More Mark Fiore brilliance.

Via The San Francisco Chronicle.

Enjoy.

- ferg

More Mark Fiore brilliance.

Via The San Francisco Chronicle.

Enjoy.

- ferg

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees domain names and IP addresses, core mechanisms of the Internet, has been granted independence from the U.S. government. A new agreement between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce states ICANN is “independent and not controlled by any one entity,” and commits ICANN to remaining a private, not-for-profit organization.

The Internet had its beginnings in the U.S., and ICANN was created in 1998 to oversee functions such as top-level domain-name system management and IP address space allocation on behalf of the US government. However, since the Internet has gone global, recently there have been calls, many of them from the European Commission (since 2005, no less), for ICANN to become divested of its U.S. ties and become accountable to the world.

The European Commission was quick to praise the announcement. Information society and media commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement:

“I welcome the US administration’s decision to adapt Icann’s key role in internet governance to the reality of the 21st century and of a globalised world.

“Internet users worldwide can now anticipate that Icann’s decisions on domain names and addresses will be more independent and more accountable, taking into account everyone’s interests. External review panels will periodically evaluate Icann’s performance. If effectively and transparently implemented, this reform can find broad acceptance among civil society, businesses and governments alike.”

In the past, ICANN’s periodic reviews took place with a table of one: the U.S. government. Now, the reviews will be conducted by an “international committee of parties” chosen by the chairman of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (representing 100 countries globally) and the CEO of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, or sometimes the chairman of ICANN. Here’s some of what Beckstrom said:

And so what it means is we’ll do some reviews– we’re committing to do those–and the United States government will have one seat the table at one of those three sets of reviews, and the rest will be as appointed by these parties, including the Governmental Advisory Committee. So what it really means is we’re going global. All the reviews and all the work done will be submitted for public comment to the world. And the United States, just like every other country, will be a recipient of that information through the publication of the results.

But there’s no separate or unique or separate reporting to the United States government. All the reporting is to the world; that’s the real change. Under the JPA the reporting was just to the U.S. government, and some of it was handled publicly, and now all the reporting is global.

The Internet is global, and thus, oversight of ICANN should have been global, some time ago. It’s nice to finally see a move in this direction.

Watch a video interview with Beckstrom, with regards to this change:

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body that oversees domain names and IP addresses, core mechanisms of the Internet, has been granted independence from the U.S. government. A new agreement between ICANN and the U.S. Department of Commerce states ICANN is “independent and not controlled by any one entity,” and commits ICANN to remaining a private, not-for-profit organization.

The Internet had its beginnings in the U.S., and ICANN was created in 1998 to oversee functions such as top-level domain-name system management and IP address space allocation on behalf of the US government. However, since the Internet has gone global, recently there have been calls, many of them from the European Commission (since 2005, no less), for ICANN to become divested of its U.S. ties and become accountable to the world.

The European Commission was quick to praise the announcement. Information society and media commissioner Viviane Reding said in a statement:

“I welcome the US administration’s decision to adapt Icann’s key role in internet governance to the reality of the 21st century and of a globalised world.

“Internet users worldwide can now anticipate that Icann’s decisions on domain names and addresses will be more independent and more accountable, taking into account everyone’s interests. External review panels will periodically evaluate Icann’s performance. If effectively and transparently implemented, this reform can find broad acceptance among civil society, businesses and governments alike.”

In the past, ICANN’s periodic reviews took place with a table of one: the U.S. government. Now, the reviews will be conducted by an “international committee of parties” chosen by the chairman of ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (representing 100 countries globally) and the CEO of ICANN, Rod Beckstrom, or sometimes the chairman of ICANN. Here’s some of what Beckstrom said:

And so what it means is we’ll do some reviews– we’re committing to do those–and the United States government will have one seat the table at one of those three sets of reviews, and the rest will be as appointed by these parties, including the Governmental Advisory Committee. So what it really means is we’re going global. All the reviews and all the work done will be submitted for public comment to the world. And the United States, just like every other country, will be a recipient of that information through the publication of the results.

But there’s no separate or unique or separate reporting to the United States government. All the reporting is to the world; that’s the real change. Under the JPA the reporting was just to the U.S. government, and some of it was handled publicly, and now all the reporting is global.

The Internet is global, and thus, oversight of ICANN should have been global, some time ago. It’s nice to finally see a move in this direction.

Watch a video interview with Beckstrom, with regards to this change:

Nokia E72 is a high-performance device tailor-made for seamless business and personal communication. Receive work emails in real time with support for Microsoft Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler – and with Nokia Messaging preinstalled, gain instant access to up to 10 personal email accounts. Explore your device with the Optical Navi Key – an intuitive key that enables you to scroll smoothly through webpages, maps, photos, and menus. Capture high-resolution images and video using the 5 megapixel digital camera with flash and autofocus – then post directly to Share on Ovi to share with friends.

Nokia E72 is a high-performance device tailor-made for seamless business and personal communication. Receive work emails in real time with support for Microsoft Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler – and with Nokia Messaging preinstalled, gain instant access to up to 10 personal email accounts. Explore your device with the Optical Navi Key – an intuitive key that enables you to scroll smoothly through webpages, maps, photos, and menus. Capture high-resolution images and video using the 5 megapixel digital camera with flash and autofocus – then post directly to Share on Ovi to share with friends.

