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The Best Photoblogs of 2007

in Art | January 2nd, 2008

The best pho­to­blogs of last year, as declared by Photoblogsawards.com. Some beau­ti­ful images here:

Via: Andrew Sul­li­van’s Dai­ly Dish

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn the Art of Pho­tog­ra­phy: The Nikon Way

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Open Culture’s YouTube Playlist

in Video - Arts & Culture | December 31st, 2007

This seemed like a log­i­cal fol­low up to our recent post “10 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube,” which high­light­ed some of the enrich­ing video col­lec­tions on YouTube.

Here’s a playlist that cen­tral­izes the YouTube videos that we’ve recent­ly high­light­ed on our site. Think of it as the Open Cul­ture YouTube Col­lec­tion, or anoth­er way of orga­niz­ing cul­tur­al­ly redeemable videos on YouTube.

You can access the video col­lec­tion here (feel free to sub­scribe to the col­lec­tion), or by play­ing around with the video play­er added right below. A per­ma­nent link to the col­lec­tion will reside in the sec­tion called “Essen­tials” on our web­site. We’ll add to it on an ongo­ing basis.

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10 Signs of Intelligent Life at YouTube (Smart Video Collections)

in Google, Video - Arts & Culture | December 30th, 2007


(UPDATED: See 70 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube)

It’s been a con­stant lament that YouTube offers its users scant lit­tle intel­lec­tu­al con­tent. And that con­tent is itself hard to find. Just vis­it YouTube’s so-called Edu­ca­tion Sec­tion, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any­thing actu­al­ly edu­ca­tion­al. But the good news is that we’re see­ing some recent signs of intel­li­gent life at YouTube. The video ser­vice hosts an increas­ing num­ber of intel­lec­tu­al­ly redeemable video col­lec­tions. And so we fig­ured why not do some heavy lift­ing and bring a few your way. If YouTube won’t make them easy to find, then we will. (Also see 10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Bet­ter Learn­ing Gad­get.)

1.) UC Berke­ley: We have men­tioned this col­lec­tion before, but we might as well men­tion it again. UC Berke­ley launched in Octo­ber a YouTube chan­nel that con­tains over 300 hours of aca­d­e­m­ic pro­gram­ming. And, most notably, you’ll find here a series of uni­ver­si­ty cours­es that can be watched in their entire­ty (for free). It’s a deep col­lec­tion worth start­ing with.

2.) @GoogleTalks: Many big names end up speak­ing at Google. That includes polit­i­cal fig­ures and cul­tur­al fig­ures such as Paul Krug­man, Steven Pinker, Joseph Stieglitz, Jonathan Lethem and more. Since Google owns YouTube, it’s good to see that they’re mak­ing an effort to record these talks and raise the intel­lec­tu­al bar on GooTube just a bit. Have a look.

3.) The Nobel Prize: TheNo­bel­Prize chan­nel presents cur­rent and past Nobel Lau­re­ates — cour­tesy of Nobelprize.org, the offi­cial web site of the Nobel Foun­da­tion. The col­lec­tion fea­tures offi­cial Nobel Prize Lec­tures and also more casu­al pre­sen­ta­tions. It looks like talks by the 2007 win­ners are being added slow­ly.

4.) TED Talks: Every year, a thou­sand “thought-lead­ers, movers and shak­ers” get togeth­er at a four-day con­fer­ence called TED (which is short for Tech­nol­o­gy, Enter­tain­ment and Design). In recent years, the list of speak­ers has ranged from Sergey Brin and Lar­ry Page to Bill Gates, to Her­bie Han­cock and Peter Gabriel, to Frank Gehry, to Al Gore and Bill Clin­ton. In this col­lec­tion, you’ll find var­i­ous talks pre­sent­ed at the con­fer­ence. They usu­al­ly run about 20 min­utes.

