Saturday, April 19th, 2008
This past week New Jersey held its annual school elections. Held in April each year, this is about the last vote New Jerseyans have in government. Voters are asked to approve local school board members and the budget to fund the local schools prepared by that school board. Mind you, some districts employ an appointed school board.
Turnout for these elections is abysmal. It was reported that this year, just 14% of the registered voters turned out to vote. That sounds a bit higher than I normally hear. In Millville, only 6.29% of registered voters voted. Nevertheless, my two children were present. Fritz pushed the red button that cast my ballot. Neither child has missed an election during their lifetimes.
Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts has called for moving the school elections to November to increase turnout. I favor this.
I favor moving the election for efficiency. The cost of elections and the time and effort of running these is a strain in times of budget crunches. I have advocated previously consolidating the municipal and school elections. Whether they be set in June (where our presidential primary should be) or in November during the General Election is not a major issue for me. November makes the most sense, I suppose.
What I do not favor is moving the election because 85% of registered voters are too lazy to get off their asses to actually vote. If one is so lethargic or apathetic to find excuses not to vote, moving all the elections to one day matters little. That person will still be lazy and apathetic. Frankly, I care not a hoot if such people vote at all.
Yet it seems that Speaker Roberts and I are for the same thing. I’ll just swallow hard when the reason is given and support the move because it is ultimately a good thing.
And while we’re talking school elections, congratulations to Ken Adams. Ken is a New Jersey blogger who ran for his town’s school board and was elected on Tuesday. Ken, it was nice seeing your post pop up in Google Reader the other day. It’s been too long. I know Delanco will have at least one board member not voting for frivolous spending.
Posted in Education, New Jersey, Politics | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
Family and friends hear from me all the time about RSS. Heck, those of you who read my Twitter feed read about how I have caught up here, am posting there, etc.
Today over at Twitter, I read Diggfeed. This is Digg.com’s feed updated to Twitter. How kewl! The post that caught my eye was this one:
RSS in plain English: A video tutorial explaining the basics of RSS, as simple and elegant as Common Craft’s inimitable paper-and-marker technique.
although it truncated at:
RSS in plain English: A video tutorial explaining the basics of RSS, as simple and elegant as Common Craf
since Twitter caps the message at 140 characters.
The true story, however, is the video that Digg linked to. The video explains in layman’s terms how all this technology works. I know some who read eCache would benefit from this video.
I love all the technology that is involved to learn about this. This is what Web 2.0 is all about. Enjoy!
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don’t. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don’t know where to start.
Posted in Entertainment, Twitter | No Comments »
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
Boston Now is a new daily newspaper in Boston. It’s a free paper supposedly written heavily by bloggers. It’s only been out a week, but it seems to me this is doomed for failure.
The paper is called Boston Now and will rely heavily on bloggers and user-submitted photos for content, with very limited content from the wire services and traditional full-time journalists.
But all this already exists elsewhere; namely, on the Internet.
More than a year ago I took Mr. Snitch to task for a book he was pitching, a Best Of posts from 2005. Snitch thought differently, but I note that not only has the 2005 edition hit the stands, neither has the 2006, and Jeff seems to have disappeared fro the blogosphere altogether.
My issue then as it is now is that folks do not want to pay for yesterday’s news. Sure, it may be packaged, but really, is anyone hurting for content these days?
I made this point a couple months ago when Fox News tried to do the same thing with a show with Michelle Malkin and Kirsten Powers. It is very much like Time, Newsweek, and the other weekly news magazines; what is in those magazines that cannot be read elsewhere? In the old days, they provided more depth to an issue than a newspaper did, but does that model hold today?
The blogosphere is a different medium. Stop trying to mould it into an old media format. What goes on in the blogosphere works best in the blogosphere. Corporate America will need to change its approach in order to make money in the medium, not off of the medium.
In discussing Boston Now, Boing Boing reports that someone at a party described the concept as:
Posted in Media | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007
The Blogger’s Code of Conduct that Tim O’Reilly proposed is hogwash. I liken it to the Geocachers’ Creed. The meaning is good, but trying to quantify an experience in a list is restrictive. I can think of examples of each that are not covered well with either. Rather, hold your head up and do the best you can do. Stop legislating the behavior of others . . . Twitter seems to change day to day in how well it operates. The last few have been frustrating as the site is not refreshing . . . Am getting caught up on the scorecards of the Phillies games. Just need to score yesterday’s and I will be all set . . . I still need to find the power cord to our scanner. It disappeared shortly after our move . . . The last run of The Sopranos has begun. The filming schedule of this show absolutely killed it. We were late arrivals to the show. Once we got into into it, it was nearly two years before new episodes and then almost a year after that for these. And these last two years have been short runs. We watch because we can, but the excitement of the show is gone . . . The feds recently released findings showing that use of instructional software has no impact on student achievement (reg. req.). We’ll see how that plays in our district . . . Jamie’s in Vegas. Who would have thought there was a Star Trek bar? . . . I am not certain I understand the outrage over Imus’s use of nappy. It seems to me to word of offense is ‘hos. Yet, that would not be a racial slur, just a highly insensitive remark to make about young ladies . . . Gert sent me out to the market recently for syrup. There was an aisle in the store named Jellies/Syrups. Syrup wasn’t in the aisle. Instead, I found it with the canned goods . . . This vacation is flying by. It seems like there was hardly time to do any of what I had planned. I need a vacation from my vacation. Wait: that might be work . . .
Posted in Baseball, Education, Sports, Twitter | No Comments »
