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Look To The Social Mobile Longtail To Empower Grassroots Mobile Campaigns
By Justin Oberman, 09/23/2008 - 9:58pm
By Justin Oberman, 09/23/2008 - 9:58pm
My good friend Ken Bank's from Kiwanja.net has written a phenomenal article for publius.cc, the syndicated project of Harvard's Berkman Center For Internet & Society. You may remember the name because we first wrote about Ken's FrontlineSMS mobile solution here on PDF several years ago. The article, titled One Missed Call, examines the mobile development world as it relates to the grassroots, NGO's and non-profits of the world.
Paralleling Aderson's “Long Tail ” Bank's discusses our tendency to aim for the big and sexy when it comes to mobile solutions. According to Bank's this type of cutting edge technology is therefore only available to the resource rich NGO's. Bank's sees a Mobile divide on the horizon. His solution? Look toward the Social Mobile Long Tail
I strongly believe that we need to seriously refocus some of our attention there to avoid developing our own NGO “digital divide”. To do this we need to think about low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, affordable, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. This is something I regularly write about, and it’s a challenge I’m more than happy to throw down to the developer community.
The rest of the article discusses how as a result of this developers tend to ignore the "low hanging fruit" of using technology to enhance communication. This of course brings up, as an example, SMS. I do not want to give away the entire article here but its very well written so I wanted to draw it to your attention. Ken understands and taps the true nature of mobile technology. That its not about this or that campaign sending SMS alerts. The true power of the mobile medium rests in the people that use that medium and the developers that develop it for that. Read Here: One Missed Call?:
Technorati Tags: berkman center, frontlinesms, ken banks, kiwanja, sms
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Struggling to survive
Because of George Bush, my parents are struggling to survive. My dad lost his weekly bonus at work and sometimes he's only able to work four days a week because of this recession.
I give my parents some money once a month but they're still struggling. My mom is having to use the little spending money she has to pay bills. They're barely able to make it.
If things get worse, my dad may be out of a job altoether and he may go under. Bush may have high hopes of getting us out of this recession but I have serious doubts.
Bush got us into this recession and many people like my dad are suffering. I doubt that John McCain can end this recession either.
Bush's dad also got us in a recession and it took a democrat to get us out of it. Republican Presidents tend to get us into recessions. Democrat Presidents don't.
President Hoover was a republican and he was the President when the Great Depression began. At the moment George Bush is as popular as Hoover and that's not very popular.
I doubt that McCain can do a better job than Bush. On November the 4th Obama is going to be my choice.