Education and Black Boys

I love innovation.  I love playing with new services and gadgets.  But the only ones I stick with tend to be the ones that are actually useful. Unfortunately, in listening to entrepreneurs at the Defrag conference (and through repeated observation elsewhere), I am startled by how many companies and products seem to be solutions in…

I have enormous respect for teachers.  But the fact of the matter is that, as with any profession, there are good teachers and bad teachers.  Unfortunately, unions and tenure prevent the bad ones from being fired in most cases, unless they step so far over the line that no sane person could conclude they were…

This is a great introduction to Web 2.0 for normal people.  It has an obligatory Flickr reference, of course, and is posted on YouTube.  Watch it below. Thanks to Alice Marshall for pointing this out — I agree with her sentiment that videos like these could replace many PowerPoints.  It obviously takes a bit more…

Steve Rubel reports today on efforts in the U.S. Congress to pass a shield law that would protect bloggers from disclosing sources for their posts.  The Columbia Journalism Review provides a detailed description of the proposal and its background.  Ironically, conservative Republican Mike Pence of Indiana is the driving force behind enacting a federal shield law…

A few weeks ago Todd And released the "Power 150" — 150 top marketing blogs, as determined by a formula that combined several measures, including Google PageRank, Technorati Links, Bloglines subscribers, and Todd And’s own subjective rating.  I didn’t quite make the 150 list — just eked out position number 173 to make the "near…

Last week SEC Chairman Chris Cox again demonstrated his interest in blogs as he spoke about them at a conference.  According to a Reuters report of the event, he lauded blogs as a source of information about “passion” and indicated that they “give you an early read on the … response you might expect.”  By…