While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.
On December 1st, 2010, Hollywood dies a digital death. The world’s top celebrity tweeters are sacrificing their digital lives to give real life to millions of people affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa and India. This was their full last tweet and testaments before fans could buy their digital lives back at buylife.org
An overview of the five new dynamic views in Blogger that you’ll soon be able to customize and use for your blog. These new views use the latest in web technology, including AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3, to deliver a host of benefits to you and your readers.
To that end, Google has launched five views that harness the power of new web standards:
Flipcard: This visual view places square photos side-by-side in neat little rows. Hovering over any photo reveals the name of the post, the date it was published and the number of comments it has. Flipcard has the unique option of reorganizing posts based on recency, date, label or author.
Mosaic: Mosaic takes the photos related to each blog post and turns them into a visual experience — a mosaic of photography. Hovering over any photo with the mouse increases the size of the image and displays the title of the post in question. Clicking it will open the post as part of the mosaic.
Snapshot: Snapshot turns blog photos into a Polaroid-esque scrapbook with the number of comments and the title of the blog post clearly visible. Hovering over a Polaroid displays a short snippet from the post.
Sidebar: Similar in some ways to Gawker‘s redesign, Sidebar creates a left-hand menu bar with all of a blog’s articles as well as their comment counts. Clicking on a title opens the article to the right.
Timeslide: This is a three-column layout that displays recent posts. The left column shows photos and short snippets from a blog’s most recent articles, while the middle column displays only summaries of less recent posts. The right-hand column is simply a list of titles of older articles. Timeslide essentially encompasses three different time periods and makes them accessible.
Classroom Superheroes allows you to nominate the teachers you love for recognition; having been raised by teachers, I have a keen appreciation for how much overtime and personal money teachers pour into their classrooms, but with the current climate of cutbacks, teachers are being asked to do even more, for more kids, with less.
Classroom Superheroes website
The new Twitter.com is coming soon to all users! Twitter is the best way to discover what’s new in your world. From football to film to philanthropy, people are using Twitter to discover what’s new about what they find interesting. Twitter has always been about getting a lot in a little. The constraint of 140 characters drives conciseness and lets you quickly discover and share what’s happening. Yet, we’ve learned something since starting Twitter—life doesn’t always fit into 140 characters or less. Introducing a new, re-engineered Twitter.com that provides an easier, faster, and richer experience. On the site, you’ll see the familiar timeline, yet underneath each Tweet is a handful of information, deeper context and even embedded media. Simply click on an individual Tweet and a details pane slides out on the right and reveals this content.
Find out more at twitter.com
WordPress is one of the most popular content management and blog publishing applications available on the web today. First released in 2003 by developer Matt Mullenweg as a basic blog engine, WordPress is now a full-featured, fully customizable website creation tool used by millions of individuals, businesses and organizations around the world. WordPress is most popular for its packaged application, which can be downloaded for free at WordPress.org and installed anywhere as the basis, platform, and structure for an entire website. It also offers free blog services online at WordPress.com. Because it is open source—meaning simply that all of its code and files are free to use, customize, and enhance—WordPress technology has been harnessed by thousands. From curious individuals to freelance professionals to Fortune 500 companies, people all over the world use WordPress because of its many powerful features. These include a templating system, workflow, search-engine friendly link structures, advanced content categorization, and more …
Chris Abraham walks you through how to join the fastest-growing and most elegant free blogging services, WordPress.com. Go from the simple acts of joining all the way through set up and administration. Become a blogger in few than 45-minutes. Most folks only need the first 15 minutes to get you started.
A four part presentation highlighting the need for educators to consider informed use of technology in their classrooms. Thanks to Dr. P.A Towndrow for ideas. Presentation given in Nagoya in March 2007. Dr. Michael Vallance
A Slovenian start up called Zemanta is “feeling lucky” after winning international investment for its innovative technology.
Founded in 2007 by two former journalists, Zemanta was one of the winners of a competition staged by Seedcamp, a UK based technology incubator that set out find the ‘Google of Europe’ in its inaugural competition in 2007. Zemanta has since received $1.5 million in funding from the UK investment funds Eden Ventures and the Accelerator Group. Reuters European Technology Correspondent Matt Cowan travelled to Ljubljana to meet the founders and find out how they are targeting the Silicon Valley with a technology that brings Google logic to content creation.
http://www.reuters.com/resources/flash/include_video.swf?edition=US&videoId=82799 http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=7074476&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1
Zemanta is a tool that looks over your shoulder while you blog and gives you tips and advice, suggests related content and pictures and makes sure your posts get promoted as they deserve to be. We at Zemanta are thinking hard to help make blogging easier for you. We’re engineering better creative tools to help you get the most out of your blogging time.
There are 6 main steps that cause bloggers most headaches. Here you’ll see why blogging with Zemanta is pure fun. Blogging made easy: 1. Link, Embed, Remix like a Pro 2. Easily Design the Post 3. Zemanta takes care of Copyright. It Links You All Over: 1. Engage you audience longer 2. Link your old posts to keep visitors on site 3. Get visitors from other sites
Learn more: Zemanta.com
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