5.) FORA.tv: In case you don’t know about it, FORA.tv is a web ser­vice that hosts videos fea­tur­ing impor­tant thinkers grap­pling with con­tem­po­rary cul­tur­al, social and polit­i­cal ques­tions. It’s like YouTube, but always intel­li­gent. You can find extend­ed videos on FORA’s site, and a decent sam­pling of their con­tent on YouTube.

6.) Philoso­phers and The­o­rists: The Euro­pean Grad­u­ate School (or EGS) hosts a video col­lec­tion on YouTube that includes talks by some very impor­tant theorists/philosophers of the past gen­er­a­tion — for exam­ple, Jacques Der­ri­da and Jean Bau­drillard. There are also some film­mak­ers mixed in — take for exam­ple, Peter Green­away and John Waters.

7.) Pulitzer Cen­ter on Cri­sis Report­ing: This chan­nel pro­motes cov­er­age of inter­na­tion­al affairs, “focus­ing on top­ics that have been under-report­ed, mis-report­ed — or not report­ed at all.” Most of these videos were fea­tured on the pub­lic tele­vi­sion pro­gram “For­eign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria.”

8.) BBC World­wide: The lead­ing British broad­cast­er is now live on YouTube, and there’s some good con­tent in the mix, although it won’t leap off of the home­page. The trick is to look at their playlist where you will find more edu­ca­tion­al pieces of video: doc­u­men­taries, sci­ence, dra­ma, trav­el, and more. The notable down­side is that the videos typ­i­cal­ly fall with­in YouTube’s cus­tom­ary 10 minute video lim­it. (Many oth­ers cit­ed here run longer.) Too bad more could­n’t have been done with this oppor­tu­ni­ty.

Oth­er smart media prop­er­ties that have opt­ed for the sound­bite strat­e­gy here include Nation­al Geo­graph­ic and PBS.

9.) UChan­nel: For­mer­ly called the Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nel, this video ser­vice presents talks on international/political affairs from aca­d­e­m­ic insti­tu­tions all over the world. It’s spear­head­ed by Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, and you can find an even more exten­sive video col­lec­tion on their web site.

10.) Oth­er Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nels on YouTube: UC Berke­ley launched the biggest chan­nel on YouTube, but there are some oth­ers out there. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, find­ing them is some­thing of a crap­shoot. We’ve man­aged, how­ev­er, to pull togeth­er a good list of ten. See 10 Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lec­tions on YouTube

Bonus: We cob­bled togeth­er our own playlist of smart YouTube videos that will grow over time. Have a look.

In putting togeth­er this list, one thing became clear: YouTube has enough qual­i­ty con­tent to keep you busy, and there’s clear­ly more that I don’t know about (again, because they don’t make it easy to find). If you want to add oth­er good YouTube col­lec­tions to our list, please list them in the com­ments and I can add them selec­tive­ly to the list.

Want more smart media? Check out our big list of free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es avail­able via pod­cast.

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10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Better Learning Gadget

in Most Popular, Web/Tech | December 30th, 2007


The iPod can super­charge your learn­ing. But it’s often a mat­ter of find­ing the right soft­ware and con­tent. Below, we’ve list­ed sev­er­al new pieces of soft­ware that will let you suck more edu­ca­tion­al media (DVDs, web videos, audio files, etc.) into your iPod. And we’ve also list­ed some impor­tant pieces of con­tent that will make your iPod a bet­ter learn­ing gad­get. So here it goes (and be sure to see our relat­ed piece 10 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube):

1) Put Wikipedia on Your Ipod: Ency­clopo­dia is a free piece of soft­ware that brings Wikipedia to the iPod. Ency­clopo­dia can be installed on iPod gen­er­a­tions 1 through 4, as well as iPod Min­is. Def­i­nite­ly worth a try.

2) Watch DVDs on Your iPod: This free, open source soft­ware works on MacOS X, Lin­ux and Win­dows, and makes it sim­ple to load and watch DVDs on your video iPod. Here are some help­ful instruc­tions to get you start­ed.

