Sarah

Recent attacks at Mumbai have splurged talk of information-age aided citizen journalism this week on NPR’ s “On The Media”. Citizen’s used Twitter and Flickr to report breaking news as the events unfolded, and for some was their only source of information. Very organized restraint and professional journalistic conduct came out of the mass twittering, as the mainstream news channels in India aired what some are accusing as ‘too much sensitive information’ that may have aided the terrorists. I am exited to see ‘new media’ and a simple twitter feed aiding and taking a role with ‘mainstream media’, especially after I just read an article yesterday that discredited Twitter as a declining fad.

I revisited Citizendium today, Wikipedia’s offshoot project that aims to create an online encyclopedia , “gently guided by experts”.  While it is still in beta, it is growing quickly, over 8,000 articles now. On their blog I found this Garrison Keillor poem from Thanksgiving, that mentions Larry Sanger, (creator of Citizendium, co-founder of Wikipedia), Fairbanks, blogs, google and most importantly Mac and Cheese…

Relating to the CS4 preview. These guys made a real life Photoshop creative suite.

I have added the ‘Hyperwords‘ extension to firefox and it has made browsing the web and information finding even easier. You can click on any text in on web page, and find information out instantly wiithout searching in google or opening up a new tab, Say I click on the word “Alaska”, the pop-up menu brings it up instantly in wikipedia, google, a dictionary, a map, photos in flickr. You can also translate in page into a variety of different languages and currencies.

You can highlight a word on the page and it will highlight every other instance of the word.

In the settings, you can add your own commands. you can enter in your delicious and wordpress accounts and set up to send urls instanly to a specific email.

One command I found especially efficient, but is not set by default, is the ‘Auto content’. You click on the far left of any page and it indexes the content for you, and acts as achor links.

Lots of other features, too, and customizable.

As I was researching resources for Style Guide materials (and creating new tongue twisters), I found this site relevant to styles on the web: http://webtypography.net It is a decent complimentary tool for the Elements of Typographic style by Bringhurst.

We all see sites daily be the victim of bad readability and flow. Or are we the victim?

My wondered back in the day when I acknowledged CSS as something I should be keeping up on.

I still like to visit CSS Zen Garden every so often to see whats new and check out the code.

The band Hot Tuna recently came to town. Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen (former Jeffeson Airplane guitarist) runs a guitar camp and concert venue called Fur Peace Ranch, 20 minutes from my college town in Pomeroy, Ohio. I remember friends of mine going to the camp and getting lessons from accomplished musicians like G.E. Smith (former Saturday Night Live Band). Public/College radio station WOUB in Athens aired live concerts from Fur Peace Ranch when I worked their. I revisited the Fur Peace Web site and found a link to an online interactive music lesson site they are hosting, Break Down Way. There are a few sample lessons you can check out there. The lessons are all pre-recorded. There are forums and email blog posts there also. The instructors are all accomplished musicians who have played in a variety of known bands. Barry Mitterhoff on mandolin…awesome!

Anyway, as someone who takes and gives music lessons, it got my wheels turning thinking about the possibilities for CDE to offer music courses like this.

I am very exited to finally catch up on the newer social networking technologies I have been neglecting…Thanks to everyone for your help, and also thank you in advance for your help, as i will be asking questions for awhile. Meanwhile, I watched a brilliant interview on Charlie Rose last week with Paola Antonelli about the “Design and The Elastic Mind” Exhibition at MoMa in NY that presented some interesting angles on design and technology.