Act 3 debuts on Friday. The whole thing goes away, well the streaming version, anyway, on Saturday. Then it will be iTunes and DVD-only. Watch it now! Learn more at the official fan site.
Is this the new business model for online video?
In class on Monday, I mentioned Adobe’s PDF as a de facto standard. Little did I know that it was about to be declared an ISO standard! (tip)
Go take a look at Ten Thousand Cents …. a crowd sourcing project (using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) that allowed thousands of individuals to “paint” a tiny part of an image of a $100 bill. Check out the “new” image (the piece of art) as well as a nicely-done video (hosted on Vimeo - see my whine about the technology in the comments) showing steps of the process.
The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.
The two artist/producers are selling reproductions for $100 each, with the proceeds going to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. (A good cause!)
From Techmeme via Twitter: Google is rolling out (ie, not everyone can get it immediately) Google Gears, which is a first-step in offline use:
You’ll know you have the feature when you see a little “offline” menu item in the upper right of your document window in Google Docs… The feature’s first-use case is, “I’m amending a document and I lose my Internet connection,” Norton said. Document creation capability will come eventually… Google Gears runs on Firefox 1.6 and above (but not beta 3) on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It also supports Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher on Windows. There is no support for Safari, Flock, Opera, Maxthon, or mobile browsers.
Of course, this will mean versioning issues for documents created collaboratively if people are working offline. (Like on an airplane, perhaps.) More later. I’m not one of the first chosen few. 
Update: doh! I hadn’t installed the extension yet.
Poynter’s Paul Bradshaw reports that the UK Government has set up a Twitter account and is using Twitter like a wire service with Twitterfeed. From NowPublic last summer, Here’s How Reporters Use Twitter.
cNet highlights four Web 2.0 business collaboration tools: Blist online database (Seattle-base — check it out!), Cozimo for image and video collaborative annotation, LiquidPlanner for project management (my students recently used WetPaint, another local startup, for a small project) and SlideShare (I required my undergraduate students to use SlideShare winter quarter).
Of these four, I use SlideShare the most — it’s a great tool for browsing, either for inspiration in presentation design or for ideas. I’m part of a few WetPaint communities but I don’t seem to be a wiki junkie. I’m looking forward to testing Blist’s collaboration feature with a crowd-sourcing project. I’ll probably never use Liquid Planner and don’t see a current need for Cozimo, although I find it the more intriguing of the two.
For less than $10 a week for a year, you can help jump start the One Laptop Per Child Project during a “sponsor one, get one” promotion. From 12-26 November, donate an XO laptop to a child in a developing nation (specifically, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti or Rwanda) and receive one in recognition of your $400 contribution. (tip)
Read a (reportedly unedited) review by a 12-year-old.
This project is the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. (TedTalks) The organization has incredibly low overhead: “One Laptop Per Child is able to allocate 95 cents of each dollar raised to acquire and distribute laptop computers for children in need.” And the cost is low because the computer uses open source software. Read the rest of this entry »
Ready to add Flash to your web-based word processor? If so, sign up for Buzzword, <http://preview.getbuzzword.com> launched by Virtual Ubiquity.
Interface is very different from GoogleDocs. I saved the “welcome” document to my hard drive as an RTF — the result is a bit ugly in Word (Mac, Office 2004). I was not able to save a second time: clicking on “Document” caused the drop-down menu to “go up” and “under” my tabs on Firefox. More indepth review later. (Tip)
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My take on today’s announcement from Google about the Open Handset Alliance: standards are good because they accelerate adoption:
[Android] includes an operating system, user-interface and applications — all of the software to run a mobile phone, but without the proprietary obstacles that have hindered mobile innovation.
After Apple introduced the iPhone, I heard a lot of developers say “it changed everything.” What does that mean today?
SlideShare is featuring a presentation on experience design from Peter Merholz from AdaptivePath. Good points about the importance of simplicity. (And how hard that is to achieve.) Good branding for his firm, too. [Hint: watch fullscreen. If anyone can tell me how to hear the sound, I'm all ears (no pun intended!).]
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