How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?

≡ Category: Life, Science, Technology |1 Comment

Every year, The Edge.org poses a thought-provoking question to 150+ engaging thinkers, and the answers never disappoint. This year, they throw out the question: How is the Internet Changing the Way You Think? In this collection, you will find answers by George Dyson, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, Marissa Mayer, Richard Dawkins and many more. Below, [...]

Why Open Video?

≡ Category: Media, Technology |Leave a Comment

What is open video? And how does it promote free speech, participation, diversity and a more engaged media sphere? Get the answers from Amy Goodman (Democracy Now), Xeni Jardin (Boing Boing), Nina Paley (Sita Sings the Blues), Yochai Benkler & Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard Berkman Center), among others. This is a mission to get behind. Excellent [...]

The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It

≡ Category: Books, Technology, e-books |2 Comments

Lawrence Lessig calls Jonathan Zittrain’s book “Absolutely required reading.” Cass Sunstein says it’s “Absolutely essential reading.” And Lawrence Tribe declares that it is “The most compelling book ever written on why a transformative technology’s trajectory threatens to stifle that technology’s greatest promise for society.”
The book is The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It. [...]

Technology Is Amazing, Nobody Is Happy…

≡ Category: Comedy, Technology, Web/Tech |Leave a Comment

A good clip that comes from Alec Couros’s 80+ Videos for Tech & Media Literacy. It features comedian Louis C.K. offering his funny thoughts on how our generation handles new technology. We’ve added it to our YouTube Favorites.

Our Rapidly Changing Digital World

≡ Category: Current Affairs, Technology |1 Comment

In case you needed a reminder, we’re no longer living in your grandfather’s world. This video makes that plainly clear. Everything is changing in a blink, and education offers you and your kids the best way to navigate it all. Don’t take it for granted.
via The DigitalBlur. Thanks Jillian for the tip on this one.
Remember to catch [...]

Salvador Dali (and Other VIPs) on “What’s My Line?”

≡ Category: Technology, Video - Arts & Culture |1 Comment

What’s My Line? aired on CBS from 1950 to 1967, making it the longest-running game show in American television history. During its eighteen seasons, the show featured hundreds of celebrities & VIPs. Above, you can watch Salvador Dali in action. You can also rewind the video tape and check out Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Lloyd Wright, [...]

The History of the Internet in 8 Minutes

≡ Category: Technology, Web/Tech |8 Comments

We have here a short, catchy animated documentary that explains how we get from the 1950s to the internet that we know and love today. Along the way, it covers inventions ranging from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet. Have a look:

Free Stanford Computer Science & Engineering Courses Now Online

≡ Category: Online Courses, Stanford, Technology, Video - Science |24 Comments

Stanford Engineering Everywhere is a new project rolling out of Stanford, and it’s making available to anyone, anywhere 10 complete online computer science and electrical engineering courses. This includes the three-course Introduction to Computer Science series taken by the majority of Stanford undergraduates.
The top-notch courses are free, which means that we’ve added them to our [...]

Download Cory Doctorow’s Technology Writings (Free New Book)

≡ Category: Books, Business, Technology |Leave a Comment

A quick fyi: BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow has released a new collection of essays called Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future. As he summarizes it, the book features “28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the [...]

The Automated Publishing House

≡ Category: Books, Business, Language Lessons, Media, Technology |Leave a Comment

The New York Times has a great article on a professor of management science who has founded an almost completely automated publishing company. The 200,000 books he’s published sound, well, terrible, and terribly overpriced: “Among the books published under his name are ‘The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stickler [...]

One Laptop Per Child vs. Intel

≡ Category: Business, MIT, Technology, Web/Tech |5 Comments

The New York Times ran a fascinating article today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child program run by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the initiative is intended to develop a reasonably priced ($200) laptop for primary school children in the third world. The model they’re selling [...]

The Future of Collaborative Culture?

≡ Category: Media, Stanford, Technology |Leave a Comment

I just heard Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, speaking at Stanford Law School today. Wales is working on some new projects that he hopes will harness the community-driven collaboration of Wikipedia. He’s already had some success in branching out from the encyclopedia idea with Wikia, which is a “wiki farm” compiling information on a variety [...]

New eBook Initiatives from Amazon and Google

≡ Category: Books, Google, Technology |3 Comments

In case you missed it, The New York Times published a piece yesterday previewing two new efforts to bring electronic books to the mass market. In October, Amazon.com will roll out the Kindle (check out leaked pictures here), an ebook reader, priced somewhere between $400 to $500, that will wirelessly connect to an e-book store [...]

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part III: The iPhone

≡ Category: Apple, Media, Technology, Web/Tech |Leave a Comment

(Continued from Part II)
The most recent major foray into the world of cultureboxes comes in an entirely different size and market niche: the Apple iPhone. It may look different, but it has all the hallmarks of a culturebox. The iPhone wants to deliver video, audio and the best of the Web; it hopes to revolutionize [...]

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part 2: Tivo

≡ Category: Media, Technology, Television, Web/Tech |Leave a Comment

The online magazine Slate runs most of its arts and culture stories in a section called “Culturebox.” Ironically, it’s taken the consumer electronics industry several years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gadget is marketed as a culturebox, from the shiny iPhone to the pioneering Tivo to the hot-running Xbox 360. [...]

The Rise of the Cultureboxes, Part 1: The Xbox

≡ Category: Business, Media, Technology, Web/Tech |Leave a Comment

The online magazine Slate runs most of its arts and culture stories in a section called “Culturebox.” Ironically, it’s taken the consumer electronics industry several years to catch up, but now it seems like every new gadget is marketed as a culturebox, from the shiny iPhone to the pioneering Tivo to the hot-running Xbox 360. [...]

The Cult of the Amateur: A Short Review (and a Free Book)

≡ Category: Books, Media, Technology, Web/Tech |2 Comments

New rule: Books that are short on good ideas should only get short reviews. And so that’s what we’re serving up today — a short review of Andrew Keen’s The Cult of the Amateur: How the Democratization of the Digital World is Assaulting Our Culture.
Keen’s argument can essentially be boiled down to this: Web 2.0 [...]

Death by Amateurs?

≡ Category: Books, Media, Technology, Web/Tech |1 Comment

Last weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine has declared this the Amateur’s Hour, an era when unpaid hobbyists can edit breaking news, design space technology for NASA, and predict the end of the world. That last article is clearly an outlier, but the first two raise an interesting point—are we getting better service from processes [...]

The Skinny on Second Life

≡ Category: Media, Technology, Web/Tech |2 Comments

Ever wondered what Second Life is and if you should care about it? Imagine a 3-D immersive game where you control an avatar and travel through constructed environments–and now take away the game part. What’s left is a fairly wide-open creative space where users can create and sell in-game stuff–houses, objects, clothing, etc–or engage [...]

10 Unexpected Uses of the iPod

≡ Category: Apple, Most Popular, Technology |46 Comments

New technologies often have unintended uses. Take the Ipod as a case in point. It was developed with the intention of playing music (and later videos), but its applications now go well beyond that. Here are 10 rather unforeseen, even surprising, uses:
1. Train Doctors to Save Lives: A new study presented at the annual meeting [...]

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