From Info World and Network World come great pieces on this must-read tale about schools spying on students. It stems from an unbelievable story from the Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia. See if this summary gets you to read more.
School gives kids laptops with web-cams.
School doesn’t tell kids or parents they are monitoring the video from these web-cams.
School administrator sees kid eating Mike and Ike candy, doesn’t realize it’s candy, thinks the kid is popping pills.
Administrator brings kid into office to confront kid on what the administrator believes to be illegal drug use.
Massive lawsuit ensues.
Lower Merion schools used to be primarily known for being where Kobe Bryant played scholastic ball. Not anymore.
The Saratoga Economic Development Corporation debuted this video today at an event with the Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce. I was not at the event.
I don’t mean to be critical, but I’m going to be critical.
What is the point of this video? I’m serious. Watch it and let me know. Is there new information? Is there a call to action? Is there really a compelling case made for anything? The only URL included in the video is to SaratogaEDC.com, which -- quite frankly -- is a static site lacking personalization, and appears to have been designed in 2002.
There is so much potential for organizations and businesses to tell their stories on the web. Video, photos, interesting content, social conversations held in the open. Putting bland, irrelevant content out there is a flat. Waste. Of. Time.
Aardvark, which we gave a positive review last Fall, was in the news today as they are reportedly going to be a member of the Google empire.
The deal, which was first reported by Techcrunch and confirmed by Mashable yesterday, is said to be for around $50 million. We’ll see how Google puts Aardvark’s functionality into play, but Mashable’s post has some good guesses.
FAIL —> What did you see if you hopped on Twitter as the Super Bowl came to a close tonight?
My guess is that Twitter’s popularity has far surpassed the annoyance of their frequent outages. Users likely just put up with the issues as Twitter is still a free service and the outages don’t last for too long. I can’t help but think that these intermittent issues are what keeps Twitter from launching premium services for users and businesses. If the service remains mostly free, users don’t bark too loud when things go sour for a bit. A paid customer is not likely to be as patient. Either way, I really wonder how most users react to these problems, and what percentage of possible users just decide not to bother with something they view as unreliable.
What do you think? Do periodic outages impact the way you select your preferred social network?
