The government released today a series of widgets that people can place on their websites, which are essentially link-backs to the CDC’s web pages on the Swine Flu. Not sure how effective the SEO is on these widgets, as the term ‘Swine Flue’ doesn’t appear very often in the code snippets it asks you to paste into your HTML. Perhaps if they used title tags to include the important words it might be a bit more effective…
Something tells me that the guy selling papers at the end this news clip is out of a job today and that half of the people in that newspaper room are also out of a job…
I wonder if the guys at the Examiner working on this electronic news project had any inkling that this project of theirs would eventually lead to the layoffs of their colleagues in the newspaper industry today.
For 8 years, I spent a good portion of my summer vacations in a part of Italy not commonly visited by most tourists. Far from the vineyards of Tuscany or the city dwellings of Rome and Naples or the island region of Sicily is Molise, the agricultural heart of Italy. Molise is the forgotten part of Italy, and if any tourist guides devote any attention to the region, it is usually in the form of two pages at most. Even then, these guides will describe the area as forgettable with maybe the exception of its beautiful beaches and the Tremiti Islands. I think they are wrong.
Molise occupies an area formerly known as Samnium, home to the ancient Samnites, who settled in the region starging around 600 BC and lasting until 290 BC when the Roman Empire conquered Samnium in the Third Samnite war. Many people you meet in ancient villages throughout Molise will claim to be direct descendants of families that have lived in the region for over 1,500 years and longer.
Bonefro is a small town in the hills overlooking the Adriatic Sea that serves as an example of the hundreds of small towns that dot the landscape of Molise. This is a photo essay I took in the summer of 2004 of Bonefro.
At the heart of every village in Italy is the piazza, a place for people to hang out and talk with friends about anything from politics and the news of the day to the gossip of local neighbors. And most often the people that hang out in the piazza are men, usually retired or on break from their work in the fields. The women are usually not seen very often, as they are usually at home taking care of the family cooking.
On Wednesday’s radio broadcast of PRI’s “The World”, the Global Hit artist that day was an African musician named Asa, pronounced ‘Asha’. I can’t quite pin down what type of music she plays, even if the genre description on iTunes is ‘World’, which is a pretty lame excuse of a term to describe a musician from Africa. Her website terms her music as ‘Nigerian Soul’, although there are elements of reggae, folk and ‘alternative’ all mixed into a unique sound that is really wonderful and pleasant to listen to. I listened to the album straight through two times after buying it, which I haven’t done in a while when buying an album.
Asa’s lyrics can be serious subject matter, although her music is very upbeat and very optimistic in nature, a subject that she actually discusses in her PRI interview. The interview can be found in the Global Hits section of PRI’s website for “The World”.
The album can be purchased on both iTunes and Amazon. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
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