RFID and the Internet of Things RFID is a term you’re going to start hearing a lot more about, if you aren’t already familiar with it. What is RFID? Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is an automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders. The technology requires some [...]
Wikipedia content is now available through BitTorrent – Wikipedia school edition is an offline DVD version of Wikipedia by SOS Children’s Villages (a charity for orphans) filled with “checked content” from the user-edited online encyclopedia. The 2.9GB download is available only via BitTorrent, and to top it off, here’s a quote you don’t hear every [...]
Most hard-core web users have either seen or used sites like Digg and Reddit at one time or another. These popular news aggregation services use the vote-to-promote model to push interesting user submitted links to the front of their pages. Users then vote on these submissions and the links with the most votes float to [...]
Recently I was reminded of an article by activist and author George Monbiot from a year ago. He argued that “green consumerism” is pointless when trying to affect environmental and social change but that political participation is the most effective course of action. If [green consumerism] merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less [...]
Yahoo Pipes Pipes is a web service that allows users to easily build web-based applications from aggregated web feeds, web pages and other sources of content. The drag-and-drop user interface makes it dead simple to quickly create useful applications from various data sources. Some examples below: Content Keyword RSS This pipe will search news sources [...]
TheCommon.org The Common is a sort of match-making site for non-profits and socially minded organizations needing help and looking to help others. Once you sign up, you can either join a “Community” or add your own. By community, they mean non-profits, churches and activist groups. From there you are supposed to invite people you know [...]
Flickr Video This week, Flickr introduced the ability to upload video to their website. The point isn’t to compete with YouTube but to allow users to upload short clips taken with a digital camera or cell phone. The limit for each file is 90 seconds in length and up to 10 megs. Is this useful? [...]
You’re doing it wrong Twitter is extremely useful beyond the “I had a ham sandwich for lunch” or the “I’m watching Sanford & Son” tweets. There’s a lot you can do with 140 characters of text. Lifehack.org has a few suggestions. Quick Human Answers – Ask folks on your friend’s list which digital camera to [...]
1,000 True Fans Theory Peer-to-peer networks, bittorrent, email and other forms of file sharing have many asking how an artist can make any money when the content they’ve created can be so easily pirated? The RIAA is trying to address this issue by the suing the bejesus out of college kids and grandparents for using [...]
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