http://dave-lucas.blogspot.com/2011/05/story-so-far-what-we-know-about.html http://amplify.com/u/a13vog

Watch out what you say! Radio talk show hosts, politicians, even reporters are not immune to being under the public microscope if something said or written is mis-interpreted. In the case of Dr. Laura, I think she began to believe the "I know all" persona she tried to project via the radio - it came back and bit her bit time!

Check out Dr. Laura's Fall From Grace", and be sure to leave a comment!

Mariuca, Lady Java, and their new "sweet blog pal"--- have launched a chilling, on-line hate camapign with a threatening message that could endanger a loving mother! Boo-hoo-hoo crybaby blogger Mariuca aka Marzie gets her panties in a bunch whenever her beaver is angry, but that doesn't stop her and her buddy, identfied above in the screencap as David Funk, from trouncing another blogger, quite viciously, I might add! As you can see, Funk openly threatens Zuveena! (In some countries this can land you in prison!) Funk describes Mariuca as "my sweet blogpal"!!!! Apparently, some people still don't get it! That threat you put out on the internet, stays put! Hopefully, no ill will come to the blogger targeted by this cast of crazies! The origins of the hate crusade are documented here. Next time you feel like bitching, moaning, complaining, whining, or thrashing another: read this, you ungrateful louse!

Before you waste any valuable time or effort on any blog, make sure it's not a "clique blog. While bloghopping you occasionally will run into blogs that run contests and/or otherwise reward readers. A good source of blog contest activity is HERE. But be careful on that big bad WWW, some blogs are "clique blogs" set up between BFF's to serve only themselves and their minions.

The dictionary defines clique as "a small exclusive group of people" - and I emphasize the word EXCLUSIVE.  You'll never win any contest on these blogs.

 

So, the signs to look for: -the same people winning "awards" and "contests"

-the same people appearing as "top commenters"

-the same people over and over and over being given special recognition by the blog

UNLESS you want to spend your time like a clever spider, befriending these bloggers, slowly penetrating their little blogosphere: then you may have a chance at winning! I would suggest building that friendship slowly. Give back some "link love" in return, and someday when a real "big" contest appears on their blogs, STRIKE! Win the contest, take all, and say goodbye!

PS::: Stay away from this blogging network! Details:

http://dave-lucas.blogspot.com/2010/04/famousbloggers-know-how-to-use.html

 

 

My buddy, who is always careful about where he goes online and what he downloads, just had to wipe his harddrive clean and reload Windows. The other night he went to download a movie (legally!) and of course when he tried to watch it Windows Media Player popped up an advisory it needed a particular codec to play the filee. It asked permission to search & download, but hiding inside whatever that codec was: a nasty little virus that hijacked his browser toward unimaginable porn and warez and mlm websites. It was outta control and unstoppable. My buddy is an IT pro and moved the harddrive to his workbench unit to make sure he could writedown the disc to zeros. He says he never encontered anything like this before. I told him, as I tell you now, seek out and grab a free copy of VLC player. I have it on my old WinMe PC. It plays ANY video, crystal clear, no pixellation, repairs broken or damaged video files of any extension, and NEVER needs to go fetch a codec! Google it!

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A generation or two stands between the 33rpm vinyl album with its artwork and liner notes and the digital music CD which is what it is. On Facebook this week Yarah Bravo has been plugging her new CD and mentions she won't be pressing any more hard copies. People who had a copy commented back how glad they were to have an original. This morning I heard that a local music distributor is closing several retail shops because people are buying and downloading music online. I see two great marketing opportunities for artists: issue limited edition specially enhanced mixed media CDs, numbered like artists number prints of their works, like "3 of 300" - and - offering an "enhanced download" including liner notes and artwork that can either be printed out or simply viewed on the computer. The CDs have the potential to increase in value over time. Downloaders get more goodies (which cost the artist next to nothing to add to the CD package.) ----------
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My two trusty tools: the VM Kyocera Wild Card and the Fly Ying F003. It's an interesting (and a great) time to be alive, as far as the ability for one to communicate goes... these days that's pretty far! The meshing of internet with mobile phone technology diminishes the space between us all quite impressively.

