Pointers: Recommended reading

Source: The Defense Department has joined the world of blogs with . The blog launched April 15. Most of the recent entries point out highlights on the Pentagon Channel, but it’s a good start.  The blog includes a long list of links to other sites and a full archives. One recent entry reported the illness of U.S. Marine Jack Lucas, a World War II veteran who won the Medal of Honor for his heroism on Iwo Jima. Another spotlighted the Navy’s role in providing a hospital ship for a humanitarian mission in the Philippines.Source: wants government to do a better job with the Web, so it has launched an online forum for governments — and citizens, researchers and anyone else interested — to investigate the best ways to use the Web for governance and public participation. is an international consortium, so the forum is not about only the U.S. government.  But it arose out of two workshops that W3C held in 2007, one in North America and one in Europe. According to W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, the forum will foster open standards and, in particular, semantic Web standards.Source: The rounded up excerpts from 26 college graduation speeches that political figures, writers, media stars and other speakers have given in recent weeks. The highlights included:“Whatever you choose to do, you invest your lives in something that is bigger and greater than yourselves and your daily concerns.” — Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security secretary “Change the world in new and exciting ways and, in Science Guy terms, hugely gigantic big ways.” — Bill Nye, the Science Guy.Source: As government users grow more comfortable with Facebook, they’ll be tempted to add applications that let them play games, list books they’ve read and otherwise expand the site’s social interaction. Many of those applications are likely benign, but some developers of third-party apps might be collecting the data in the user profiles — such as hometown, religious affiliation, marital status or employment history — to use for marketing or other purposes that users might not welcome, Normally, a Facebook user’s full profile is visible only to the user’s designated friends. You can control who sees your information. But third-party applications can also see that information and relay it to the developers who created the application.  Be careful what you put in that profile.