3) Load YouTube Videos to Your iPod: Con­vert­Tube allows you to take any YouTube video and con­vert it to a for­mat that works on your iPod. It’s as sim­ple as enter­ing a url and click­ing “con­vert and down­load.” If you want to give the soft­ware a test run, try con­vert­ing these UC Berke­ley cours­es that were recent­ly launched on YouTube. Or these Nobel Prize speech­es.

4) Make Oth­er Video For­mats iPod-Ready: Life­hack­er recent­ly men­tioned three oth­er pieces of soft­ware that will make a vari­ety of oth­er video for­mats iPod-ready. For Win­dows, see Vide­o­ra; for Mac, see iSquint. Or more gen­er­al­ly see Zamzar. In a nut­shell, these items will turn a wide range of video for­mats into the one video for­mat (MPEG‑4) that your iPod likes.

5) Con­vert MP3 files into One Big iPod Audio­book File: Down­load­ing free audio­books can often require you to work with a series of sep­a­rate mp3 files, which can make things rather cum­ber­some. This soft­ware does you a favor and mash­es the files into one man­age­able file. And it has a fea­ture that will let your Ipod remem­ber where you stopped if you decide to take a break. (If this one appeals to you, be sure to see item # 10.)

6) Cre­ate eBooks for the iPod: This bit of soft­ware turns text files into ebooks that you can read on your iPod. After you load a text file, it will make the text read­able through iPod Notes (which you can find under “Extra Sett­tings”). Then, voila, a portable text. Thanks to Pachecus.com for point­ing this one out.

7) Record Web Audio and Move it To Your iPod: Designed for Macs, iRecord­Mu­sic enables you to eas­i­ly record audio from web pages and Inter­net radio streams. So if you’re surf­ing the web and find a good piece of streamed audio, it lets you record it and then trans­fer the media to your iPod. The only down­side is that the soft­ware isn’t free. It will run you $24.95, but it may well be worth it. You can down­load a tri­al ver­sion here.

8) Get a Civic Edu­ca­tion on Your Ipod: This site allows you to down­load to your iPod ten impor­tant doc­u­ments that any edu­cat­ed Amer­i­can should be famil­iar with. The texts include: The Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, Con­sti­tu­tion of the Unit­ed States, Bill of Rights, Louisiana Pur­chase Treaty, Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion, Get­tys­burg Address, Civ­il Rights Act, and sev­er­al oth­ers. (Note: You can also down­load here an iPod ver­sion of Mer­ri­am-Web­ster’s Pock­et Dic­tio­nary for $9.95.)

9) Load Maps onto Your iPod: If you trav­el to New York City, Paris, Berlin or Moscow, how will you find your way to the muse­ums? iSub­wayMaps is the answer. It lets you down­load sub­way maps from 24 major cities across the globe. You’ll only need an iPod with pho­to capa­bil­i­ty and you’ll be good to go. (By the way, if you want to load Google Maps to your iPod, here is a tuto­r­i­al that will explain how.)

10) Study For­eign Lan­guages, Take Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es, and Lis­ten to Audio­Books on Your iPod — All for Free: Ok, so this is a cheap but worth­while plug for some of our rich­est pod­cast col­lec­tions. Our For­eign Lan­guage Pod­cast Col­lec­tion lets your learn over 25 dif­fer­ent for­eign lan­guages. Our Audio­Book pod­cast col­lec­tion will give you portable access to 100+ clas­sic works of lit­er­a­ture and non­fic­tion. And this uni­ver­si­ty pod­cast col­lec­tion pro­vides access to over 85 cours­es record­ed at lead­ing Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties. Not bad, if I say so myself. For our com­plete pod­cast library, click here.

Know of more soft­ware or con­tent that will super­charge your iPod? Feel free to list them in our com­ments. And if they’re good, we’ll hap­pi­ly add them to the list.

