Posted June 28th, 2009, in: Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

The following is a bunch of predictions.  Mark my words.  Three areas to pull out your wallet for.

• Personal Web Hosting/Cloud/Sync/Backup Services – I’m not sure what to call this space that I think we’ll be seeing a lot of.  I don’t believe that these kinds of services will be bundled with mobile accounts anytime soon, but that’s clearly what will happen. The definition is this: Add-On ISP-like services that make mobile and desktop apps work together more effectively.  This would include backup services and services that bridge gaps across the various hardware networks we use.
• Genealogy – The Baby Boomers love this stuff, and actually so do humans in general.  Who doesn’t want to know their own family history?  And with DNA analysis becoming more and more standardized, I think that Social-Media-Driven Genealogical Information will probably be mashed together with known hereditary data to create really compelling information services for average people.  The word “Rich” comes to mind but that’s really in the hands of designers and visionaries.  Imagine what’s going to happen in this space.  It blows my mind.
• Library Sciences Related Anything – The so-called “Public Library” is probably about to explode into something much more tangled with our daily lives.  I believe that tax-funded Public Libraries are increasingly getting closer to being able to easily use cutting edge Information Technology to serve the public.  The abolition of hard-copy card catalogs went slowly.  But we’re in the age of Moore’s Law. It’s no stretch of the imagination that soon there will be title-to-isbn translators that cross language barriers and so on… But that’s just the beginning.  Imagine the Public Library as place that has cached, categorized databases from all sorts of sources, and Librarians as people helping you to mash data together (while you’re still at home in your underwear or on a train heading to work) …This idea is so hard to see for some people. I could go on for pages about the possibilities.  And for you asshole cynics, remember: Facts Cannot Be Copyrighted. “(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.” …Libraries are worth so much to us as people.  And when they merge into a global archive of ‘verified’ sources, we’ll really start to see the Web’s potential.

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Posted May 14th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| New Media| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

This is a draft version.  Suggestions welcome.

Short answer: People. 

What the Semantic Web (now officially called any number of other things besides that) needs in order to become mainstream, in my opinion, is people and the connections between them. The phrase “The Social Graph” comes to mind a la Brad Fitzpatrick’s once famous, but now all but forgotten manifesto which even Tim Berners-Lee eventually commented on. 

The Semantic Web would catch on if it was seen as even remotely useful by the young people who are most likely going to be building the next big thing on the web.

The beautiful thing about the Web2 era is that highly useful tools can sprout up overnight simply because of the desires of more or less ordinary people with no credentials or affiliation with a company. Everyone knows someone who’s a programmer.  The next big social software application just might come from the bedroom of a teenager.  There is hardly any barrier to access anymore.  This is why Web 2.0 happened.  A new tool or service doesn’t need a business plan and a data center to launch and go viral.

The trajectory of innovation throughout the last five years or so, the “Web 2.0″ years, has been around capitalizing on people, the content they create, their interests, and the value added by crowd-sourcing.  The benefits in the social media space are clear from both the perspective of normal end-users, as well as giant companies. Mostly, these benefits are about filtering noise and finding relevance on the user-side and on the giant company side, gathering metrics, targeting messages and acquiring free content.   The SemWeb standards have a lot to offer the Social Media realm, dare I say, probably even more than CSS with rounded corners does (I hope I’m not offending anyone here).  

But the way things are today, for most programmers, implementing SemWeb standards is a lot of extra work with no immediate benefit. Why not just use MySQL or cook up a new XML format?  

So why are these standards being completely ignored by the coders on the street?   RSS took off.  Why not FOAF? I think it’s because there’s no useful directory of URIs for people.  There are lots of SEmWeb geeks who have URIs, but the kids on MySpace and FaceBook don’t have URIs or FOAF files.  And those kids’ eyeballs and participation are worth real money!

One fine day, back in 2006, Tim Berners-Lee came down from the mountain and gave us a commandment (or at least he logged into his blog and made a suggestion):

“Do you have a URI for yourself? If you are reading this blog and you have the ability to publish stuff on the web, then you can make a FOAF page, and you can give yourself a URI.”

