Technology

On Will Raymond's blog post Chapel Hill Downtown Development Initiative: The Debate, there are links to TWENTY ONE separate videos of twenty one different people speaking at a November 20th public hearing on downtown development. To make it real easy to choose which one to watch there are screen shots from the video of the people who spoke with their names captioned at the bottom. (I've copied them below.)

Carrboro has launched a new online system to help residents interact with town government. The Carrboro Action Line is oriented toward facilitating communication with town staff on a wide range of informational and action items.

There is an article on the project in today's Herald.

We discussed improving the friendliness of the town web site at the board retreat last February. This strikes me as a big step forward, entirely from staff initiative and at a fairly low cost.

I'll be interested to learn of the experience of users of the system (as, I'm sure, will town staff who just rolled out the program). In particularly, you web savvy folks who've been riding Chapel Hill's case on technology, let us know what you think of this step for Carrboro.

Check out these two items that both appear on the WCHL website today. One story asks "Can hard news be found on blogs?" concluding with this ridiculous statement: "So the next time you read a blog online, remember that you could be getting information from a twelve-year-old rather than a professional."

As if in answer to their own question, they also have a report about the NC Legislature acting to remove term limits for the Mayor of Chapel Hill - a story we broke here on Orange Politics last week.

Now I've never claimed to be a journalist (although I am a professional, thankyouverymuch), but that doesn't mean my opinions aren't both informed and informative! It's just this kind of lumping the entire online world into some adolescent MySpace stereotype that will keep adults from being able to protect themselves and their children from what they see as the dangers of the Internet.