role, to one extent or another, these days, as new media consumption patterns and cultural behaviors erupt right and left? Worth watching.

By chance, I hit the Internet Archive Wayback Machine today and noticed that The River actually has entries dating back as far as 1998.

I remember that design… the first after I actually learned how (somewhat) to use PhotoShop.

Wow. Just saw a story that says Fox News Channel actually aired video footage captured with a Treo, during the NYC plane crash aftermath this week.

From the piece:

“We’ve been waiting for the opportunity to get live pictures on the air from inside a cellular network, and we wanted to take it to the next level, make it easy for people and make it portable,” said Ben Ramos, director of field operations for Fox News.