For more great iPod util­i­ties, see the recent fea­tures by Life­hack­er and Pachecus.com.

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A Conversation with Benazir Bhutto

in Current Affairs, Politics, Video - Politics/Society | December 29th, 2007

Again, no com­men­tary need­ed. Infor­ma­tive in many ways, Bhut­to’s talk was taped at the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions in August. More info here.

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How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?: The #2 Podcast on iTunesU

in MIT, Uncategorized | December 23rd, 2007

hannibal.jpgDur­ing a week when uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts received wide­spread atten­tion (thanks to a very pop­u­lar arti­cle in the NY Times), we’ve kept a close eye on the high-rank­ing pod­casts on iTune­sU. Quite con­sis­tent­ly, one pod­cast — How Did Han­ni­bal Cross the Alps? — has ranked at the top. It cur­rent­ly sits in the #2 posi­tion, right behind What is Exis­ten­tial­ism?.

The Han­ni­bal lec­ture was pre­sent­ed at Stan­ford by Patrick Hunt, an archae­ol­o­gist who recent­ly wrote Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry (see relat­ed post) and whose long term project is to fig­ure out how the great mil­i­tary leader crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with his large army, which includ­ed dozens of war ele­phants. I had a chance to catch up with Patrick and ask him why, over 2,000 years lat­er, the adven­tures of Han­ni­bal still man­age to cap­ture our imag­i­na­tion. Here is what he had to say:

“Here are some rea­sons I think the Han­ni­bal top­ic is mes­mer­iz­ing. First, the logis­tics of mov­ing a large army — at least 25,000 sur­viv­ing sol­diers — over some­times ter­ri­fy­ing moun­tain bar­ri­ers is very daunt­ing and immense­ly chal­leng­ing. Sec­ond, this is expo­nen­tial­ly com­pound­ed by the fact that even with able scouts the increas­ing­ly steep ter­rain and bad weath­er en route to the sum­mit were threat­en­ing­ly unfa­mil­iar to the vast major­i­ty of Han­ni­bal’s army in this ear­ly win­ter of 218 BCE. Even in sum­mer, the weath­er can be harsh and wild­ly unpre­dictable. In win­ter, it can be that much worse. Third, there were Celtic tribes to con­tend with, who would roll boul­ders down on troops and ambush them from (more…)

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Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

in Books | December 22nd, 2007

tendiscoveries.jpgHere are a few facts to know about the adven­tur­ous Patrick Hunt. He’s a Stan­ford archae­ol­o­gist who has spent more than a decade try­ing to unrav­el the mys­tery of how Han­ni­bal, the great ancient mil­i­tary leader, crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with 25,000 men and 37 ele­phants. (Lis­ten on iTunes to the course he gave on this adven­ture, and get more info below). He has bro­ken more than 20 bones while doing field­work, fought off kid­nap­pers, and twice sur­vived sun­stroke-induced blind­ness. And now he has just pub­lished an excit­ing new book called Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry. It’s pub­lished by Penguin/Plume and starts ship­ping tomor­row. I asked Patrick what makes these dis­cov­er­ies — rang­ing from the Roset­ta Stone to the Dead Sea Scrolls to Machu Pic­chu — so impor­tant. Below he gives us a brief glimpse into what makes each dis­cov­ery his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant and fas­ci­nat­ing. Read on, and check out his cap­ti­vat­ing new book for the fuller pic­ture.

Patrick Hunt: “First I should say that not every archae­ol­o­gist would agree that these are the ten most impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies of all time. On the oth­er hand, the ten sto­ries retold in this book are often regard­ed as among the most excit­ing archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies of the mod­ern era (since 1750). And no one would deny that these ten vital dis­cov­er­ies have for­ev­er changed the world of archae­ol­o­gy, trans­form­ing how and what we know about ancient his­to­ry. Let me tell you a lit­tle about them.

