Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

A few days ago during a #pubmedia chat on Twitter, we were talking about the complex relationship between public media – NPR and PBS stations – and community media such as cable access TV. Someone brought up community media centers that also serve as telecentres – places that provide free/low-cost Internet access and training – and I mentioned Lowell Telecommunications Corporation (LTC) in Massachusetts, one of several community media organizations that pioneered this model.

I’d hoped to tweet a link to a book on telecentres I co-wrote and edited for IDRC in Canada a number of years ago called From The Ground Up: The Evolution Of The Telecentre Movement, since it included a chapter on LTC. But I discovered that the online version of the book was no longer being hosted by telecentre.org. Thanks to Archive.org, though, I managed to find a PDF of the book. It’s a big file – seven megs – but the book is very heavy on photography, so the PDF version does it justice more than the Web version ever did.

I’m uploading a copy of it here to ensure that it doesn’t vanish again. I wrote the chapters on Ghana, Hungary and India, and co-edited the rest of it. Hope you enjoy it. -andy

Video of my March 2010 TEDxNYED talk, The New Volunteers: Social Media, Disaster Response And You:

Here are the slides from the talk:

TEDxNYED Talk: Social Media, Disaster Response And You

Thanks to the good folks at iBiblio, I’ve switched my blog from Movable Type to Wordpress. My MT database had been having problems for many months, which is why I haven’t been posting very often. We’re still working out some of the kinks, but hopefully the blog will be stable fairly soon.

A soldier who was wounded in Afghanistan, one of several rehabbing at 
Walter Reed that we saw at the Silver Spring Thanksgiving Parade 
today.  His mom says he expects to have another year of rehab before 
he gets to go home.

Posted via email from aka @acarvin

That Pic Sure Makes Your Email Scam More Believable, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I just got this email in my in box. It’s obvious scam mail, of course, but I love how they’ve added a stock photo of global office workers to make it more convincing that a "British finance security company" needs my assistance in processing $35.5 million.

Video I shot today of the Swedish royal ship Vasa, which sunk off Stockholm during its maiden voyage in 1628. It was salvaged in 1961 and was processed for years using water and preservative chemicals until it was given a new home at Stockholm’s Vasa Museum. It’s the best preserved 17th century ships in the world, and one of my all-time favorite museums.