Find, Collect, Share - LLARC Presents 2006

This is my presentation for LLARC Presents, Fall '06. I cover several web-based tools to find, collect, and share information on the web. I discuss del.icio.us, diigo, podshow, Google Earth, Google Notebook, and the Firefox plugins "Alexa Sidebar Again" and Shazou.

This is available at Ourmedia under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Technorati Tags: technology, language, web20

Video conferencing via iChat is awesome

I think this must be one of the cutest cat pictures I have - my sister's cat, Mr. Binks, sleeping. She put her computer on her bed in Michigan, and I took this picture in Boston. Most of my immediate family is available via iChat now. Two grandmothers, two sisters away in college and grad school, and my parents at home in Massachusetts. Even my soon-to-be mother-in-law now has a camera and a mac, and of course, my fiancé has one too. We can do four-way video chatting at the drop of a hat. That is truly awesome. I never realized before how limiting the phone can be. When I have the ability to "show" something, rather than to try and explain it or describe it, it becomes much easier to communicate. I have also found that video conferences seem to be much more memorable for me than phone conversations. It seems like you've really visited with a person, rather than just spoken to them. And, to think, it's practically free to talk this way. Sure, there is a steep adoption curve to overcome, but my family is already there. How cool is that? I'm looking forward to the new iChat features that will be available in Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard), but until then, I'm very pleased with what I can already do.