Technology
Entries related to technology.
Upcoming Events in Second Life
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/03/2007 - 13:46More and more, I’m getting invited to events in Second Life, and I thought I would highlight a few of them here. This afternoon, at 5 PM Eastern, Social Signal is opening their practice in Second Life at the TechSoup Space on Info Island. Friends have spoken highly to me about Social Signal, and so while the event sounds a little like the opening of a consulting firm, it seems like it is work checking out.
Then, tomorrow, at noon eastern time, Second Life Capital Hill will usher in the 110th congress. I hope to attend and perhaps blog and/or videoblog some of the event.
Later in the day, RootsCampSL will have their weekly meeting in SecondLife. I look forward to seeing several old friends there and talking about what progressives can do in SecondLife.
Exploring Second Life
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/23/2006 - 02:09I really don’t have time or energy for my first life right now, but several different groups I’m part of are talking to me about Second Life, so I thought I should put up a quick post about what I’ve been up to there and what I’ve been finding.
Friends of mine who are videobloggers, non-profit technologists, and political activists have all been talking with me separately about Second Life. To me, these three groups have some interesting potential overlaps and I would love to see them connect a little better.
A videoblogger had recently posted on BlogHUD. BlogHud is a blogging system for Second Life. You can send a message from Second Life and it will show up on BlogHUDs page. They have nice feature to find who blogged what, and from where they blogged it.
For example, check out my recent posts from SecondLife as well as posts from Commonwealth Island.
Ideally, all of my friends should probably use this to publicize places and events in Second Life.
From there, I stumbled across Snapzilla. Snapzilla, aka SLPics can be found at http://www.sluniverse.com/pics. It is sort of like the Flickr of Second Life. It is even supposed to support cross posting to Flickr, but that hasn't worked for me yet. Bloghud includes pictures from Snapzilla, and you can associate them with your profile there.
As I was learning my way around Snapzilla, I also came across SLProfiles. If Snapzilla is the Flickr of Second Life, SLProfiles is the MySpace of SecondLife. I haven't really started putting up much of a profile there yet. Like MySpace, I’ve been contacted by people I don’t know very well asking me to add them as friends. Ideally, I would love to see all of my videoblogging, non-profit tech, political activist friends add me on SLProfiles. The we could do some really interesting Second Life based online social networks. My profile is at http://www.slprofiles.com/slprofiles.asp?id=5450.
SLProfiles also has a blogging tool, very similar to bloghud. I’ve posted one quick note there.
When I get more time, I’ll explore more and think about how we can really use some of this for positive change.
Event Central
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/05/2006 - 12:26Yesterday, I learned that a volunteer had set up an event on DFA Link for the Lamont Campaign. Already, 46 people have signed up for the event. It is a great idea and I’m very glad the event will happen. However, as the technologist for the Lamont campaign, I wish that it had been set up on Lamont website. As a person who has recently started playing with Facebook, I thought, maybe it would be good to set up the event there as well. How about on the Democrat Party’s PartyBuilder, or on more general calendars like Google Calendar or Yahoo!’s Upcoming.org?
The plethora of options reflect, what I think is a need as more people put more events online, some set of Events Central tools. One tool that would be really nice would be something like is something like Pingoat. With Pingoat, you can ping a large number of blog tracking services to let them know that your blog has been updated. There is a checklist of sites that can be pinged. It would be great if a similar tool could be built for setting events. Fill out the necessary information, check which sites should get a listing of the event, and off you go. For that matter, if I were a major campaign vendor, I would consider adding options to my event system so when I add an event to the system, I could also add it to public systems like Upcoming, Facebook, or Google Calendars.
Another thing that would be nice would be better sharing of events between systems. Some events systems, like Blue State Digital’s which powers the Lamont campaign and the Democratic Party, and Upcoming.org, allow you to subscribe to events as RSS feeds. Other’s like Google and Drupal support iCal. Some allow export, some allow import, some allow both. Currently, I’m subscribing to several different calendar feeds via Bloglines. It would be great to see more systems support both iCal and RSS both for incoming and outgoing.
These are the easy parts. Where it gets more complicated is how you deal with RSVPs. Besides trying to get people to events, campaigns use event tools to build mailing lists. As noted above, the people who signed up the DFALink event are added to DFA’s mailing list, but not to the Lamont mailing list. It would be great if a secure and authenticated protocol could be established so that if a person signs up for a DFALink event, they could optionally let their information be shared with other events RSVP (and mailing lists systems). This of course is a Holy Grail that I doubt we’ll see anytime soon, but some of the other tools could easily be built.
Anything else interesting going on?
Gadgets
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 10/01/2006 - 10:26Recently on the Media Giraffe Forum there has been a lively discussion about Sony finally releasing its eBook reader, the Sony PRS 500. It will cost $350 and will start shipping in November.
Generally speaking, most people on the list seemed pretty unimpressed. The feeling was that the device hasn’t found its niche. The thread evolved into a very interesting discussion about reading habits, the way people use different media, and the implications for journalism.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the different topics, and hope to have a few different takes on this over the coming days. Right now, I want to contrast the eBook to a few other gadgets out on the market or soon to be on the market.
First, it is worth noting that Sony put information about their eBook in the “MP3 and Portable Electronics” category. In the specifications, they say that it supports the MP3 audio format.
This made me think of another MP3 player that also supposed to start shipping in November, the much heralded Microsoft Zune The Zune will cost $250, and unlike the PRS 500 reader, will support color and have WiFi as well as an FM transmitter. It will be a much more collaborative device.
Robin Miller posted about the Nokia 770. It is currently shipping and costs $360. They list it with their phones, although they call it a ‘Internet Tablet’ and the only telephony you can do with it seems to be using the “Voice over the Internet Protocol (VoIP)”. It has Wifi and Bluetooth. When you are not near a WiFi hotspot, they suggest using 3G services on a phone connected with Bluetooth.
What is particularly interesting about the Nokia 770 is that it runs Linux. As such, it has the potential for a vibrant community to develop new types of tools changing the way people can connect.
Later, I hope to write a little bit more about what some of these new connectivity tools could look like.
Fighting poverty one click at a time
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/25/2006 - 08:19(Cross posted on the OAC Blog)
Today, I received an email about GoodSearch. It is a search engine that contributes a penny to a charity of your choice every time you use them for a websearch.
After checking around a little bit, I’ve set my charity of choice to One.Org. (Not to be confused with One America Committee). So, every time I do a search, a penny will go to One.Org, The Campaign to Make Poverty History.
I use Firefox as my web browser, and so I’ve set the little search box in the upper right hand corner, which I use all the time, to default to GoodSearch. I use that search box a lot, so I suspect that my searches are going to add up. I’ve also just set up my wife’s computer to use GoodSearch and contribute to Habitat for Humanity.
Are you using GoodSearch? Which charity are you contributing to?
