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Tight Budgets Deprive Some FBI Agents of Email

"As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is reluctant to give all agents and analysts dot-gov accounts," Mark Mershon said when asked about the gap at a New York Daily News editorial board meeting. "We just don't have the money, and that is an endless stream of complaints that come from the field," he said.

FBI officials in Washington denied that cost-cutting was putting agents at a disadvantage. Spokeswoman Cathy Milhoan said e-mail addresses are still being assigned, adding that the city bureau's 2,000 employees would all have accounts by the end of the year.

Let's all hope that they all have cellphones.

In case anyone missed it, The New Wisdom of the Web

then the comments from ResourceShelf

Yes, tagging can be very powerful and useful for very individual or small focused groups like an eight grade class or a group of friends or co-workers. To be useful to the masses (if/when) it reaches mainstream/widespread is another matter. Is the point of tagging to make information retrieval more precise for a large group of users? Why? Synonyms, pluralization, etc. Also, spam and gaming the system. This is another topic NOT addressed in the article. What would stop someone reviewing the most popular tags and then including these tags in every item they post? I'm sure with several logins and a script this could be achieved quite easily. We all know what happened to the meta-keyword content tag. Aside from spamming, for tagging to save effort and make retrieval more precise, something I've called structured or fielded tagging (location field, author field, date field, etc.) is needed. The Catch-22 is that most people wouldn't do it.

I was going to name this post, "Tagging has become Irrelavant", but thought maybe as a user and not a developer throw in my two cents worth. Tags need to be more useful. Let's get away from simple tags like tech, politics, news. Whether its del.icio.us (tech returned 116641 results) or technorati (politics didn't return a number, but did turn up 26+ pages of results) or flickr (architecture returned 11592 results). Architecture is interesting to me, but not one of the most popular tags and would easily take someone hours if not days to sought through. Searching technology has a long way to go and we should be getting more specific. Tagging is the reverse, its way too general. Just today, I remembered an article along with some names and key words, still it took me fifteen minutes to find with Google. Imagine if the artcle was just tagged politics, I'd still be looking. I know that Ask Jeeves trys, but we need searches that use something like human logic with parameters, tagging is a kind of de-evolution of that. Even the examples I gave of tagging were within a community, abeit large communities and they still served little real use. Tags can be fun to surf for fun, but for right now aren't especially useful research or documenting tools. Ok maybe I should have called it "Tagging has become Irrelavant"

A Time for Heresy

We need such courage today. This is a time for heresy. American democracy is threatened by perversions of money, power, and religion. Money has bought our elections right out from under us. Power has turned government "of, by, and for the people" into the patron of privilege. And Christianity and Islam have been hijacked by fundamentalists who have made religion the language of power, the excuse for violence, and the alibi for empire. We must answer the principalities and powers that would force on America a stifling conformity. Either we make the heretical choices that will inspire us to renew our commitment to America's deepest values and ideals, or the day will come when we will no longer recognize the country we love.

Here's what I mean.

Two years ago, the American Political Science Association produced a study entitled Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality. The report said people with wealth — privileged Americans — are "roaring with a clarity and consistency that public officials readily hear and routinely follow," while citizens "with lower or moderate incomes are speaking with a whisper." The study concluded that "progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and even, in some places, reversed."

The following year — 2005 — the editors of The Economist, one of the world's most pro-capitalist publications, produced their own sobering analysis of what is happening in America. They found great and growing income disparities. Thirty years ago the average annual compensation of the top 100 chief executives was 30 times the pay of the average worker; today it is 1000 times the pay of the average worker. They found an education system "increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries." They found our celebrated universities increasingly "reinforcing rather that reducing" these educational inequalities. They found American corporations no longer successful agents of upward mobility.

It is now harder for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement. The editors of The Economist studied all this evidence and concluded — and I am quoting a pro-business magazine, remember — that the United States "risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based society." Let that sink in: The United States "risks calcifying into a European-style, class-based society."