Condivisione di buoni prodotti della Rete.
Le nuove tribù promuovono nuove infrastrutture di accesso alla Rete. L'innovazione la promuovono i Cittadini; siamo noi quelli che stiamo aspettando.
Colpo di scena sul fronte della legge varata in Francia per combattere la pirateria su Internet. Oggi il Consiglio costituzionale ha bocciato il testo, già al centro di vivaci polemiche.
L'organismo, il cui intervento era stato richiesto da un gruppo di deputati socialisti, all'opposizione, ha emesso un parere, che renderà inapplicabile una parte fondamentale della legge, approvata in maniera definitiva lo scorso 13 maggio. Questa prevede la creazione di un'autorità pubblica (Hadopi), che si metterà a caccia degli internauti disonesti, quelli che scaricano illegalmente dalla Rete musica, film e video. Secondo la legge, in questo senso la più severa a livello mondiale, una commissione specifica dell'Hadopi deve inviare due mail di avvertimento nel caso di un download illegale (dopo la seconda mail è prevista anche una lettera raccomandata per lo stesso contenuto scaricato). Se tutti questi strumenti si rivelano efficaci, è previsto che la commisione dell'Hadopi proceda a tagliare la connessione Internet fino a una durata massima di un anno.
Oggi, pero', il Consiglio costituzionale, facendo appello ai principi di libertà di espressione e di comunicazione espressi nella Dichiarazione dei diritti dell'uomo, ha reso noto che considera la possibilità di interrompere l'abbonamento a Internet anticostituzionale, contraria a un diritto fondamentale come è diventato potersi collegare alla Rete. In sostanza il Consiglio ha reso inapplicabili gli articoli 5 e 11 della legge, limitando il ruolo dell'Hadopi all'avvertimento, senza la possibilità di sanzionare. Viene contestato soprattutto il fatto che a decidere il taglio della connessione sia un'autorità amministrativa e non giudiziaria.
Guest Post by Esther Gokhale
Author, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free BackWhether in Zazen or Valley Zen, sitting is very much a part of our lives. In Zen sitting, each muscle, bone and ligament has a natural place. The design of the skeleton, the end product of millennia of collaboration between gravity and structure, has a natural balance and harmony. When we restore that balance, the result is stillness and flow. No part of the body is pinched or pulled, no part signals the brain that it needs to shift, toss, turn, tighten or be protected. Structure informs function. Blood, lymph, cerebrospinal fluid and Qi circulate unimpeded. A myriad accumulated injuries and rogue events sort themselves out spontaneously.
If this is not the way you currently sit, stillness and poise are still within your reach. Two helpful techniques are stretchsitting and stacksitting. Both transform sitting into a therapeutic activity that will help to heal aching backs and more. Yes, sitting can actually be good for you!
Stretchsitting
(using a backrest to put your back in traction)
Sit well back in your chair.
Curve your body forward from the waist so as to elongate your low back.
Elongate your spine further by pushing against the chair seat with your arms.
Press your elongated spine against the backrest (you may need to modify the backrest with a towel or our newly developed Stretchsit™ cushion.
Let go of all your lengthening efforts, while your spine remains attached to the backrest. Enjoy the stretch in your back while you work, drive, eat, or relax at home.Stacksitting
This technique is useful when there is no backrest available. The idea is to stack the bones of your spine, from top to bottom, in a single column so that they support your head without any muscular involvement at all. None, zero, zilch. You will find yourself suspended in space and time. Use a small wedge (folded towel or blanket) on the back of the seat. Sit on the edge of the wedge so your pelvis tips forward. Notice that the rest of your spine stacks more easily. If necessary, use some of your abdominal muscles to improve your alignment . If you are swayed, rotate your rib cage forward to straighten out your sway. If your torso needs more length, engage the abdominal muscles that will create extra length)
Your shoulders
Now give attention to your shoulders. They should naturally sit back, so that the arms hang down at the back of the rib cage. One at a time, roll the shoulders forward, up and back in a slow, deliberate circle. Then let your shoulders settle in a position that lets the arm hang further back than before.
