Tropology's blog

Data is Data is Data ... VoIP?

Tropology — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 11:44:52 -0600

The principle I adhere to and which needs to be defended is that data is data is data... (and this point should be defended against FCC and others).

GIO News and Thoughts

Tropology — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 02:14:25 -0600

Consumer, Civic, CTC, and other many-hatted persons met in Chicago on Weds. Dec. 15th to strategize and enumerate the issues of Illinois' pending telecommunications legislation "rewrite" from our perspective. The group will meet again in Chicago early in January to coordinate the first of what we expect will be several community action/education events. CTCNet Chicago offered to coordinate one in Chicago in partnership with the other groups, with a tentative date of January 13th. We'll further flesh out the content in the early-January meeting.

We anticipate many more such community gatherings on the rewrite issue in around the State.

Blogging and Blogger Corps

Tropology — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 20:51:45 -0600

My oblique spin on a recent list discussion.... Thoughts on blogging When one blogs, one always blogs somewhere... So (bear with me as I continue to restate the obvious, and correct me when I mis-state it) one generally blogs within a community of bloggers at some blog site... Now blogging tools have spread so that practically any site can incorporate them... Some sites are all about the blogging activity, but others want the blogging to be the generation of a portion of content, lets say in a puposive member community (Such as AFCN,or RTC)... If one is a member of several communities one often wants to share one's words and thoughts in each of the several...

Vision from Ohio

Tropology — Sun, 14 Nov 2004 00:32:19 -0600

I write a lot about Illinois and Chicago. That's where I am.

I keep an eye on developments elsewhere... as a lot passes through my in box. I've been following ICT coordination efforts in California and Ohio for some time as Illinois has been following suit in organizing statewide ICT interests. Here in Illinois we've begun to think more about Policy and Vision, and whether we are "asking for enough" or "doing enough" ourselves. We've also begun to think a little more regionally, first in terms of the different sectors of the state, then of the several states around us.

It occurs to me that we should be able to arrive at models for professional development and professionalization of our work (speaking more from my CTC side) that will have some degree of standardization.

Identity Protection and the Hazards of the Information Age

Tropology — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 00:38:45 -0600

Recent (and perennial) discussion has touched upon the ethics of network service and content providers that require a significant amount of personal information (and what they do with it), along with reasons some of us may not want to disclose such information, or that we should be recommending the development of community oriented/owned network infrastuctures that take this as a starting point. Concerns for protecting one's identity (and personal privacy) are likely to grow, so there will be an increasing demand for services or technologies that offer some degree/promise of protection.

Patent this!? Outraged by patent issues for common sense practices?

Tropology — Wed, 06 Oct 2004 01:57:29 -0500

I have patents on door nobs, door handles, door knocks and door bells I will be sending you a packet soon And dont forget whistles and bells, and bells dont forget whistles and bells :) In the mean while, check out this link from the archives of wifinetnews.com.

weblinks and bookreviews

Tropology — Tue, 05 Oct 2004 19:18:00 -0500

These are two new categories of content you can create, and I invite you to do so.

With "weblink" you can submit a URL to our database, and offer commentary on its purpose and it's overall utility, among other things.

This goes a long way towards our goal of providing summative content by adding value. In the past we've tried to do this by maintaining and updating pages of URL's with some commentary. We'll probably still have to do this, and it makes sense because in that format we can offer a lot more by structuring the information and providing an overview. The problem has been the effort it takes to maintain them. New sites emerge. URL's change (or break) and sites disappear.

LinkedIn and Social Networking "Applications"

Tropology — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 14:27:18 -0500

This note is prompted by the inquiry of a colleague who received an invite from a "user group" on LinkedIn one of the popular Social Networking sites. I'm not addressing the question of being invited by user groups vs. individuals, but more or less the general question of the utility of such sites. As to its utility... there isn't a straightforward answer... it depends.... What do you want from a social networking application? What do you put into it? Well, I can't speak as to what any particular individual may want one of these apllications, but I can imagine, based on some conversations, that you see there being potential for job-seekers and others who might be oriented to such applications in workforce development approaches. As The utility forthis purpose will likely depend to some extent on the category of work sought. I think the same will be found in tradoitional Job sites... not all types of work are to be found there in proportion to their availability in the economy, and the bias will be towards ITC and communications ennabled sectors.

Our Web Site, etc...

Tropology — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 06:46:24 -0500

I've just upgraded the underlying Drupal software to the current stable version 4.4.2, and everything seems to be working relatively well. This should simplify things for those of you that have taken the time to try and post things, and more to the point for any of you that may have been frustrated and decided not to. (Keep in mind that as far as CMS's go, Drupal isnt the easiest, but it certainly isnt the hardest-in any case the object is to make things relatively straight forward for an end user.) Basically, you can submit posts with html style tags. This wasnt clear before, and it often required going back into the posts and fiddling with them, adding code here and there, including breaks, links, etc.

Try ::w.bloggar::

Tropology — Fri, 01 Oct 2004 03:35:19 -0500

I'm testing how some blogging tools work with our Drupal based CMS. If you have a user account on the AFCN site, you can use ::w.bloggar:: to submit your blogs. You can download ::w.bloggar:: here. The following settings worked for me: Blog Tool: MoveableType Host: www.afcn.org Page: /xmlrpc.php