Organise your readings
Totally thrilled by Bloglines at the moment. Apart from being multi-lingual and doing blog searches, it also lets you have a free blog (no ads!). But the subscription service is a real time-saver. Customize all your favourite reading sites and have them beamed over as RSS to your blog or a special email.To be able to make clippings from the feeds is a great idea.The service is for free searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds and blogs.

Virtual Earth tool
Tagzania is about tagging the planet. You can create and document your spot or any interesting bits of the planet via tagged Google maps. This folksonomy via collaboratively shared space-time is worth a watch. Germany and Berlin seem to feature very strongly. Australia is, as so often off the map. Their blog gives you more info. Great tool for landscape mapping too.

Tufts University is offering free online courses. Modeled after MIT's OpenCourseWare initiative the OpenCourseWare (OCW) provides formal education in various subjects.There is no registration necessary and no awards issued. The vision is to share knowledge amongst self-directed learners. There are some six courses online so far.The microbiology of infectious diseases, pathophysiology or emerging infections and agents of biological warfare and histology are just a few.

via
wired campus blog

Grokker is a cool tool to search for various contexts.There is a community blog and an educational version can be downloaded .

You can start with the intro tour or just discover the many surprises it comes up with when grokking your URL. It visualises and displays nodes and networks you might not know about...

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society is exploring cyberspace. Some of its philosophical convictions are:

Technology can transform education.
The collective wisdom of academics is valuable.
Access to education should be easy.
Credit should be given where credit is due.
The best software is developed by its own community.

To facilitate these visions they provide the social software H2O. The collaborative, mostly academic playlists "...represent a new way of thinking about education online. An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event."

These playlists facilitate the following:

Transform traditional syllabi into interactive, global learning tools
Share the reading lists of world-renowned scholars, organizations, and cultural leaders
Let interested people subscribe to playlist updates and stay current on their fields
Promote an exchange of ideas and expertise among professors, students, and researchers
Communicate and aggregate knowledge -- online and offline.

You can browse/search these tags/playlists for the most influential, recent or the most viewed or create your own and join in.

Susannah Gardner compares various blogging software in her article. The article features a matrix which compares the functionalities of various major blog software.

Some vlogs present daily news programmes, such as Rocketboom or this Swiss version.

Mainstream Media (MSM) executives consider the 'attack on London' "a "tipping point", a democratisation of the news process, the true birth of the "citizen reporter". The public (is) assuming control of the newsgathering process to a hitherto unimagined degree." This "new world" in a "gear change" provided the MSM with a cost effective "deluge" of first hand rich media." News crews usually get there just after the event, but these pictures show us the event as it happens." A BBC broadcaster summed it up as "…this is a media turning point'. It was revolutionary."  As an owner of such user-generated content one has to make decisions in such situations that could occur anywhere & anytime. Help, shoot and then share with which channels: The Home office, the MSM, or the collaborative Wikipedia. Questions of appropriateness, effectivity and efficiency arise. But the questions of trust and allegiance are not insignificant.

In a recent article (German) by Mario Sixtus he enthusiastically proclaims 'that while global capitalism is raging on the outside, fear of displacement and unemployment are rampant, the growth of new spaces and spheres is emerging  where identity, trust and cooperation rule.' "Open source yourself", promote yourself via portfolio building, reveal yourself and link in to a community of practice on the web. Together trust, confidence and transparency will this way be established in a dog-eat-dog world.

There are many examples of bloggers loosing their paid work, here are some more from the space 'out there':

The content of your blogs can be used against you while applying for an academic job for example. As an anonymous American humanities professor stated in the Chronicle of Higher Education: 'Bloggers need not apply'. Job applicants had their blog contents compared with their stated interview presentations. Their claimed academic interests were contradicted by their blog content. The department also seemed very concerned to have their workplace blogged on the 'cyber clothesline'.

Another case is a German professor of psychology and pedagogy which has published jokes on his private website. The student representative body claimed that the humour was 'sexist, racist and antisemitic.' The director of the university is now considering whether the academic is fit for the teaching position.

There are fantastic emergences happening on the web, connecting and aggregating people with purposes, but the world out there seems to utilise the new potentialities to further rationalise its ways. Virtually opening up, connecting and creating true transparency seems to be incompatible with the 'business as usual' way. The same rules of inclusion and exclusion apply in both spheres.

Blinkx searches videos, podcasts, tv and web pages. It currently has a special on searching videos of the London explosions.

A free download of 6 MB gets you a lot of features. Try out searching for a podcast or a blog/web site...

