(iverson's) currentbuzz

in 2014 Americans will be spending $1.5 billion on online newspaper subscriptions and $5 billion on imaginary objects. Maybe I find this ridiculous because I’m a reporter and my sympathies lie with the newspaper industry.

via MediaPost Publications Virtual Goods Worth More than Real News: Curmudgeon 08/27/2010.

So this does sound like “amusing ourselves to death,” “fiddling while Rome burns,” doesn’t it? Folks will spend money in virtual worlds, to buy everything from a hot avatar to a pig for their Farmville, but they can’t or won’t pay for news. Hmm. Time for some kind of new model. Perhaps that ought to be a model of civic engagement or citizenship education, not necessarily another business plan.

Vince Hunter considers himself tech-savvy, but never realized the newest “app” on his iPhone would thwart a burglary while he was out of town.

via iPhone ‘app’ thwarts burglary for out-of-town couple | wfaa.com | Home Page.

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Poligraft is a new, geeky Web tool that the Sunlight Foundation just launched. You can plug either a URL or text into the tool and it will analyze the information and link you to groups that donate to politicians.

…Let’s take a look at CNN‘s story on the “buzz” over Proposition 8. When you drop that story’s URL into Poligraft, you can see how various groups mentioned in the story give money to one party or the other.

via Poynter Online – Al’s Morning Meeting.

How to Mobile-Optimize a WordPress Website

by PrabhasPokharel

Publishing for the mobile web is an important way to reach audiences on mobile phones. This screencast demonstrates an easy-to-use tool that can enable many content producers pubish for the mobile web. WordPress.org has developed software which lets many around the world create websites fairly easily. This tool, the WordPress Mobile Pack, makes it easy for those web publishers to now publish on the mobile web.

In this short how-to video, we show easy it is install the WordPress Mobile Pack and generate a mobile version of websites, along with pointers to the more advanced features of the software.

via How to Mobile-Optimize a WordPress Website | MobileActive.org.

the middle childhood cohort, those who spent a median of 3.86 hours in front of a screen had an odds ratio for developing attention problems of 1.81 (95% CI, 1.56 to 2.11). Among the sample of late adolescents and young adults, those with a median of 4.36 hours of total screen time, the odds ratio for attention problems was 2.04 (95% CI, 1.45 to 2.88).

The findings suggest that the risk of attention problems could be reduced if parents limited children’s viewing and video game time to a total of two hours a day, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Swing and colleagues said.

via Medical News: Attention Problems Traced to Time Spent Gaming – in Pediatrics, ADHD/ADD from MedPage Today.

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• Video games threaten kids’ attention span (cbc.ca)
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