Then, apparently fifteen minutes after the first post was published, Berners-Lee really got at the importance of URIs in a post called Backward and Forward links in RDF just as important:

“One meme of RDF ethos is that the direction one choses for a given property is arbitrary: it doesn’t matter whether one defines “parent” or “child”; “employee” or “employer”. This philosophy (from the Enquire design of 1980) is that one should not favor one way over another. One day, you may be interested in following the link one way, another day, or somene else, the other way.”

For those of you who don’t yet understand the idea of the Semantic Web, here’s the deal.  If there’s one web-address that represents each person, place thing or idea, it becomes possible to crawl the Web (documents as well as databases) looking for links to that person place or thing. And if those links contain tags which specify the meaning of the links, the web-at-large begins to look more like a giant database.  This is the “Web of Data” (in contrast to the “Web of Documents” we know and love).  This is what people call The Semantic Web. So what’s stopping people from being in the “Web of Data” (AKA Semantic Web)?  Like Tim Berners-Lee suggested, we need URIs for people.  That’s where it all starts.  Once there are URIs for people, and there are semantic links (ones that contain tags explaining what they mean) pointing at the those URIs, we can start making tools that use that data.

This is a fairly simple concept.  And Berners-Lee makes it sound simple enough.  Sure, we’ll all just give ourselves URIs and viala, the Social Graph will go Semantic.  That sounds great but there are a few problems with leaving it at that.

• Most ordinary people do not have websites or hosting of their own and instead rely on Social Networking Services’ profile pages for their web presence.  This means that most people have no way of easily publishing themselves to the Web of Data.
• For-Profit Social Networking services have a conflict of interest with regard to providing the Web-at-large with useful, granular “Social Graph” data. Instead we see APIs that give approved developers limited access to data.  No love for the average joe like me that is not a programmer.     
• The Web currently has no trustworthy repository for facts about ordinary people.  Trustworthy means not-for-profit at the very least.  The closest thing we have is Wikipedia, but Wikipedia does not allow entries on ordinary, non-notable people.  (keep in mind that the Wikipedia publishes the facts in its ‘info boxes’ in RDF one of the core Standards of what we have been calling ‘The Semantic Web’)  

We need to start thinking of the Web more like we think of a Public Library, but completely decentralized and with infinite shelf-space.  I think WikiMedia, the organization behind the Wikipedia is the best bet for a trusted librarian for all the information about normal people.

I think what is really needed right now is a non-profit run directory of people, possibly even modeled after the Wikipedia, especially when it comes to the concurrent DBPedia project, which publishes the contents of  Wikipedia facts to the Semantic Web.  Really I think because of WikiMedia’s established trust, they would be the ideal organization to do this.  Wikipedia could simply have another layer which reveals non-notable results or ‘all results.’

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Posted April 5th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Data Portability (DataPortability)| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)

As a major intaker of information about leading technologies, I am proud to say that at the time of the creation of this blog post, I am ahead of the game as far as declaring a change in the language we use to refer to the next phase of web evolution.

The term “web” has never been stronger. The “internet” goes on as something we mention almost every day. And the technologies that comprise the realm of what we have been calling semantic web, mainly markup standards, aren’t going anywhere.

But semantic web just fell out of favor as a [canditate for a] useful euphemism in our language.  The moment this became obvious to me was a few weeks ago  when I heard that Tim Berners-Lee spoke at TED and didn’t mention ‘the semantic web.’  A few weeks later I saw the video for myself and felt a certain sadness or abandonment when TBL talked about the geekiest dream ever, one that he created, without using the name I thought we had all agreed on for it, The Semantic Web.  Instead, he used a different euphemism for the most awesome library system ever conceived.  He called it “Linked Data.”

If you are a Semantic Web apologist like myself you might feel slightly deflated by a sudden change in terminology. I’m sorry.  I’m sure TBL is sorry too.  

But the reality is that “Semantic Web” is always going to be confused with Natural Language Processing, which is also a field of technology that is growing fast in its own right.  

No sustaining buzz has really caught on with “the semantic web,” as a catch phrase, beyond us geeks that are already sold on the idea.  Instead, we’ve recently heard more and more announcements (made usually by search companies) that include the word semantic as if the mere use of the word means that the company is doing something right.

