Larger companies are slowly introducing Open Source technologies to their organizations and, as most of us know, change even for better isn’t often very easy, specially if they had already invested in technologies such as Microsoft .NET and Windows Servers and subsequently hired staff who are only specialized in those technologies.
Many of the cutting edge Web2.0 innovations are happening in the open source world and they have been developed in technologies such as the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) and Ruby on Rails. The problem is, when the management decides to utilize some of these technologies they immediately face the resistance from the internal IT team.
Reproducing many of the Web2.0 sales and marketing tools in the proprietary world is very costly and expensive and the results are often not so impressive either. In fact I see many smaller companies who are utilizing more advanced web applications with slick user interfaces to power their blogs, content management driven websites, online forums, and Intranets, all thanks to the open source technologies. On the other hand, some larger sales and marketing companies with much larger budgets are starting to feel deprived from the new wave of internet applications, because utilizing one means exposing the internal IT staff to things they aren’t used to see!
Continue reading ‘When corporate IT resists the Open Source’
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If your Yahoo! ID is based in Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong or Korea you will only be able to view safe content based on your local Terms of Service so won’t be able to turn SafeSearch off. In other words that means, that German users can not access photos on flickr that are not flagged “safe” … only flowers and landscapes for Germans …Copy and upload this picture to your account - show flickr who we are!
please use the tag: “thinkflickrthink” and join this group www.flickr.com/groups/againstcensorship/
Technorati Tags: flickr censorship, censorship, Singapore, Germany, Hong Kong, Korea
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Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir is an Art Student and a very talented photographer on the Flickr. Rebekka had posted a plea for help on flickr about a theft case involving an online retailer selling copycat art. She requested that people send the retailer letters concerning the issue, but in response, her original post was deleted by flickr admins.
Photography by Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir © all rights reserved
Rebekka’s deleted post had 450 long and meaningful user comments about how selling other people’s stuff for profit is a crime, including advices and suggestions on how to deal with it. This post had been viewed over 101,000 times at the time of deletion.
Continue reading ‘Protecting the User Generated Content’
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A while ago on Reuters and Slash dot I read that Chinese President Hu Jintao has launched a campaign to rid the country’s sprawling Internet of “unhealthy” content and make it a springboard for Communist Party doctrine.
That isn’t really anything new. The truth is, the distributed and democratic nature of the Internet has always been a threat to those who are trying to super impose conformity or a unified set of ideas over the diverse humanity. I personally think attempts to censor and lock down content would fail in the long run, yet they could do quite a bit of damage in short run.
Photography by Abbey Wuthrich © All rights reserved
Many social networking and online communities such as YouTube and Flickr aren’t exempt. For example, we all know that there is an ongoing race among companies such as Google or Yahoo to grow market-share in China. They have already filtered their search engine content to comply with the censorship regulations imposed by the communist party. The same applies to YouTube and Flickr which are owned by Google and Yahoo. In general the fact that a lot of user generated images and videos are centralized in these two online communities, would leave them at the mercy of corporate greed and dictator governments.
Continue reading ‘To better protect the Democratic Internet’
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