Do you feel your chest expand, and breathing become easier? Good, you’ve got it.Your head
Elongate your neck by gently pulling a clump of hair on the back of your head up and back. Now notice where your head is. It should perch on the top of the spine, chin down, back of the head seeming to rise up the back. When you position it there do you feel the neck muscles release? If so, then, again, you’ve got it.
Finally, just enjoy the sensations traveling through the body as you sit—in a way nature intended, in a moment of Zen.
Facebookers love to post 'Pick Five' lists, such as 'Five Albums That Shaped Me' and 'Celebrities I've Met'. We asked the creator of these lists, Facebook app developer LivingSocial, to tell us which of the lists have been filled out most frequently, and what the most popular 'picks' were for each.
China is on course to obtain 20% of its energy from wind and solar sources by 2020—a transformation that would make the country the world leader in renewables. Beijing is ramping up its targets for clean energy, helped by the $590 billion stimulus package passed last year, a senior government official told the Guardian. "Due to the impact of global financial crisis, people are all talking about green and sustainable development," he said.
China has been under substantial pressure from the US and Europe to cut its emissions, and the country's reluctance to act has contributed to recent stalemates at climate talks. But ahead of the crucial Copenhagen summit later this year, China now says it's open to limits on carbon emissions relative to economic output. The US and China alone account for about half of the world's greenhouse gas.
China's blocking of Twitter ahead of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre last week didn't foil the country's computer-savvy youth for very long, the BBC reports. Users swiftly shared information about visiting the site through proxies or software applications, and the subsequent twittering made Tiananmen one of Twitter's most-discussed topics last week.
Twitter and other social networking sites remained blocked for days after the anniversary, annoying even users with no interest in politics. "Entrepreneurs and technical experts too need to exchange ideas with their peers on social networking sites," one Beijing businessman said." For example, because blogspot is blocked, one of my business blogs is not accessible in China. This is not helping China become a technology innovator."
I want to share with you a roundup of Twitter tracking tools that I have put together. It’s the result of the market research I did before launching our own prototype of a Twitter measurement tool a few weeks back.
The list below summarizes tools that analyze influencers or popularity, evaluate sentiment or number of mentions, identify the location of the person tweeting, offer trend analysis or focus on time frames. I marked an “X” in the category that I perceive is the tool’s primary utility. That is not to say that each tool doesn’t do other things. Also as an aside, I personally don’t like the idea of sharing my Twitter password with a third party. You will need to decide whether you want to share yours with tools like Twitstat and Twitterank.
This list is not exhaustive, but it may be helpful in trying to manage the deluge of daily tweets. (Please use the comments section for suggested additions and changes.)
At the SES Canada conference yesterday, there was, not surprisingly, a lot of talk about Twitter. Most of it had to do with whether Twitter is truly emerging as a search rival to Google - something the SEO and SEM aficionados dismissed as unlikely.
More interesting - at least to me - was the talk during the Twitter panel in which I participated about Twitter’s growing value as a customer service tool - a topic that continued during dinner with Freshbooks’ Mike Macderment and Rayanne Langdon, and PR veteran Michael O’Connor Clarke.
There was an animated discussion about how Twitter leverage the Web to offer a new, different and better kind of customer service. Unlike impersonal and frustrating telephone-based customer service systems, Twitter lets companies dynamically engage and build relationships with their customers.
The ability to provide information, solve problems, address issues and have conversations in real-time is a powerful tool that doesn’t get as much attention as it should when people talk about Twitter. The opportunity to provide better and different customer service is perhaps the single most important reason why companies, particularly consumer-facing ones, should use Twitter. For these kind of companies to not use Twitter is a strategic and operational mistake.
A great example of a company effectively leverage Twitter to provide amazing customer service is Zappos but there are tons of other companies being as successful. Freshbooks, which provides online invoicing services, is one of them. If you’re a consumer-facing company, the approach to Twitter taken by Zappos and Freshbooks is definitely worth emulating.
There’s a lot of great services that make Twitter better but, like Twitter, most of them suffer from the fact they have no way of making money. This means these tools become public service projects or they disappear when the people who create them run out of resources, patience or enthusiasm.
