Tweet Week

About a week ago, I was a bit bored and decided to see what Twitter is all about. I created an account, and I Tweeted for a week. I tried to keep to the original idea, where a Tweet should answer the question “What are you doing”? Looking back, my tweets include Coffee, Podcasts, Global frustration, Small joys, Small irritations, Re-tweets, and Replies. 

Bill’s Mosquitoes

Bill Gates found a very good way to get the news reporters to pay attention to the malaria problem. In his talk at the TED conference, he released a few mosquitoes, stating that malaria should not be just for poor people to experience. People who did not see the whole performance may react shocked, because when placed out of context it sounds like an outrageous thing to do.

If you think that’s the case, you should maybe have a look at his talk, available (for free, without registering) at TED.com. You’ll see that the audience is actually laughing when he releases the mosquitoes, and at the end of the talk Bill gets a standing ovation.

In addition to the malaria problem, Bill also makes a very good case about how important good teachers are, and what we can do to help teachers become just that.

Noisy feeds and bad news

Since the comming of rss feeds, the world is a better place for online people like me. I can select interesting newsfeeds I’d like to read, and compose my own newspaper. For newssites, this requires a new skill. For them to keep me as a reader, they need to keep the rss feed up to date, and with items I’d like to see. Because I can do research on the spot, the news items better be balanced, verified and unbiased (unless it’s funny . Recently I dumped the nu.nl rss feed because of the constant re-posting of only slightly modified articles.

Pomphouders dupe van ’spookliters’

For those that can read Dutch. This is a nice example of Dutch gasstation owners wanting to be compensated for the fact that gasoline (or any other fluid you can sell) schrinks when cooled.