January 18, 2004

Open Source Tools for eActivism. Top 10 Open Source Tools For E-Activism. Good article today listing the "Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism". Some of these I hadn't even heard of before (like ActionApps, completely new to me). Open source tools are a natural fit for e-activism, since they are born of the same bootstrap, grassroots mentality as a good e-activist campaign. Plus, they're free :-) Or at least cheap -- and often far better in quality than their commercial counterparts. [Seen on Many-to-Many] [Ant's Eye View] Top 10 Open Source Tools for eActivism Dan Bashaw and Mike Gifford have put together a terrific list of Open Source tools that can be used by activists to spread the message and promote interaction by enewsletters, forums, blogs, wikis and epetitions. They wrote an article for Steven Clift's excellent Democracies Online Newswire. 1. ActionApps (On-line Magazine/Content Sharing) http://www.apc.org/actionapps/ 2. PostNuke (Slash Forums/Portals) http://www.postnuke.com/ 3. Drupal (Blogs) http://drupal.org/ 4. Active (News Posting) http://www.active.org.au/doc/ 5. phpList (eNewsletters) http://www.phplist.com/ 6. phpBB (Forums) http://www.phpBB.com/ 7. WebCards (eCards/email2friends) http://webcards.sourceforge.net/ 8. TWiki (Wiki/Group Documentation) http://www.twiki.org/ 9. Back-End (eActions/ePetitions) http://www.back-end.org/ 10. FPDF (eLeaflets/ePosters) (Dynamic PDF/Graphic Generation) http://www.fpdf.org/ [Designing for a Civil Society] [Marc's Voice] 8:32:22 PM

Tech Industry Giants' Marry Hollywood: You Lose. I've been hoping that the tech industry will bring its better traditions into the living room -- expanding customers' flexibility and creativity, not curbing them. At the giant Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in early January, the evidence was mixed. While new technology is adding some useful features to consumer electronics, tech companies -- by embracing Hollywood-dictated restrictions on how digital content is used -- have allied themselves with a greedy cartel at the expense of their own customers. [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] 2:41:23 PM

Police in India to Monitor Cybercafes (AP). AP - Relatively few Indians can afford home PCs, so millions go online in the nation's jammed Internet cafes, enjoying their low cost and anonymity. But police in Bombay are planning to monitor cybercafes, a move some are decrying as excessive regulation that could create a dangerous precedent. [Yahoo! News - Technology] 2:37:40 PM

2003 in Review: DRM Technology. DRM Watch - 2003 in Review: DRM Technology. It's the end of 2003, and DRM technology is inching ever so slowly towards the mainstream.  To use Geoffrey Moore's terminology, DRM has crossed the chasm -- made particularly deep and yawning by the overall post-9/11 technology slump -- and made it firmly into the bowling alley.  DRM technology progressed through 2003 primarily by finding new niche markets and building solutions for those markets that expand on established DRM techno... [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service] 2:30:42 PM

Zephyr Teachout-Dean-NetPoliSci101 Zephr Teachout-Dean PolicSci101 I did a short article on the approaches used by Howard Dean and his Director of Internet Organization-Zephyr Teachout. I have posted the above story on WIFLblog. 1:10:29 PM

© Copyright 2004 Ted Ritzer.