Here’s an interesting take which seems inspired by Wired’s ‘Rants & Raves’ feature. This guy has a project where he sends a disposable camera with attached instructions for the postal workers to take photos. The results are interesting.
Images, details here.
The recent natural disaster of biblical proportions points out Fox News lack of resources compared to it’s biggest rival, according to this column at Salon.com (membership required, or watch a short commercial for a day pass to read this story). The article points out a limited amount of staff dispatched to the region by Fox (while CNN has 75+ in the affected countries) and lots of partisan us v. them discussion. My favorite is this bit about a Fox host thinking out loud about where the relief money was going.
Fox host John Gibson bemoaned the fact that U.S. relief — getting water, food and shelter to millions of destitute people — might be part of an insurance scam to simply pay for the cost of rebuilding a resort community. “This is the travel industry, major big hotel companies,” he said last week. “How is it that United States taxpayers are going to be convinced you have to build hotels in Phuket?” He worried aloud that “Thailand, Indonesia, India, the countries that got hit [will] say, ‘We need dough and we need buckets of it to fix all this so Swedes can go on vacation in Phuket again.'”
Hey, dumb#@%! There are close to 200k dead from this thing, and you are talking about the possibility some money might revitalize a Thai resort? Give me a break!
A train wreck in Graniteville, SC, about a dozen miles from Augusta, GA, points out a glariing weakness in U.S. homeland security to an intentional attack on hazardous materials transportation systems. This was an accident, and eight are known dead. The ‘hot-zone’ in close proximity to the derailment has not yet been entered, and more casualties may be found when the area is clear. I can only shudder thinking about this type of incident happening in a densely populated area instead of in the relatively rural area where this incident occured. I hope my former colleague Ron Cockerille (who’s photo from the decontamination efforts appears at right) is making sure he avoids breathing too hard covering this story.
AugustaChronicle.com Picture Story here.
Chronicle story on the disaster here.
DirecTV launched three ‘mosaic’ television channels on Thursday at CES in Las Vegas. The channels aggregate into one screen six or seven video signals by category, allowing a news junkie to keep tabs on CNN, CNN Headline News, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News Channel and The Weather Channel on the same screen at one time.
CBS Marketwatch coverage here.
The Sports Mix includes ESPN, ESPN2, The NFL Network, TNT and others, but has the caveat that it may be blacked out subject to local programming restrictions. Kids Mix features children’s networks such as Nickelodeon and Turner’s own Cartoon Network.
These channels (which I was happy to see at home on my DirecTV system on channels 102, 104 and 111) follow the succesful launch of mosaics last Summer and Fall by Echostar’s Dish Network. They broke this ground in the U.S. with an Olympics mosaic over the Summer showcasing the various NBC channels carrying that programming, and followed that up with an election-night mosaic featuring CNN and the other news networks.
The new DirecTV mix channels can’t truly be called interactive, however. They are a static collection of the networks with (on the news and sports channels) a somewhat annoying barker channel talking about news/sports programming on the network. Unlike the Dish version, the user cannot use the channel to move from video to video and change the audio signal. That small detail alone would, IMHO, vastly improve the usefullness of the service. The Dish version also allowed the user to highlight one of the streams and click to tune.
I suspect DirecTV will follow up with click to tune and switchable audio with a new version soon. BSkyB, their sister company in the UK, has numerous similar applications running there which have these features and more, including interactive news feeds and stories.
More screenshots here at Engadget.