Rest in peace, Doug Marlette

July 10, 2007 at 7:57 pm | In people | Leave a Comment

The Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist, author, and Hillsborough resident died today in a car crash. He was 57 years old.

– mc

Accolades for Erskine

July 10, 2007 at 7:43 pm | In education, government, leadership, north carolina, people, policy, politics, unc | Leave a Comment

An awful lot of people in North Carolina have some awful nice things to say about the way that Erskine Bowles has thrown himself into his job as UNC-system president.

In a piece which first ran in the Charlotte Observer — and which the N&O carried on the front page of its website yesterday — lawmakers, academics, and administrators all give the one-time White House chief of staff high marks for his on the job performance.

The story quotes 10 people, one of whom is Erskine Bowles himself. Of the remainder, five are prominent Republicans from the state. One of those is Bowles’ 2004 US senate opponent, Richard Burr. But the best of the quotes is from State Sen. Tom Apodaca, who apparently told the president in a meeting:

“You know, Erskine,” he said, “I’m trying to decide why I didn’t vote for you.”

– mc

Google’s next social network?

July 10, 2007 at 7:24 pm | In community, culture, design, future, infrastructure, innovation, media, networking, privacy, technology | Leave a Comment

Google already owns Orkut, and hardly a month goes by without there being rumors that the search giant is eyeing Facebook for acquisition. But Google might be up to something completely different (hat tip to Google Operating System). The company has sponsored a research project at Carnegie Mellon University, which has developed an application called Socialstream. The aim is to develop a system “to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.”

A video introduction:

Yesterday, I talked about the possibility of Google creating a unified online communications suite. Now imagine that married to a unified social network, which lets you keep track of your friends and their content across any number of platforms. Add in Google Office (Docs & Sheets, Calendar, and Notebook) along Google Reader (a tool I’m already addicted to which aggregates all the content you want to read from news sources), and I think the equation equals game over. We have the Google Grid.

When you make your living selling ads, attention is currency, and the type of thing I’m talking about is something that many, many users of the web would hardly ever leave. And if they did, what would they use to find something new? A Google search, I guess.

– mc

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