Last night on my Fly Ying phone I chatted with friends near and far, texted friends in some very faraway places, checked my e-mail, jumped on Yahoo Messenger for a minute, read the New York Times online, watched a youtube video and downloaded a couple of java games. Then, I looked through the directory that contains photos, deleting a few that I no longer needed, e-mailing a few others to friends and family, and sending a couple to my computer so I could put them on CD. All of this, on one little mobile phone!

The technology already exists and is available on that phone to use the device as a one-to-one or one-to-many video/audio broadcasting device. Not only that, when either cellular or internet technology or BOTH are NOT available, my phone can entertain me with audio (mp3s or built-in FM radio) or video (it can hold 5 full-length movies and has built-in TV) or eBook reader (I have two books and a dictionary loaded onto it). I can view saved webpages, play games or WRITE and save my work for later! Just 25 years ago, the ability to posess such a marvelous communications tool was at best a sci-fi dream, and now, it is here.

With the speed of the internet itself, the mobile phone industry is changing day-to-day. There are many among us who have not and probably will never have a land-line telephone. My advice, as always, is to keep an analog system as a back-up. Although the "Dark Angel" TV show is fictional, imagine the impact if some sort of pulse bomb succeeded in wiping out all electronic data!

Hand-powered Windup Mobile Phone Charger

Solar Charger from thinkawesome

Freeloader Solar phone charger

Mobiles are no longer a luxury. They are an absolute necessity. A Cell phone is also a fashion statement. The kind of phone a person carries speaks volumes about the person. This year the number of worldwide mobile phone users hit 4.6 billion people. Much of that growth has taken place in the developing world. And, as phones expanded in some countries, so did economic development.

Think Media, Not Medium

Wordpress has launched two themes that will automatically be displayed when a Wordpress.com blog is accessed from a cell phone... the type of mobile phone a user employs dictates what the different blogs will look like, the company said in a blog post. Websurfers who access Wordpress.com blogs from their iPhone or Android-based devices will be able to access the particular blog's "posts, pages, and archives." WPtouch will also support AJAX-based "commenting and post-loading." Header images will be scaled to fit the device's screen. Those accessing blogs on other phones won't be treated to all the bells and whistles. According to the company, those visitors will see a simple page that focuses mainly on loading blog content as quickly as possible. *more on C-net In some countries, mobile telephones have been the driving force and social glue behind "flash mob" gatherings.

The American book and TV series "Gossip Girl" demonstrated the power of electronic communication slightly ahed of the curve when it was first introduced. I guess Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio was cast from a similar mold. People have WANTED to communicate and be informed like this for years and years! NOW is the time! The trend hasn't caught on just yet in North America (although I recently signed up for mobile banking with my financial institution) but Mobile phones are also being used to transact business. " The continual expanding coverage and use of wireless mobile devices such as mobile phones in developing regions such as Africa and South East Asia, are leading to increased applications to deliver financial services, especially to those in remote regions and whose low income have typically excluded them from the traditional banking system." Mexico Eyes Mobile Phones To Boost Financial Service Use - WSJ.com The blog Crisscrossed details what makes the mobile phone so important. I've rewritten the original post to explain, from my point of view, what the mobile phone has done for me, both personally and professionally.

But what makes mobile phone so special?

It is so especial because it combines all former media, such as telephone, Internet, and even radio and television, and because one can:

1. Communicate and receive information (radio, television and Internet)
2. Document and collect information
3. Publish information in text, audio and video
4. Can network in different ways on a peer-to-peer basis

So a passive recipient can become an active user or citizen.

The excellent Pomise of Ubiquity report from Internews has some fascinating statistics such as the different media access. In most countries, 2008 signified a turning point as more people owned mobile phones than televisions. So, the mobile phone becomes a key instrument to receive information via Internet, listen to radio (FM mobile phone) and watch videos although the latter has not worked yet and is unrealistic due to high costs. Location-based services will be very promising.

“A world in which nearly everyone owns a mobile linked into networks advanced enough to offer video and location-based services is years, not decades, away.” Internews

Different spheres of mobile activism I looked, during my presentation, at political activism and focused on four different spheres and examples even though there is still a lot more happening (and much more in many African countries than in Europe).