The battle we’ve been fighting as SemWeb advocates is largely a battle for widespread awareness. TBL has said himself that the phrase semantic web wasn’t the best choice of words.   

I’m sure TBL spent at least an afternoon considering what he might say to the audience at TED which arguably consists some of the most influential people in the world.  I’ve concluded that he intentionally abandoned the phrase, in preparation for a brighter future in which the SemWeb technologies are no longer so easily confused with other technologies.  We’ve changed our name.

If you feel the re-branding is unfair, consider who has more right to the word semantic, the Natural Language people or the Interchangeable Data Format people?  

We lose.

Sorry.  We need to move on. 

The Semantic Web is now called Linked Data.  It’s official.  Take a deep breath, change your notes.  And let’s move on as Linked Data enthusiasts, not Semantic Web enthusiasts.

I will lead this effort by removing the category of “The Semantic Web” from this site and replacing it with “Linked Data.”  I’ll do it later this week.  I need some time to say goodbye.

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Posted February 10th, 2009, in: 1| Data Portability (DataPortability)| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0

As a hardcore Linked-Data/Semantic Web Enthusiast for some time now, say since pre-2007 (back then, I didn’t know what to call it but I understood that it was possible), I can’t help but feel sometimes like it’s never going to happen.  Sometimes a non-silo Web seems like a idealistic fantasy.  Sometimes it seems like nothing is happening.  During the first half of 2007, the amount of excitement in the Sem-Web Category of my feed-reader was high.  Since then, however, the excitement level seems to have diminished quite a bit.  Am I right?

I want to offer a few condolences and some evidence that the Semantic Web is not dead. In fact, I believe it’s still going to “happen.”

1.  Tim Berners-Lee spoke at TED this year, apparently urging people to unlock their data, according to GigaOm (TED, please publish this video soon, OK?). TED has a quickly growing  amount of influence in the mainstream from what I can tell.  This is good outreach. 
2. JavaScript support for querying more than one URL/Site/Database at a time is coming to a browser near you very soon, according to John Resig via this talk at Google. We’ve seen a lot of new APIs allowing programmers to access certain data from certain places, but more promising to me than these limited and proprietary APIs that have been sprouting up is how HTML itself is increasingly becoming more ’semantic,’ if for no other reason, because it allows coders to do more interesting and elegant things with CSS and JavaScript… Where this is heading, I think, is toward a future where pages are basically designed to be scraped, a sort of Microformat revolution (albeit totally rag-tag). Once the cat is out of the bag, I really believe embedded HTML semantics will become more and more standardised because of the incremental benefits resulting for the publishers of the content.  What I’m talking about here is mainly Classes and ID’s in HTML.  Give it some time. Those things are basically Microformats waiting to happen.  Right? 
3. Last but not least, remember that the emergence of “Linked Data” will probably seem to explode at a certain point, even though the buzz seems to have slowed down in the echo chamber.  There’s a great little analogy I came across where data are compared to buttons being threaded together from one to the next, randomly and one connection at a time.  How many random single connections need to be made before picking up one button will bring all the others along?  The results are reassuring. Check it out over at the Data Evolution Blog, the newest feed in my Feed-Reader.

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Posted February 6th, 2009, in: 1| Cultural Acceleration| Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| New Media| Reviews & Thoughts About Products| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| Web 2.0

If you haven’t played around with EtherPad, and you have a few friends you can get to screw around with you on this thing, do yourself a favor and try it out.

At first, it’s very simple:

EtherPad is a Collaborative Text-Editing environment. It’s real-time though, so it’s not as much like Google Docs (remember Writely?) as it is like IM.  Yes, it’s like Instant Messaging only more instant.  Every character typed or removed by anyone working on the text is seen in real-time by everyone else editing the document.  The page never has to reload or anything!  Ah, the beauty of Javascript.

Be warned though, this means that the people you’re working with can see how slow you type!  And as of yet, there’s no spellcheck, so you’re basically letting it all hang out. 

I heard about this from the Technometria Podcast, and it’s clear to me that, as they discussed in the show, for students taking notes during a lecture, nothing I’ve ever seen in my life could ever be as valuable as this technology is, even in its youngest form, that is, as long as the students in question have computers and friends.

