Stuff

Pico, a clean and simple theme (also available on TypePad and designed by Jim Ramsey) is now bundled with MT5.

Win a trip to SXSW Interactive!

Are you a filmmaker? A citizen journalist? A video remixer? Or a citizen of the web with a camera and something to say?

To enter, just make a video spot explaining open video in 60 seconds or less. Then upload it anywhere and tell us the URL.

you have 60 seconds ... go!

On Monday, Evernote, a start-up based in Mountain View, Calif., announced that it had raised $10 million from Morgenthaler Ventures and previous investors, from whom it had already raised $6.5 million. It plans to use the money to expand to more platforms and move beyond the United States and Russia to Europe and Japan, said Phil Libin, Evernote's chief executive. Since the product was introduced in June 2008, it has amassed 2 million users. Mr. Libin pegs the market at "the few billion people in the world who aren't satisfied with their natural brains and need to remember more."

Here are the latest tools and services we've come to love, maybe you'd like to give them a try too.

Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person's trash is transformed into another's treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.

Each day, students in the School of One are given a unique lesson plan -- a "daily playlist" -- tailored to their learning style and rate of progress that includes a mix of virtual tutoring, in-class instruction and educational video games. It's learning for the Xbox generation.

They are also using Open Innovation practices to extend the project by awarding a cash prize called the Fun Theory Award to people who submit similar ideas to the one illustrated below...

Facebook is getting old. No, people aren't getting tired of it, it's actually getting old, as in its population is aging. In May of 2008, the median age for Facebook was 26. Today, it's 33, a good seven years older. That's an interesting turn of events for a site once built for the exclusive use of college students. So where are today's college students hanging out now? Well, to some extent, they're still on Facebook, despite having to share the space with moms, dads, grandparents, and bosses. Surprisingly though, they're also headed to another network you may have heard of: Twitter.

Google is open sourcing a collection of Javascript tools today that will enable developers to build faster, more powerful and more efficient web applications using some of the same code that runs Gmail, Google Maps and Docs.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/layar_tells_cnn_augmented_reality_will_be_second_o.php

What do you think? Is Augmented Reality the next step for the internet? Displaying data about the world, on top of our view of the world, certainly seems compelling. Could mobile AR overtake traditional mobile browsing, photography, etc. and be second only to voice as the way people use their phones?

I haven't personally gotten to play with any of this yet, but it has huge potential in so many contexts. I've seen dozens of apps at the App Store, but how could we work to imagine this for education?

Google just opened the Google Wave developer sandbox for federation. Developers can now begin prototyping tools against WaveSandbox.com. Google tested earlier versions of Wave with a small number of developers on the Wave sandbox and this server will now become the platform for testing interoperability between different Wave servers. Google also released a how-to document that explains how to set up a Java-based Wave server over the weekend.

Google Wave is a web-based application that represents a rethinking of electronic communication. Users create online spaces called "waves," which include multiple discrete messages and components that constitute a running, conversational document. Users access waves through the web, resulting in a model of communication in which rather than sending separate copies of multiple messages to different people, the content resides in a single space. Wave offers a compelling platform for personal learning environments because it provides a single location for collecting information from diverse sources while accommodating a variety of formats, and it makes interactive coursework a possibility for nontechnical students. Wave challenges us to reevaluate how communication is done, stored, and shared between two or more people.

Sony will be working hand in hand with Netflix in order to make available thousands upon thousands of movies and TV episodes from Netflix to be streamed straight onto TVs as long as your living room (or wherever else that you're most comfortable with to be entertained) has some room for a PS3 console. This streaming service from Netflix will be made available to the PS3 from November onwards for free, but bear in mind this is limited to just folks living in the US as other people outside of the country will have to settle for what they have currently.

We're still not entirely certain what Google Wave is for -- or even if humans are capable of comprehending it -- but we do know that we're super-intrigued by the idea of third-party extensions that hook into the fledging messaging platform, and it sounds like the folks in Mountain View are as well. Google's planning to launch both an extension gallery and extension store in the coming months, which would allow users to easily find, buy, and share apps for Wave. It's not clear how the sharing will work, or how much Google expects extensions to cost, but it's certainly an interesting way to capitalize on Wave's flexibility.

With no fanfare or as much as an official announcement, Google has taken an important step in making users' Google Docs more open and portable. As of today, several bloggers have reported seeing this new feature, which allows users to grab all their Google Docs and batch export them as a zip file. Files can be exported in a number of formats, including Microsoft Office and Open Office formats. Users can also choose to export only certain types of docs, e.g., spreadsheets and slide decks only.

Google is always experimenting with new features aimed at improving the search experience. Take one for a spin and let us know what you think.

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.