"Non Lethal Weapons" (NLW) which do not kill the enemy, but render them inactive are classified as techniques of political control. Citizens, prisoners and riots in general are the target group of police or military utilising "weapons of mass protection" which are not bound by international regulations. The definition of non lethal means that no more than a quarter of the effected people die. Opponents of the use of these means wish to call them therefore "Less Lethal Weapons" (LLW). A mobile multi-media exhibition in Europe has produced books, a theatre play and an exhibition on the topic how LLWs are employed for the pupose of political control.

European theatre-makers, artists, architects, engineers and scientists developed an urban mobile theatre platform called TROIA. "The whole purpose of TROIA (English) is to focus public awareness and discussion on the technologies of political control within the context of a fast developing Europe." Olaf Arndt describes the problem in an excerpt from his book (PDF): "Domestic security has created a science-fiction reality with the aid of electricity, sound waves, gas and foam. It paints a picture of civil conflict which, despite a 30 year old tradition in the use of hi-tech weaponry such as pepper gas, computer searches,computer intelligence networks, police round-ups, is still seen by most as some fantastic script for a Hollywood film and bearing no relation to reality."

Inspired by this German article in Telepolis
TROIA English
TROIA German

The bomb attacks in London that caused the death of 38 people, are now covered by a very comprehensive wiki. While the mobile phone network was out after the attack many bloggers aggregated their experiences of the site and from the chaos of the city. Technorati features many blog reports, the BBC is also pointing to reports via blogs.

EDUCAUSE is offering 'Educating the Net Generation', edited by Diana G. Oblinger and James L. Oblinger, 2005 as a book. The whole or parts can be downloaded as HTML or Pdf formats. "This collection explores the Net Gen and the implications for institutions in areas such as teaching, service, learning space design, faculty development, and curriculum."

George Siemens' 'Connectivism:A Learning Theory for the Digital Age' advances a contemporary theory of learning with new media in networks of ever shifting knowledge-grounds. " Connectivism presents a model of learning that acknowledges the tectonic shifts in society where learning is no longer an internal, individualistic activity."

John Seely Brown also problematised 'Growing up digital'. He investigated work environments and learning environments and concludes a rethink and redesign of education for the 21 century.

GoLexa.com is a search engine with a "Site Analyzing Control Panel" for each result. Type in your blog URL and it aggregates a row of web tools to quantify your traffic, ranking, stats, links, keywords used, site speed and much more. Worth a click through...

Dogpile claims to be 'the best searchengines piled into one'. Try the 'missing pieces tool', enter your URL and fetch...

The realisation just hit me, that we are living in a 'glassdome', pulverising most substances and matter in our productivity, but our respiratory organ has not evolved to handle the 'fallout'. Hence we choke to death on our own anti-products.

The evolution of the thin protective layer around the globe started around 3.5 billion years ago. 3.3 billion years ago cyanobacteria generously pumped out oxygen into the atmosphere. Plants evolved and produced more oxygen for air breathing life forms. The thin layer of the troposphere enabled a multiplicity of life-forms to evolve.

The mammalian lung interfacing the troposphere, also known as breathing, is built to take up air, not particles.

The virulent productivity of  sprawling human beings has as an anti-product: the pulverisation of the Earth's matter and substances. This pollution is so harmful, because particulate matter
and gases (the dust/anti-product) contaminate the air. Very small particles, or aerosols get trapped in the cavities of our respiratory system. Some nanoparticles, many very toxic actually make it into the blood. We actually are the living vacuum cleaners of our 'dust'.

Combustion, the burning of fossil fuel in cars and power plants, dust from sprawling construction sites and from deforested areas are the major sources. Diesel is a specific health hazard. To wade through this 'thick soup' leads to asthma, lung cancer and premature death. 200,000 deaths per year are attributed to this form of 'air' in Europe.

Often the public discourse wishes to focus on this pollen or that house mite as a cause, but rarely questions the underlying causal chain of intentional and unintentional human activity on this planet.

That we are using up the evolved thin layer that we depend on is probably clear to everyone.

more:

Visualising hypothetical worlds
Giornale Nuovo displays unusual images from hypothetical lands.The IT consultant living in Sweden, devotes some pages promoting graphic art, especially that of Luigi Serafini.  Weird and wonderful images of a topography of the mind.

Illustrations of the evolution of life
The illustrations of the biologist and illustrator Ernst Haeckel are being offerd by Kurt Stübers' site. The brilliant images, depicting the evolution of life can be downloaded there, viewed or the updated book (Kunstformen der Natur/Art forms of nature) can be purchased.

War Casualties
Casualty maps lets you view the progression of US military casualties from the Iraq war. Strange feeling, that with each click 30 more casualties are displayed. Good Google map hack.