Enter FeaturedUsers.com, which has created an ad network that Twitter services can join. It works like this:
If someone on Twitter (an individual or company) wants to attract more followers they can purchase a CPM-based ad from FeaturedUsers that will appear on the different Twitter “publishers” who are part of the network. Here’s an example of what an ad looks like:
In terms of pricing, 1,000 impressions is $10; 3,000 impressions for $30; and $10,500 for 10,000 impressions.
I’ve been blogging for around 4 years now and despite all the changes we see in technology and software, the ‘rules’ to a successful blog tend to have remained the same. Yet, while the rules haven’t changed much, a lot of our traffic generation methods have. Gone are the days where 50 votes would guarantee a Digg homepage or you could place some technorati tags in your post and get thousands of visitors.
Each niche is getting more competitive by the day but it still doesn’t mean you can’t stand out from the crowd. One of my favourite new sites for creating relationships (hugely important) and getting website traffic has actually turned out to be Twitter. For the last few months, the micro-blogging has been in my top 5 referring sites, sending thousands of visitors monthly.
In this post I want to look at six common rules which can help with your blogging and also benefit the Twitter users of you out there who want to drive more traffic back to your site. Please note that I use the term ‘rules’ loosely, everyone has their own way of doing things and there will always be exceptions but you’ll probably find that these work well for you.
Roma - Arriva ancora una volta dal Massachusetts Institute of Technology statunitense una di quelle trovate tecnologiche potenzialmente capaci, nei prossimi anni, di promuovere avanzamenti concreti in ogni settore. Questa volta si tratta di un'antenna universale per le trasmissioni radio, con cui è possibile captare onde elettromagnetiche di ogni ordine e grandezza posto che facciano parte dello spettro delle radiofrequenze.Come conferma Rahul Sarpekhkar, professore del MIT co-autore della ricerca che è stata pubblicata sul numero di giugno del magazine IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, alla base del nuovo avanzamento c'è uno studio attento di come funziona l'orecchio umano, le modalità con cui esso trasforma le vibrazioni trasmesse attraverso un corpo liquido in segnali elettrici da inviare direttamente al cervello per la decodifica sonora."L'orecchio umano è un ottimo analizzatore di spettro" dice Sarpekhkar, dunque i ricercatori hanno "copiato alcuni dei trucchi che esso utilizza, e li abbiamo tracciati sui circuiti elettronici". Nell'udito umano i suoni vengono percepiti grazie al lavoro instancabile delle 20.000 cellule ciliate dell'organo del Corti, di dimensioni differenti per la percezione di differenti frequenze all'interno della porzione di spettro compresa tra i 100 e 10.000 hertz, e che trasformano le informazioni recepite dalle vibrazioni meccaniche in segnali elettrici da consegnare al cervello.Nell'orecchio-antenna universale del MIT le cellule ciliate vengono sostituite dai circuiti integrati ma il principio di funzionamento rimane invariato: nella parte più esterna del congegno sono stati posizionati i chip più piccoli (quadrati di 3 millimetri per 1,5 di spessore) capaci di catturare le trasmissioni sulle onde radio corte ad alta energia, mentre via via che si procede verso il centro dell'antenna sono presenti i chip più grandi con cui captare le trasmissioni in bassa frequenza.Il principio di funzionamento è lo stesso, ma l'efficienza dell'antenna universale batte di 1 milione a 1 quella dell'orecchio umano. E lo fa consumando una minima quantità di energia, dicono i ricercatori, inferiore alle antenne universali sviluppate sino a ora. Anche grazie a questa sua caratteristica "verde", le possibili applicazioni del nuovo dispositivo includono ogni genere di scenario, dai cellulari ai ricevitori GPS, ai router wireless per l'accesso a Internet.Tra i vantaggi più importanti e significativi dell'antenna universale, inoltre, c'è anche il fatto che avere la capacità di captare ogni onda su ogni frequenza permetterebbe virtualmente di eliminare i rumori sul segnale: se ad esempio la comunicazione su un cellulare comincia a fare le bizze, il dispositivo potrebbe semplicemente spostarsi su una frequenza diversa e meno disturbata per ripristinare una corretta ricezione del segnale. E dopo l'antenna di ricezione, al MIT stanno ora lavorando anche al trasmettitore universale.Alfonso Maruccia