Before I go any further, I should mention that my techie friends are all telling me about JQuery… I’m not a programmer, so that doesn’t mean anything to me (yet)… Also, EtherPad is only one of several spotlight applications running on a new platform called AppJet, which I guess is a Javascript-based development platform that’s really visual/browser-oriented.  Maybe even a sort of WordPress for Ajax?  

Well whatever. I’m not a dev so I’m not qualified to criticise that stuff, but the mention of JQuery seems timely given what I’ve been hearing, all-hype though, as far as I’m qualified to say, as a non-programmer.  The use of Javascript in general,  is not all-hype, my instincts tell me… We better move on because I don’t know shit about Javascript. But I do think it’s the future, if you’re asking my nose.

I would like to see EtherPad with TinyMCE because at the very least, UL’s and OL’s (un-ordered and ordered lists), Bold and Italics, Links Etc, would make the collaboration so much more useful! 

Beyond that, I’d love to see an app that can be installed anywhere that allows people to run controlled instances of ET, while controlling certain parameters like the maximum number of characters or lines per document… Etc…

I have a lot of ideas about the possibilities of this kind of real-time text-editing.  Big ideas.

Hey AppJet! Wanna talk?

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Posted January 23rd, 2009, in: Data Portability (DataPortability)| Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology

An interesting baby-step in Google improving Search Results (man are they ever holding out on us!)

From Read/Write Web (Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick)

Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?  Well did they?  No. The results pages don’t expose any “structured data”

I really believe that Google is trying to avoid becoming everyone’s scrape-able Semantic Query Engine. There’s tons of at least semi-semantic data out there and google simply doesn’t present it to us.  They have it.  They understand it. They could give it to us. But they don’t.  I mean for crying out loud, imagine how difficult it must be for google to return image search results that are anywhere near as good as google’s image results are?   Does anyone really think that google is completely ignoring microformats or service-wide presentational semantic data (an example of this would be the html classes and ID’s assigned to elements on social network pages)?? Does anyone really think so?  While they’re looking at things like alt tags and nofollow tags and everything else?  Would google just ignore piles and piles of metadata? No.  Would they decide to not let us use it?  I think so.  

I think they’re doing a classic ‘roll-out’ thing, saving their best search technology for when they absolutely have to whip it out for competitive reasons.  This is cause to resent google to a certain extent I think.

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Posted December 16th, 2008, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| Semantic Web| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| The Semantic Web (Giant Global Graph)| Web 2.0| Web Browsers

first of all, my last prediction-for-next-year was a little optimistic, as I was predicting what people in the echo chamber have since started calling ‘cloud computing…’ I predicted that we’d see a lot of online services that blur the lines between what is ‘local’ and what is an online ’service.’  …let me just defer that prediction one year and add it to the heap of what I see coming this year.  At least give me credit for making it my major prediction before the catch-phrase ‘cloud computing’ came to the surface.

1. Linux Will Come and Start Killing. Google Android, Ubuntu Mobile, Asus’ recent release of EEE PC’s running Linux, all point for me to the fact that Linux is finally coming to a device near you.  Of course, Linux never went away, but I’m talking about real OS Market share.  In addition, I wouldn’t be surprised if the coming popularity of Linux also dishes out a major hit to Microsft because I bet it’s easier to port software made for Linux to Mac OS X than it is to port it to Windows since OS X is built on Unix.  Just something to consider.  Also, if you haven’t been looking, take a look at Ubuntu.  It’s a pretty nice OS and will run on anything, maybe even your toaster.  And it’s free!
   