1) Roset­ta Stone: This excit­ing dis­cov­ery in 1799 was the key to deci­pher­ing Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs and unlock­ing the his­to­ry of the ancient world texts. It pro­vides a win­dow into the real his­to­ry of Egypt rather than an imag­i­nary one; all oth­er deci­pher­ings of ancient lan­guages since the Roset­ta Stone’s ini­tial decod­ing in 1822 are based on its prece­dents. (See pho­to here.)

2) Troy: Its dis­cov­ery and exca­va­tion begin­ning in 1870 proved once and for all that Troy was not just a myth based on Homer; Troy was a his­tor­i­cal site where real peo­ple lived and fought. Its ear­li­est exca­va­tor, the oft-maligned and often-uneth­i­cal Hein­rich Schlie­mann has been most­ly cred­it­ed — right or wrong — as being the “Father of Archae­ol­o­gy” and his tech­niques became the foun­da­tion of archae­o­log­i­cal research, how­ev­er great­ly improved, after­ward.

3) Nin­eveh and the Roy­al Assyr­i­an Library: This riv­et­ing find begin­ning in 1849 by Austen Hen­ry Layard, a sleuth of antiq­ui­ty, even­tu­al­ly unearthed a whole lost library of cuneiform texts, includ­ing ones not only from ancient Assyr­ia but also from far old­er Sumer, Akkad, Baby­lon and oth­er great civ­i­liza­tions. This had a very sig­nif­i­cant impact on world lit­er­a­ture, intro­duc­ing such sem­i­nal works as the Epic of Gil­gamesh.

4) King Tut’s Tomb: The dra­mat­ic open­ing of this roy­al tomb in 1922 — sought for years by a deter­mined Howard Carter — was the first time in mil­len­nia a pharao­h’s tomb had actu­al­ly been found intact; its trea­sure gave the world a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to actu­al­ly account for stag­ger­ing Egypt­ian roy­al wealth. [Dan’s note: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic has a nice web site on this archae­o­log­i­cal find.]

5) Machu Pic­chu: The remark­able high jun­gle moun­tain dis­cov­ery in 1911 of the remote Lost City of the Inca by Hiram Bing­ham made it pos­si­ble for the world to final­ly see an undis­turbed Inca roy­al city mys­te­ri­ous­ly aban­doned on a moun­tain­top but nei­ther con­quered nor changed by the colo­nial world. (See pho­to here.)

6) Pom­peii: Pre­served by the erup­tion of Vesu­vius in AD 79 and not dug out for almost two mil­len­nia, Pom­peii (prob­a­bly acci­den­tal­ly found by a farmer dig­ging a well) is the sin­gle most impor­tant Roman site in the world; its arti­facts offer the largest and fullest record of life in a Roman city. Pom­pei­i’s mis­for­tune is our great for­tune. It pre­serves a city with thou­sands of objects vir­tu­al­ly unchanged. (See images here.)

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The Final Cut of Blade Runner: Now Out on DVD

in Film | December 19th, 2007

Back in Octo­ber, Rid­ley Scott released a final and defin­i­tive direc­tor’s cut of Blade Run­ner, pre­sent­ing to audi­ences the film that he would have made if stu­dio execs had­n’t med­dled with things. A short two months lat­er, the final cut is now out on DVD. It was released yes­ter­day, bare­ly in time for the hol­i­days. For more on the mak­ing and remak­ing of Blade Run­ner, you can lis­ten to this recent inter­view with Rid­ley Scott.

