Except for the fact that the company's also facing one fat, glaring environmental problem in its business practices. Facebook is planning to open its first-ever data center in Oregon, using what kind of energy source? You guessed it: the center will be fueled primarily by coal, a resource responsible for 40% of carbon dioxide emissions among fossil fuels. What a Facebook fail. |
Kudos to the Texas Supreme Court Blog. Lawyers (or journalists) with Gmail accounts: Careful with the Google Buzz |
There was a pretty massive shift in your privacy a couple of days ago. You might not have noticed it. But unless you take a few steps to protect yourself, Google may be sharing some of your confidences with the world. |
Yes, that’s right. Google Buzz is opt-out. When you log into your Gmail account, you’ll be confronted with this announcement: |
Here’s what this elusive new Buzz item might mean for your privacy. And here’s how to find (and change) a few settings to protect yourself. Read more at www.scotxblog.com |
What a stark reality check that the nonprofits most adversely affected by this recession are the social services organizations, which are often tasked with clothing, sheltering, and feeding those of us who have had less luck in this economy.
That said, there are thousands of kinds of nonprofits dealing with thousands of kinds of problems with our ever more complex society, and I take issue with this notion of "too many poorly performing nonprofits". If a nonprofit has an impact, it is (for the most part) performing well, regardless of its tenuous income stream. Careful with your private sector jargon. And there are too *few* nonprofits, not too many. The WSJ would have the nonprofit sector return to the Fortune 500 model, where big bureaucracies position their maws in such a way as to monopolize individual and corporate giving.
The so-called "touchy debate" often boils down not just to field work turf wars, but to staking a claim to gifts, resulting in massive nonprofits trying to claim every problem as their own, even when a small nonprofit has a more closely fitted solution. Big nonprofits have a remarkably important role to play because they essentially allow America to enjoy Western European-scale social welfare, without being forced to admit that's what it wants and needs.
But that system has become even stronger with the proliferation of niche-nonprofits, and I think the lesson here is not how do we merge those smaller entities, and stand blithely by while they consolidate, but how do set up a system that keeps them alive during recessions like this one?
Micro-nonprofits are just getting off their feet in the last 5 to 10 years; we are just learning about them, and they are just learning how to operate for the long term. It would be a shame if so much well-intentioned effort were to go to waste during this recession, but if our view of the nonprofit sector were shaped entirely by articles like this, I can see how it might. "Like in the animal kingdom, at some point, the weaker organizations will not be able to survive," says Diana Aviv, chief executive of Independent Sector, a coalition of 600 nonprofits. |
But longer term, say many nonprofits, the decline in donations to charities appears likely to continue. The sector's difficulties are re-awakening a touchy debate among some leaders in the nonprofit world over whether the economic prosperity of the past few decades has spawned an excess of nonprofits. |
"There were too many poorly performing nonprofits," says Paul C. Light, a professor at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service. "There were very many niche nonprofits devoted to small slices of a problem and they needed to be merged." Read more at online.wsj.com |
Do you tend to see innovations as massive paradigm-shifting change, or as the incremental achievements built on longer-term trends? Obviously, there’s some truth in both perspectives, but I think that most people have a tendency to lean one way or the other in how they interpret what’s going on in the world. |
Also, as someone whose professional practice is all about helping people make and embrace change, I think it’s usually more effective to connect new ideas to the already-familiar, rather than trying to motivate people with the fear of being “obsolete” or missing out on “what everyone else is doing.” One of the most valuable things we can do as consultants is to help people fit confusing new chunks of knowledge into a longer-term framework of ideas and trends. That builds capacity and confidence. Read more at jstahl.org |
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Wordnik, a living dictionary.
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To that end, Wordnik is a living dictionary that will be more accurate at any moment than any printed work.
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Is personal computing changing, as Carr puts it, or is personal computing being changed -- by big business -- to monopolize marketable innovation. It's actually ludicrous to suggest that the iPad foreshadows the end of hackable computers (not going to happen), but I'm sure Steve Jobs and company wouldn't mind if it did. The automobile went through a similar evolution. From eminently hackable to hood essentially sealed shut. When the automobile was new, you HAD to be a mechanic to own one. Later, being a mechanic gave you the option of tinkering and adapting it to your specific interests. In fact, that's how most people up until about 1985 learned to be mechanics. The big changes came with the catalytic converter and electronic ignition (and warranty language to match). Now the automobile has reached the point in its development where you don't even have to know whether it has a motor or an engine to use it, but to tinker at all requires highly specialized skills. Read more at radar.oreilly.com |
The rapturous reaction to Apple’s tablet - the buildup to Jobs’s announcement blurred the line between media feeding-frenzy and orgiastic pagan ritual - shows that our attitude to the tablet form has shifted. Tablets suddenly look attractive. Why? Because the nature of personal computing has changed. Read more at www.roughtype.com |
"See you lata'" is the new "beta." Exploring an epidemic of opting out. |
Is it just me, or is there a bit of a collective unconscious thing going on here? Perhaps it's just a "meme" that is spreading like a avian virus throughout the networks that I'm connected to via my work; networks that typically are pretty "techie" and kinda' into social media. |
I think this is a classic case of smart people with similar perspectives and experiences figuring out a fairly obvious conclusion at about the same time. Convergent evolution, if you will. |
OK, so I've only tried it once, but I really like the Amplify bookmarklet. I had mentioned to Eric that it was onerous Amplifying via the FF plugin (mostly because it's just onerous using FF, in general once addicted to the speed of Chrome.
So the bookmarklet worked well -- and fast -- on PC/XP/Chrome.
An added bonus is being able to select parts of a paragraph, rather than the whole shebang. Also quite easy to unselect.
Here's a screenshot.
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