2. AJaX Will Continue to Prevail as the Shiznit in Web Development (while Flash and others continue to die).  Because of the nature of touch-screen interfaces and because we will increasingly see the deployment of Navigation and Map-based services as well as virtual world type applications, where a scalable simulated 3-D space is used, I think AJaX is likely to continue to become the way things are done.  At this point, I’m starting to doubt the long term success of Flash, AIR, Silverlight because I think Javascript can do what these things do better.
3. Affordable Smartphones. Maybe this is a no-brainer, but when I say affordable I mean $100 or less.  I’m not predicting at this time affordable connectivity for these devices. I know gadget enthusiast might hate me for saying this, but I think the Handset Race and the Netbook Race are very overlapped.  They are both fighting for certain causes together such as improvements to battery life, cheapening of Solid State storage, cheapening of Mobile Connectivity, The need for competition in the OS market and the need for “Thin” software, not to mention ‘Cloud’ services… 
4. Ubiquity of Navigation Systems and/or GPS. From my understanding, cellular networks are already able to provide location info nearly as accurate as true GPS.  There’s no reason for the next wave of phones to not have on-board GPS capability or something similar that offers driving directions etc.
5. Google Will Roll Out Geo-Targeted Advertising for Realz. Via GPS/Navigation devices probably, but even desktop search should see a shift in this way. Try searching for ‘pizza.’ You can see there’s big room for improvement there.
6. Google Search to Shape Up or Start Shipping Out. Google may begin losing Search market-share in 2009 if they don’t play their cards right. Google’s Search Results haven’t changed noticeably since they started putting Wikipedia articles at the top of the stack a few years ago.  Personally, I think Google is intentionally not releasing major improvements to their results in order to avoid being an unofficial API for competing services. Again, search for ‘pizza.’ Then, add your postal code to the search. The funny thing is that Google already knows where you are, more or less, based on your IP address. Meanwhile, other search engines are actually better for many kinds of searches. Try Yahoo! for ‘pizza.’ Try Dogpile for finding an mp3. Google is capable of being better than these right now, in my opinion, but intentionally holding back, banking on the idea that their mindshare will carry them along until the next era, probably brought on by the ubiquity of GPS and Smartphones.  Even if Google loses a considerable amount of its Search traffic, it will continue to be the biggest hub of online metrics collection, as well as of course, online advertising, where Google makes all its money.  I don’t think Google is going anywhere any time soon.

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Posted November 26th, 2008, in: Ideas, Observations, Opinions, Rants Etc| Marketing/Advertising In The Cloud| New Media| SEO, SEM, SMO Etc| Social Software and The Social Graph| Spam and Scams| Technology| Web 2.0

I like many NPR programs.  And this post about Weekend Edition’s mis-use of Twitter is just a way of pointing out a flaw in how one organisation is using Twitter so that we, and hopefully they (are you listening?), can learn from their mistakes.

1. I clicked to “Follow” Weekend Edition.
2. I got a weird impersonal messages sent “to me” via an “@ Reply” about how they’re getting the next episode of their show ready etc.  (why would they send that to me?  Smells like a strategy: “When someone starts to ‘follow’ us, respond to them with the latest tweet…” …a lot like automated thanks-for-the-add comments on MySpace, right?)
3. I responded suggesting they aren’t really using Twitter correctly.  
4. I gave it a day thinking I’d get a little response from their Team… Nope.  (What’s even worse than misinterpreting a medium, is not paying attention when people try to help.  Hello?)

Why would I want to be getting “personal,” direct messages from a media brand that wont respond to my own “personal” messages, when all of this is taking place via a platform in which I‘m already subscribing to a stream of anything that brand wants to say???  

Arghh!!

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Posted September 12th, 2008, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| New Media| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology

read below if you want my introduction/thoughts on this video…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8AtVBQ8MBE]

This is an interesting presentation. It’s not told quite right for my taste, but it emphasizes how hard it is to see outside the current technology/media paradigm, mostly by showing clips from the early days of TV and computing… The similarities in the language between then and now are pretty stunning.

Very notable for me was a clip of Marshall McCluhan in the 1960’s speaking about how audiences want to feel included in media.  Sound familiar?  

Also touched on is McCluhan’s “Global Village” concept which will surely inspire much near-future reading for me.  The ‘Global Village’ is basically a visionary concept to this day.  

McCluhan, thanks to Peter Hirshberg, will probably become a new teacher of mine.  At this rate, I may have a college level education by the time I’m 40 years old.

Really, I should say that Peter Hirshberg does a really good job in this presentaion compiling a lot for us to chew on in a short amount of time, even if it is all a little bit scatter-brained in my opinion.  My preview notes don’t do justice to the ground covered.  I couldn’t do better.

OH! He even touches on how the late 60’s, counter-culture and LSD may have influenced the birth of Open-Source and Personal Computing!  Interesting stuff. 