1. Public sphere The mobile phone will become an important tool to shape the public sphere. Two examples are Voices of Africa and mobile African reporters. I showed a great footage from Cameroon about a Guiness factory polluting water sources. This example shows the potential to report better from the local context. But I also wonder when will there be a critical mass of an audience for such reports?
2. Participation The radio still plays a decisive role, because it reaches many more groups of people and particularly illiterate listeners. Combining a mobile campaign with the radio can be a great package. The organisation AZUR in Congo launched a while ago an SMS campaign, where they asked women to report about cases of domestic violence. The answeres were then portrayed and discussed in a radio show.
3. Transparency For some years now, the monitoring of elections has been happening in different African countries such as Zimbabwe or Nigeria. Digiactive has a great comparative case study analysis. In Barcelona, I followed an insightful presentation by Ethan Zuckerman, where he describes a great example from last year’s election in Zimbabwe: “SMS is an effective tool for monitoring all sorts of large, dangerous mammals. You can make the argument that Morgan Tsvanagarai was able to challenge the first round of Zimbabwe’s presidential elections in no small part due to SMS. A change in polling law meant that every local polling station in Zimbabwe was required to post local voting results publicly. Zimbabwe’s opposition party, MDC, organized an effort to collect these results via SMS. As a result, the MDC knew, within a few hours after the close of polls, that they’d received more votes than ZANU-PF.” By the way, an organization called Sokwanele has also been doing some pioneering work in Zimbabwe for mobile activism. Another one is Kubatana, which developed the Freedom fone.
4. Networking A bit more than a year ago cotton-workers in the Nile delta striked for a higher salary. They went into strike for a few weeks long because of the inflation, which took most of what little was left. Unrecognized by media in Egypt and internationally, an Egyptian woman, who did not use to be an activist, decided to set up a Facebook group to solidarize with the strikers. The group grew in a few weeks to more than 70,000 members (Egypt has about around 700,000 Facebook members). There is an enormous potential to use social networks for campaigns and protests. I think these networks will be working over the mobile phone in the future as I described here. Nevertheless in this case the protest could not made it to the the street, as the Egyptian authorities hardly allowed any protests on their streets. But mobile phones play a decisive role in protest coordination. Patrick Meier, also from Digiactive, did a great presentation about Mobile for Advocacy and Activism.

Challenges

Unfortunately, there are numerous challenges to mobile activism in Africa and, therefore, it is even more incredible how many initiatives are happening. Just to name a few:

• Usage The costs of mobile communication or SMS are still very high. Although rural areas a now much better connected, there is a disparity between rural and urban areas, where one part becomes only passive recipients of information.
• Government Mobile networks can be even easier controlled such as the Internet, because they belong to one provider. Recently, it came out that half state owned Vodafone in Egypt gave out its customers data about the above described strike to the Egyptian police.
• Mobile Provider As much as mobile providers have done positive for the dissemination of mobile phones , they have their own business interests, which do not necessarily fit and promote activism. Such are walled gardens, where companies can and want to control what is offered and exchanged.
• Activism Although mobile activism is at least 8 years old, since the Estrada campaign in the Philippines, it has just started and a lot of experimenting is happening. It is also clear that it can also be a tool for a mean and cannot be useful for any form of activism. A theatre group might have more impact on the issue of HIV/Aids than an SMS campaign.

Patrick Meier, from the group DigiActive, argues that people can now become activists simply by using a mobile phone. Portable telephones have been employed to organize and coordinate protests – specifically in the Philippines, Spain and Pakistan. Mobile phones have also been used to document human rights abuses, in Egypt, Tibet and Morocco. Cell phone sales inch up in third quarter 9 Examples of innovative tools for the mobile phone Girl attempts suicide in Jammu and Kashmir over sim card Stop Positioning Mobile Phone as a Mere Tool for Entertainment and KIT

Tags: mobile phones, cell phones

I'm trying to figure out why my posts sometimes appear twice. I only write them and send them once...

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Some nitwit with nothing better to do sent me an email, complaining about my blog*spot blog ( http://dave-lucas.blogspot.com ) "I like your blog but you're all over the place... Why don't you stick to one topic or niche?" D'oh, hello? It's MY blog and I'll do with it whatever I please! I wrote back to the moron in a pleasant, professional fashion. In closing, I asked him to send along the url for HIS blog. To which he responded "I don't have one I think they're a waste of time."

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