Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Plenty of people have tried XX things in XX days schemes, such as the The Blog Herald’s wildly successful and interesting 100 blogs in 100 days, but where these ideas fail is in the content they provide. Typically a blogger asks his readers for contributions and then posts them over the course of some period of time. This allows for, on a popular blog, a distribution of new ideas, but it contains nothing of the blogger himself.

What I want to do is different than blogging pro bono. I believe that a blogger needs to put some of his own skill into a post, to remix and rehash the content provided by his readers. It’s more interesting when there’s an application of your skills to reader-submitted content.

Let me introduce the idea: blogging ars pro bono. What I will offer over the course of the next month is a case study in a cycle that takes user-submitted content, remixes it with special skill, and then releases it back onto the web. “Technique for the good,” an elevation of the interaction between blog and reader.

In my case, the skill I offer for the next 30 days is digital retouching. Everyday I will retouch a user-submitted portrait and post it on the blog, along with a short text description of the author, subject, details, website, anything. If you are interested in submitting a photo to be digitally retouched, please send an email to ecb29@cornell.edu with “Digital Retouching” in the subject line, a brief textual summary including attribution, title, and a link, as well as a high-resolution photograph. The first 30 submissions will be queued and released over the next 1 month.

Ars photoshop is my gift to you, blog readers, pro bono.

The idea of gravatars is nice … but only if you can get something out of it. Simply acting as a dictionary to lookup URLs for images doesn’t let you insert arbitrary evil advertising and javascript! So, you then get things like:

%%ping gravatar.com

Pinging gravatar.com [64.124.231.223] with 32 bytes of data:

Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.

Ping statistics for 64.124.231.223:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)

What does this mean? Visitors in IE will choke because for some reason IE hangs while those images are timing out…

Here’s why:

But FEMA and the affected states are reimbursing the Red Cross under preexisting contracts for emergency shelter and other disaster services. The existence of these contracts is no secret to anyone but the American public. The Red Cross carefully says it functions only by the grace of the American people — but “people” includes government, national and local. What we’ve now come to expect from a major disaster is a Red Cross media blitz.

When New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer asked for documentation of 9/11 expenditures, the Red Cross’ response was that it is federally chartered and not answerable to state government regulators. The clamor rose, however, when the media began dissecting Red Cross activities in the 9/11 aftermath. This resulted in the resignation of the organization’s president and chief executive, Dr. Bernadine Healy…

The Red Cross expects to raise more than $2 billion before Hurricane Katrina-related giving subsides. If it takes care of 300,000 people, that’s $7,000 per victim. I doubt each victim under Red Cross care will see more than a doughnut, an interview with a social worker and a short-term voucher for a cheap motel, with a few miscellaneous items such as clothes and cooking pots thrown in.

Emphasis mine. Facts? Ask them yourself where the money goes.