Transatlantic

Today is World Information Society Day

by Martin · May 17, 2006

World Telecommunications Day is now World Information Society Day “to help raise awareness, on an annual basis, on the enormous possibilities that ICTs can bring to all economies and societies and explore ways to bridge the digital divide”.

“ICT can change the face of the poor dramatically. ICT can be visualized as Aladdin’s Lamp in the hands of a poor woman. A digital genie can leverage her energy and creativity to lift her out of poverty at the fastest speed.”

Professor Muhammad Yunus, Managing Director of Grameen Bank, Bangladesh, and recipient of the 2006 ITU World Information Society Award.

Don’t be afraid, upgrade to simplicity! – Ars Electronica 2006

by Martin · Apr 21, 2006

Simplicity is the theme of this year’s Festival Ars Electronica which is held from August 31 to September 5 in Linz, Austria. A blog about the festival program will be launched in May. Last year’s festival featured 450 particpating artists and scientists from around the world, and 33,000 vistors came.

The challenge of the future will be to make complexity comprehensible and manageable. Thus, simplicity in a positive sense means developing intelligent strategies to facilitate access to technologies, to make them more convenient, and to enable users to see what actually happens with the information moving through them.

Gerfried Stocker, artistic director, Ars Electronica

Want to build an online community? Start the printing press

by Martin · Mar 26, 2006

I like what my German hometown paper NGZ is doing. They have embraced blogging and are taking it a step further in a back-to-the-future kind of way. NGZ and sister publication Rheinische Post launched a “reader-to-reader” portal called Opinio in early 2005. Readers can post their own articles about a broad range of topics. More than a year later, they have contributed 14,000 articles.

The kicker is that editors select the best articles and publish them once a week in the print edition of the newspapers and every two weeks in a dedicated magazine supplement. The prospect of having their own words and photos appear in print seems to appeal to many people, and is an additional incentive to join the Opinio online community.

Opinio was developed by Boogie Medien for Rheinische Post. If you know of other newspapers with similar ideas let me know. Here in Canada, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star and the National Post all do something or other with blogs on their sites now, and all three employ journalists who have started personal weblogs related to their beat. But it would be interesting to see a Canadian newspaper launch a blog-to-print portal like Opinio.

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