Go Bears...
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A Graphical Look at the Last Month in Iraq
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Picnik: Web Based Photo Editing...
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Picnik is an impressive web based photo editing tool. It has many of the features of stand alone photo editors but allows you to access and manipulate images on the web. For example you can integrate it with your Flickr photos, great for editing those under exposed camera phone shots. The Flickr integration gives you the opportunity to replace the original photo with your edit, or add it as a new image. You can also grab images from stand alone sites such as a Gallery install. For example at Lewis Elementary we are starting to use Gallery to post images that student can share and use in their projects. This could be a great way for them to get to them and adjust and manipulate them. I was very impressed with how fast and responsive it feels with resizing and adjusting exposure.
Via Jim Gates and also Solution Watch...
Google's Moon Shot
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This week, The New Yorker has an article entitled Google's Moon Shot and it details Google's plan to scan and digitize several university libraries and also to made searchable all published books. The article describes some of the challenges and objections by publishers and authors. One interesting aspect is that several of those publishers that are partners with Google in the Book Search project, are also at the same time suing Google to stop the project.
Google's Gapminder Tool
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Last June, Alan Levine pointed me to the talk by Hans Rosling at TED. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit group that looks at global data through visualization. In his talk he demonstrates how looking at data over time can help us challenge our assumptions and biases about conditions in the developing world. It looks as if Google has been working with him to develop an interactive web tool that takes the Gapminder data and allows you to manipulate and compare the the data in a web browser. For example you can compare life expectancy and annual income and plot the results. I created a quick video which demonstrates the timeline feature, also have a link to the Rosling talk.
I wish I had a tool like this to look at student data...
by way of Paul English...
Technorati Tags: Hans Rosling, TED
Shaded Relief Map Mashup
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Noel Jenkins of Digital Geography points to a great teaching resource created by Jon Parker. Jon has created a Google Maps mashup that overlays a relief map on top of Google Maps. His site, shaded-relief.com provides a number of options for moving from one view to another.
Google Book Search Adds Maps
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Google Book Search has added a new feature creating maps of places mentioned in the book being searched. For example the book, The Journals of Lewis and Clark, when searched on Google Book Search returns a map with push pins to denote places mentioned in the journals. The information behind the pushpin includes a snippet of text and a link to the pages where the place is mentioned.
By way of Inside Google Book Search...
Technorati Tags: books, Google Book Search, maps, search
4 Generations: How to Save a Life...
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Jason Kottke has a post about a water buffalo, a poor family in China, and people who want to help. A story about symbolic giving that turns into a real gift. Robert Thompson picks up the story, acts on it, and creates for me the best video I have ever seen on the web. A glimpse of what we call the read/write web can be. Watch this video by Robert Thompson, and see what I mean...
Technorati Tags: Robert Thompson
First Life...
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First Life is a 3D Analog World Where Server Lag Does Not Exist...
Access your closet to build your First Life look...
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In the 1972 movie, Play It Again Sam, Tony Roberts plays a business man who is constantly calling into his answering service (this is 1972 folks, long, long before mobile phones and such...) and reporting his whereabouts and leaving numbers where he can be reached. It is a running gag in the movie and is really pretty funny. Twitter is the web 2.0 answer to this.
"Twitter is a community based website where users post what they are doing at any given moment. Tell friends, colleagues or strangers what you are snacking on, your current interests, favorite websites or just plain goofy nonsense!"
You can update your Twitter information via a web page, a mobile phone, an instant messenger client and if you are running Mac OS X, you can update via Twitterrific, an application that lets you both read and publish posts or "tweets" to the Twitter community website.
Think of this as taking your instant messenger status (Away, busy, etc...) notice to extremes. :-) While I can't see doing this all the time, I can see where at conferences and such it might be fun to play around with. You can choose to make your updates public or private. I've added the Twitter widget to my sidebar so you can see an example of how this might work.
Technorati Tags: twitter, twitterrific