Cell Phone Trees

Wayne's Word tells of a new species of trees that are suddenly appearing in San Diego County. Their entire growth cycle is completed within a few days in one of the most unusual examples of urbanization.

Top Directors

Boston Phoenix readers came up with their list of the seven greatest living narrative film directors and not a single vote came in for Steven Spielberg, Spike Lee, Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, or any Italian, African, Spanish, or Russian filmmaker. So who's left?

Getting Started with Brightcove

"...We hope to take on the heavy-lifting related to Internet TV. Hosting, storage, delivery, user experience, distribution, syndication. Very soon, we'll also help with monetization. It's our mission to empower storytellers of all kinds to do what they do best, without having to worry too much about technology." Get started with Brightcove - today

Google Maps in Europe

Google just launched beta versions of Google Maps for France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.

Reinvent yourself or die!

"Postmodernism is a change-or-be-changed world. The word is out: Reinvent yourself for the 21st century or die! Some would rather die than change." -Leonard Sweet

Social Mourning

Web Sites Set Up to Celebrate Life Recall Lives Lost

"Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning... Inevitably, some of these young people have died... and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time."

Geek Prom 2006

MN Stories has a great movie on Geek Prom 2006.
I <3 Minnesota!

Grease Not Gas

Grease not gas! Whatever do I mean? Don't you know that organic oils like vegetable oil can replace petroleum based fuel in deisel engines? Watch this video to see how Piebald used vegetabal oil and saved $$$.

Related
A Brick in the Toilet can help you reduce water waste in your household by more than a third. Learn more about this and how to clean up your act with other planet friendly tips.

Google Page Creator or not

So sad, I tried to use Google page creator but since the programming wizards only get to use %20 of their time on these kinds of projects, they haven't gotten around to getting it to work on my (MAC) versions of Safari or Firefox yet.

Mpls-St.Paul Int'l Film Festival

The 24th annual Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Film Festival is in full swing. It opened on Thursday with Al Franken: God Spoke and will have screenings throughout the cities until the 30th, closing with Sweet Land by MN Director Ali Selim.

For the schedule, go to films>daily

For a taste of MN-grown films, go to the MN Shorts tonight at 9h15pm in the Bell Auditorium and the MN Documentaries next Saturday the 29th at 7h30pm at the Riverview Theater.

'Save the Internet' campaign

JD Lasica is organizing a major effort to educate the public about Net neutrality, and to lobby Congress against allowing telecoms to create a two-tier Internet. See his Darknet blog for details.

Apple Upgrades Recycling Program

"Apple has announced a nice upgrade to their recycling program. Starting in June, new Apple computers purchased either online or at a Apple Store will receive free shipping and eco-friendly disposal of old PCs or laptops. Also announced is that the fifth generation iPods—including the video, nano and shuffle—are 100 percent compliant with the RoHS hazardous material standards that are in place in Europe and California." [Gizmodo]

NetFlix Envelope Evolution

Oh Malik let us know about a Business 2.0 story on Netflix envelope evolution from its early days to now. Check out the photos (with descriptions) of the envelopes.

Open Source Physical Objects

Limor Fried and her x0xb0x Synthesizer

Play Movie
This video clip is a conversation between hacker/artist Limor Fried ("Lady Ada") and Joi Ito with Phil Torrone of Make Magazine. Fried talks about her popular x0xb0x synthesizer kits, and the increasing elaborate revisioning of the product that's coming from her users. With Ito and Torrone, she proposes that this is a promising model for "open source physical objects" - extending the permitted hackability of software to hardware. This is an interview from South by Southwest: Interactive, in March 2006; the camera was held by Merci Hammon, the editor was Justin Hall, and Joi Ito was the executive producer - this is part of a series of videos released online from that event under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

From Justin Hall via SXSW

Sand, Kiteboarding, & Dreams from My Father

That several-day lapse in posting is due to my recent trip to South Padre, Texas. Denis went to kiteboard and I went to just relax and refresh. While sitting in the sand on the beach, the wind gently ruffled the pages of the book I read. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama is not only a story of race, identity, and inheritance, it is also sure to stimulate introspection and cause readers to really think about who they are and how they relate to others. Good reads.

Free City-Wide Wi-Fi

"The City and County of San Francisco just chose the bid from EarthLink and Google to offer citywide Wi-Fi access. If all goes well, construction will commence this year on a network that would provide it for free to virtually the entire city at speeds up to six times dial-up." (G-blog)

CSCAN: Crustal Stress Community Awareness Network

CSCAN: Crustal Stress Community Awareness Network

Watch the video

The Crustal Stress Community Awareness Network (CSCAN) is a network of earthquake monitoring sites that are set up in nine different communities on Luzon, the Philippines. The nine-community sites report their data to PHIVOLCS to analyze and prepare summary reports on crustal stress signals.

Digital Outreach Programs for Teens

Danah Boyd has worked at teen outreach programs where they helped kids who were on the street, suicidal, struggling with addiction... With sites like LiveJournal, Xanga and MySpace, many teens are expressing similar kinds of out-of-control behaviors. She wonders if there are digital teen outreach programs on the web.

Google Romance

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Deeshaa reminisces about past Google April Fool's Day gag releases.

Videoblogging Week 2006!

Josh at We Are The Media reminds us that Videoblogging Week 2006 is coming soon. Get your cameras ready!

"You may have heard of Videoblogging Week before, well this year is going to be even bigger!

April 3-9, seven days of vlogging. One video a day!

Get involved and get ready to do some serious vlogging! Be sure to tag your videos with videobloggingweek2006"