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15 Most Viewed Posts in 2007

in Most Popular | December 14th, 2007

We dug back through the his­tor­i­cal data and iso­lat­ed the 15 most viewed posts of the year. If you’re look­ing for a trend, one will leap out. Peo­ple like num­bered lists. Hence anoth­er one:

1) 10 Unex­pect­ed Uses of the iPod
2) 25 UC Berke­ley Cours­es Avail­able via Free Video
3) 45 Free Cut­ting-Edge Books … Cour­tesy of Cre­ative Com­mons
4) The War of the Worlds on Pod­cast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riv­et­ed A Nation
5) Our Ances­tral Mind in the Mod­ern World: An Inter­view with Satoshi Kanaza­wa
6) Free Beethoven and Mozart Record­ings via Pod­cast
7) Life-Chang­ing Books: Your Picks
8) 10 Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es on iTunes
9) Pod­cast Primer
10) MP3 Music Blogs: For Your Lis­ten­ing Plea­sure
11) Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry
12) The Hottest Course on iTunes (and the Future of Dig­i­tal Edu­ca­tion)
13) Ten Pod­casts to Build Your Vocab­u­lary
14) YouTube Gets Smart: The Launch of New Uni­ver­si­ty Chan­nels
15) The Decline and Fall of the Roman (and Amer­i­can?) Empire: A Free Audio­book

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Yale Launches Open Courses

in Yale | December 13th, 2007

Click here for 250 Free Online Cours­es From Great Uni­ver­si­ties

Yes­ter­day, Yale announced that it is pro­vid­ing “free and open access to sev­en intro­duc­to­ry cours­es taught by dis­tin­guished teach­ers and schol­ars at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty.” I’ve list­ed the course line­up below, with links to each course. You can access the home­page for the project here.

With this launch, Yale becomes the lat­est pres­ti­gious Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ty to give glob­al users access to online edu­ca­tion­al con­tent. But its approach is rather dif­fer­ent. The high pro­file ini­tia­tives led by MIT and UC Berke­ley both deliv­er high vol­umes of con­tent, and they’re designed to be scal­able. (MIT gives users access to mass quan­ti­ties of course mate­ri­als cre­at­ed by its fac­ul­ty, while Berke­ley dis­trib­utes through iTunes and YouTube over 50 cours­es that the uni­ver­si­ty records at a rea­son­able cost.) In con­trast, Yale’s project is more bou­tique and high-touch.

Each course fea­tures a syl­labus, read­ing assign­ments, class notes, and pol­ished lec­tures, which, when tak­en togeth­er, con­tribute to a more round­ed learn­ing expe­ri­ence. The lec­tures can be down­loaded in one of five for­mats (text, audio, flash video, low band­width quick­time video, and high band­width quick­time video). And quite notably, Yale has designed the cours­es to be down­loaded fair­ly eas­i­ly, which means that you can put the lec­tures onto an mp3 play­er if you’re a lit­tle tech savvy. This does raise the ques­tion, how­ev­er: why aren’t the lec­tures also post­ed on Yale’s iTunes site? This would sure­ly facil­i­tate the down­load­ing of lec­tures for many users, and it would offer an easy way to dri­ve sub­stan­tial traf­fic to the cours­es.

As some have already not­ed (see the com­ments on this page), Yale isn’t offer­ing online cours­es in the truest sense, mean­ing you won’t get access to a live instruc­tor here. Nor will you be able to inter­act with oth­er stu­dents. It’s a one-way, soli­tary edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ence. But there’s a rea­son for that. Not long ago, Yale exper­i­ment­ed with a more com­pre­hen­sive form of online learn­ing when it cre­at­ed, along with Stan­ford and Oxford, an e‑learning con­sor­tium called “The Alliance for Life­long Learn­ing” (a/k/a All­Learn). For many rea­sons, the ven­ture (where I spent five years) was­n’t ulti­mat­ley viable. And so Yale has opt­ed for anoth­er mod­el that has its own virtues — it’s less cap­i­tal inten­sive; it’s free (All­Learn charged for its cours­es); and it will get edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als into far more peo­ple’s hands, which is per­haps what mat­ters most.

As a quick note, let me add that this project was fund­ed by the Hewlett Foun­da­tion, and Yale expects to add up to 30 addi­tion­al cours­es over the next sev­er­al years.

To vis­it Yale’s open cours­es, vis­it the fol­low­ing links:

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