NEW YORK--The state senate in Albany was in a bit of a shambles Monday. So instead of speaking in-person at the Personal Democracy Forum as planned, NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg used Skype to make his keynote address.
"Through the miracles of modern communication, we're essentially together," Bloomberg commented to the audience at the Frederick P. Rose auditorium here in midtown Manhattan. He then spoke about how New York is using the assets of the digital age to make more information available to the city's residents--something that Bloomberg can pitch well, considering he made a fortune as the founder of the business news and information company that bears his name.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg
(Credit: NYC.gov)Bloomberg's new initiatives include Skype and Twitter accounts for NYC 311, the city's information hotline that Bloomberg launched several years ago; a partnership with Google to get more detailed information about exactly what people are searching for on municipal government sites (and what they can and can't find); and "Big Apps," a new contest for developers to crunch and remix city data into Web or mobile applications for the masses.
The economy, however, may get in the way. Any ambitious new city projects are taken with a grain of salt these days, and with good reason.
I, for one, was scrambling to get to Bloomberg's talk on time because cutbacks and delays on the B-D-F-V subway line had added literally an extra half-hour to my commute from downtown to the conference venue at Columbus Circle. Griping about the city budget is pretty commonplace around here these days, and Bloomberg himself is no exception.
"If any of you from around the world wants to move here," Bloomberg quipped over the Skype connection when conference organizer Andrew Rasiej commented that a thousand people were on hand, "we would love to have you. We need taxpayers."
The official information available on the Web to New York residents includes public school progress data and citywide performance reporting. Beyond that, Bloomberg's administration has chosen to support new and more efficient ways of doing business: it has given the thumbs-up to collaborative workspaces and launched a venture fund for tech and finance start-ups, among other things. These are all part of a way to combat the fact that the Wall Street meltdown has left scores of the city's professionals out of work.
With "Big Apps," Bloomberg is encouraging developers to participate in a contest that "will challenge all of you, and the whole tech world, really, to come up with new applications using city data."
"We'll be releasing a huge volume of data from a number of agencies," Bloomberg said before the Skype connection briefly cut off. Rasiej re-dialed in, and Bloomberg continued that he hopes the fruits of Big Apps contests will "create the connectedness that will benefit the city economically, civically, and socially."
If developers aren't willing to act solely out of a desire to help the city, Bloomberg said that Big Apps will indeed have cash prizes, as well as an even bigger incentive.
"I'll up the ante by taking the grand-prize winners out to dinner," he said.
Good to hear that's still in the budget.
Almost 20 years ago exactly, on June 4, 1989, the Chinese military opened fire on prodemocracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, resulting in the loss of hundreds--if not thousands--of innocent lives. Most of the slain were students. However, the Chinese government would like the younger generations in China and the rest of the world to know very little about that.
The most iconic image from the Tiananmen Square protest and subsequent massacre.
(Credit: Wikipedia)Many media reports say that in the recent days leading up to the anniversary, China has been blocking Web sites like Twitter, Yahoo's Flickr, YouTube, Microsoft Hotmail, Live.com, Wordpress, Blogger, and many other social-networking sites and news outlets in an effort to keep the event an internal issue. Several of my friends in China have confirmed the inaccessibility of these sites. China currently has the most Internet users in the world.
According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, Microsoft's new search engine Bing is also blocked. In response to this, Kevin Kutz, a Microsoft spokesman, said his company "is committed to helping advance the free flow of information, and is committed to encouraging transparency, due process and rule of law when it comes to Internet governance."
The Associated Press reported that other Chinese blogs and file-sharing sites are also disabled. VeryCD, a popular Chinese video-sharing portal, has put a note on its site saying it will be offline until Saturday for "maintenance reasons." The popular miniblogging site Fanfou has done the same thing.
Foreign journalists are currently barred from entering Tiananmen Square and have not been given any specific reason as to why.
On June 4, 1989, student protesters gathered at Tiananmen Square in the capital city of China and called for a democratic system and clean government. Troops moved in with tanks and were ordered to open fire at the crowd. Unofficial figures indicate that somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 people were killed.
Since then, the Chinese government has carefully guarded information on the event--and even refused an independent investigation into the matter--which is believed by many to be one of the bloodiest examples of human rights suppression in the 20th century.
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