I experienced a ton of dropped calls on my iPhone 3G in the San Francisco Bay Area before last year’s 2.1 ROM update that “fixed” (or at least reduced) the problem. I still drop calls, but at a lower rate. What’s unacceptable (to Apple and AT&T), however? A Gizmodo reader went to an Apple Genius Bar and found out: 30%.

When AT&T said nothing was wrong with their network, Giz reader Manoj went to said Genius Bar where the Genius downloaded stats from his iPhone 3G (purchases in July 2008). The stat dump showed the iPhone 3G had dropped 22% of his calls. But that’s good, Manoj was told!

Why? The average for New York City is 30%. That means that despite the high drop rate, his phone was fine and the network was operating as expected.

And people wonder why consumers are clamoring for Verizon to pick up the device. At the same time, however, it’s interesting that Manoj didn’t complain until recently. My question would be: has it gotten progressively worse? That might show that oversaturation of the network has occurred as more and more iPhones populate the area.

It’s still a mystery to me that if such a thing is happening, why isn’t ever AT&T customer in that area complaining. You’d think it would affect all AT&T phones. Or maybe they are, and we just don’t hear about it because it’s not the “device of the moment.”

One of the tools that I have been relying more and more on is Context Organizer. With the increase of information that we all need to process it is great to have a tool like Context Organizer to help me make sense of the information and summarize it for me. I have explained in past blog posts how Context Organizer can be used with MindManager 8 to build a map from URL’s, PDF files and Word Documents. But one of the most powerful features is being able to do Google Searches and within seconds have the sites that are found summarized with key words and relevancy at my disposal. Context Organizer allows me to do my Google searches and processes them with a click of the button. If you want to see what I’m talking about then take a look at the video below to give you an idea of the power of this tool.

While not specifically developed for individuals with reading difficulties just think of how this can be used to help students deal with the mountains of text that they encounter each and every day. Using Context Organizer, information can be quickly summarized for students and then using a text to speech software the information could be read. There is also the ability to send the summaries to Microsoft Word which could make this a great research tool for students with reading and writing disabilities. Think of this as cognitive assist for students with reading disabilities and a great tool for doing research. You can download a trial of Context Organizer at their website.

Are people noticing this?  It seems that face-to-face and online presenting are becoming more similar.  Some aspects:

• Wireless access is becoming more common in places where presentations occur.  If you are a conference organizer and you don’t arrange for wireless, be prepared for some negative comments.  See Better Conferences.
• A larger percentage of the audience these days brings a laptop to presentations and it seems that the factor of Laptop Distraction is quieting down.
• If your audience is already on a laptop and connected wirelessly, then you can use techniques such as Twitter Conference Ideas with twitter as a back-channel or twitter to post links to the audience.  You can get the audience to provide thoughts and suggestions just like chat online.  In fact, this is on of my favorite things about online presentations (see Examples of eLearning 2.0 for how great the audience input can be).  But now you can somewhat do this at Face-to-Face presentations.
• It used to be that your online audience was distracted.  Now your face-to-face audience may seem distracted as well.  I had a recent presentation at a large corporation.  75% of the audience had a laptop.  Some percentage of that audience was taking notes and chatting on Yammer.  Some percentage was reading email.  Hard to tell which was which.

The last bullet is probably the biggest change here.  I’m used to presenting in-person where the audience is highly engaged, taking notes, etc.  It was a bit different for me to see an audience looking at their laptops that much. 

I’ve talked about this in Online Conferences and In-Person Conferences and made the comment that:

In-person conferences have an advantage of getting more attention from the attendees.

That’s still probably true as there’s a higher commitment level, but the gap is narrowing.  Clive as points to this in Multitasking is now every presenter’s problem.

What struck me is how the gap is narrowing between face-to-face and online events. You could usually rely on a fully attentive audience face-to-face while bemoaning the ease with which multitasking occurs online. The reality is that the same phenomenon is now occurring in each setting.

What’s interesting here is that it used to be that you could count on your in-person audience to be singletasking (is that a word?) and paying attention.  Now, they are going to be multitasking just like your online audience.  I’ve always said that one of the wonderful things about face-to-face presentations is that you can see your audience and get immediate reaction based on their faces.  But what about when they are looking at their laptop?  If anything it’s worse than online.  When you present online and the chat channel is active but on-topic, you feel you are doing good.  When you are in-person and everyone is looking at their laptop, it doesn’t feel good.  Hmmm…

One last thought … I recently presented to a group of professional speakers about the use of social media.  There was quite a bit of discussion around Face-to-Face vs. Online Conferences.  I’m still of the opinion that Face to Face Still Matters.  However, because of the dramatically different characteristics of Online Conferences and In-Person Conferences and because of the narrowing gap between face-to-face and online presentations – we will see a shift towards more online conferences such as LearnTrends 2009.

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Iraq and Afghanistan statistics via The Boston Globe (AP).

As of Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009, at least 4,346 members of the U.S. military had died in the Iraq war since it began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count.

The figure includes nine military civilians killed in action. At least 3,473 military personnel died as a result of hostile action, according to the military’s numbers.

The AP count is three fewer than the Defense Department’s tally, last updated Tuesday at 10 a.m. EDT.

As of Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2009, at least 773 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Tuesday at 10 a.m. EDT.

Of those, the military reports 594 were killed by hostile action.

More here and here.

Honor the Fallen.