Peter Hirshberg is a veteran of old media as well as new, and now, new-new media (now just considered new)… The list of companies he’s been involved with is amazing:

And finally, don’t miss the cameo by James Burke who we all know (or should know) and love from the show Connections (about the history of technology and innovation).  In the presentation, Peter Hirshberg shows a commercial in which Burke is a spokesperson for Apple, promoting “HyperCard,” a predecessor to HTML (HyperCard is not networked).

Hirshberg’s list of companies he’s been involved with is pretty impressive and includes some of my favorites, Technorati and Apple. Copied from his TypePad Bio:

Biography

Peter Hirshberg is a Silicon Valley executive, entrepreneur and marketing innovator who most recently served as president and CEO of Gloss.com, the major multi-brand beauty ecommerce business co-owned by Estee Lauder Companies, Chanel and Clarins. Launched in Fall 2001, Gloss features prestige cosmetic brands including Clinique, MAC, Prescriptives, Estee Lauder, Origins, Bobbi Brown, Stila, Chanel and Clarins.

Hirshberg served as Chairman of Interpacket Networks, the global leader in Internet Via Satellite, before its acquisition by American Tower Corporation in October 2000. From 1996-1999, Hirshberg was founder/CEO of Elemental Software, developer of the award- winning Drumbeat 2000 family of e-business web development software. Backed by Accel partners, AT&T Corporation, and Microsoft, Elemental Software was acquired by Macromedia Incorporated in September 1999.

During a nine-year tenure at Apple Computer, Hirshberg headed Enterprise Marketing, where he grew Apple’s large business and government revenue to $1 billion annually and helped lead the company’s entry into the online service arena. After leaving Apple, Hirshberg’s new-media strategy firm served clients including America Online, Microsoft, NBC Television Network, Estee Lauder, Pacific Bell and Silicon Graphics.

Hirshberg is a founder of Goodmail Systems, a board member of ICTV, and serves on the advisory boards of start-ups Technorati and Informative. He is a Trustee of The Computer History Museum and a Henry Crown Fellow of the Aspen Institute. Peter earned his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth College and his MBA at Wharton.

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Posted August 8th, 2008, in: Humanity, Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Ethics Etc| New Media| Social Software and The Social Graph| Technology| Viral Marketing| Web 2.0

Comment I left on zaproot’s episode 048 called Truth About The Pickens Plan …As of posting this, it hasn’t appeared on their site…

Here’s the Video I’m responding to:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70HFEHB6dag]

I love me a good conspiracy theory.

I’m interested to see the evidence of this water-grabbing thing spelled out as more than just a reference and passing the buck to one article in Tucson Weekly (which has no sources or links).

Are there other sources?

I’m not a Pickens supporter per se, but I am a Web2 fanatic who thinks the grassroots/marketing efforts of the Pickens Plan are amazing, both in design and success so far.

I’d like to see the evidence of this theory about the mid-western aquifer properly added to the Wikipedia article on the page for the pickens plan… Currently, it only mentions one source, which seems to be the same source as for this episode.

Here: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Opinion/Content?oid=oid:113228

Maybe I’m wrong, and I definitely have no reason to side with a rich-ass oil guy…

I just want my skepticism to be smart.

Dates, Bill Numbers, and other data would really help.

The Wikipedia article, which anyone can edit, has none of this. It simply mentions the existence of this theory, which to me really makes it seem like a stretch since something so important seems like it would have some wikipedia back-n-forth going on.

Where is the discussion? If the people of the US are blind to this alleged water-grab, can you really claim the position of moral high-ground while attempting to make [ad-supported] content out of the issue without lifting a finger to actually get the word out via the wikipedia [or any other medium with any kind of reach]?

You guys aren’t even popular enough to have a wikipedia article for yourselves, yet you claim to be delivering an important message. I know it probably took a few hours at least to edit all that green-screen stuff with the pretty host bouncing around.

Who’s “Green-Washing” who? Are you helping humanity? Are you participating in the cloud? Or are you just trying to sell a cute actress to us while capitalizing on our guilt by using the whole “green” thing?

This is social media, people. If it’s true, add it to the wikipedia with sources!

If it’s “true” let’s expose it properly! I can’t wait to hear back from you. BTW, I love Channel Frederator!!! —Andrew

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