·:[ Sound and Fury ]:·
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The banning of access to MySpace may have long term repercussions for Army recruiting. Working class teenagers, the type most likely to enlist in the military, use MySpace. As many have noted, Facebook (which tends to attract college students) was not blocked.

MySpace may be bandwidth-intensive and insecure, but rather than just block access, the military should seek low-bandwidth, secure ways to allow soldiers to accomplish the same thing. AKO is not the answer, because teens do not develop their online social networks on AKO. The social networks are currently Balkanized, therefore we must leverage the social networks the soldiers have spent years developing. Very often, the *entire high school population* of a soldier is in their “friends” grouping, following their adventures in the Army.

The most obvious answer is to partner with MySpace to develop a more secure, low-bandwidth area of their network.

The military budgets resources (in money, personnel, and logistics) to provide physical mail to our members. A small investment in resources will allow today’s soldiers to communicate with their hometowns, further connecting our military with the American public and improving recruiting opportunities.

Much has been made of the accuracy of wikis - collaborative documents that has an open editing interface. Wikipedia is perhaps the most well-known wiki out there. It’s not 100% accurate, but what is? Other encyclopedias have errors too. Just with this one, they can be fixed. Who in their right mind would use any encyclopedia as a primary source anyway?

The best explanation of Wikipedia is a movie about how one article evolved. See the screencast here: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html

I realize that it has been a long time since I last posted. I’d like to update two earlier posts.

Slideshare has matured. People are using it primarily to share picture shows and how-to presentations about doing presentations. People obviously feel that most presentations can be improved. People “zing” presentations which is a way to mark them for others to see. You can comment on shows, rate them, and mark them as favorites. Combine a slideshow with an mp3 and create a slidecast.

Reader2 has also improved. Links to Amazon and other shopping venues are included. The interface is still clunky though. How much does an Ajax programmer cost these days anyway?

The other place I’ve been spending some time is Shutterfly, which is a commercial site for pictures. They do nice work with books and photos.