My roommate Swifty has come up with a neat way to use the interwebs to add dates, names and places to his family’s old pictures using Flickr: I’ve started scanning the huge batch of old photos I borrowed when my Grandfather passed away. They are awesome. I created a Flickr account for my mother and…
Category: Information Society
Lincoln Center offers jazz education videos online
Jazz at Lincoln Center announces that they are now offering a limited selection of online videos of some of their jazz education classes for those who can not attend their programs in person. Not only can you watch the recorded lectures, you can see concert performances and commentary on those performances, all carefully tagged and…
Compare US presidential hopefuls on their international positions at “08 or bust!” website
My friends at Citizens for Global Solutions have created a neat new website called "08 or Bust" that tracks the positions of each of the major candidates for the US presidency on a range of international issues. The heart of the website is an interactive comparison chart that allows you to pull up the public…
XO Laptop “Two-fer” expires November 26 — help a poor kid get connected!
Just a reminder that those amazing folks at One Laptop Per Child are offering a very special "twofer." If you buy two of their incredibly cute "XO laptops" for $400, one of them goes to you (or your kid) and the other to a child in the developing world. I’m leaning toward getting one, which…
Earthlink customer service hell
I’ve been a loyal customer of Earthlink ever since they acquired the excellent Mindspring ISP back in the 2000. For the most part, I’ve been happy with their service. But for the past couple of years they have been harassing me about paying for an additional "premium email account" and dial-up fee, even though I…
“IRL” documentary explores geeky, fetid underbelly of online communities
As the moderator for the past eight years of the swing dance online community at Yehoodi.com, I’m always interested in studies and explorations of other online community sites. Stephanie Tuszynski wrote and directed a new documentary that examines one particular online community surrounding the uber-geeky show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer": "IRL (In Real Life)" is…
16 BILLION pixel image of “The Last Supper” viewable online
Ok, this is incredibly cool. The Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities has partnered with the firm HAL9000 (wasn’t that the computer in "2001"?) to provide on the interwebs a ridiculously high resolution image of Da Vinci’s "Last Supper." For incredibly fragile and faded works of art like this, providing high-resolution images online is…
Merge your Facebook & Second Life social networks with “Second Life Link”
So you have a problem: You’ve got your real life friends on Facebook and virtual friends on Second Life. How do you keep track of who is doing what in both worlds? Fire Centaur (pictured here), a Second Life resident who resides in real world Korea, thought about this conundrum and wondered if it would…
Flickr Folk debate Second Life versus real world photography
There’ s an interesting, somewhat heated discussion in a Flickr discussion forum about the merits of Second Life photographs being posted to the Flickr photo sharing site. For those who don’t know, Flickr has become a tremendous community gathering point for thousands of amateur, expert and professional photographers to share knowledge, feedback, suggestions and encouragement…
Yes, I’ve become one of THOSE assholes
I cashed in my $100 back from Apple for being a sucker early adopter and got an Aliph Jawbone bluetooth headset. Look for me yammering on self-importantly on a major thoroughfare near you.