plus nine. neo now.

Please join us at our new address: www.thewavingcat.com

Live video broadcasting & conferencing from your own web page. Sounds absurd? Looks like it ain't anymore: Stickam promises to offer web-based video conferences for up to five users at a time. (Plus some music and video playing feats.)

Differently from other Flash-based tools which allow you to embed rich-media content like photos, audio or video clips onto your web pages with custom widgets that contain one such clip or track, Stickam integrates these abilities into one customizable player which can carry within itself all of your selected music tracks, digital images and video clips that you want to share through your web site...

Stickam is completely free to use and can be used with any type of computer as it is completely web-based.
Stickam's still in beta, and according to Robin Good it also needs to improve on usability, but hey, watch out for this.

What happens when the grid breaks? Communications need to be restored. After Hurricane Katrina hit, BellSouth announced that it would take 3 months to restore phone lines. Volunteers using WiFi gear were able to connect churches and community centers within the first weeks and within three days of setting up an asterisk call server, routed 10,000 phone calls. Reliable backup infrastructure can be brought up in hours or minutes if you are prepared and have a plan in place.

Instructables does have a plan in place.

[via MAKE Blog]

Over the last few days I've been listening to a lot of podcasts while in public transportation, and there's one which I think is quite outstanding:
It's Greg Niemeyer's lecture on cyberculture. (Don't be fooled by the title "Foundations of American Cyberculture"!) The lecture is part of Berkeley's great lecture series webcast.berkeley, and it nicely wraps up the whole range of topics from internet basics to online identity to gender to cyborgs to online culture.

The whole lecture is quite inspiring, and it's great. (And you learn some interesting bits and pieces about traditional rituals in remote Swiss mountain towns as well.)

Please note that this is absolutely fresh and up-to-date: The most recent lecture was given this Monday!

Folk Songs for the Five Points is a digital arts project that allows you to create your own “folk songs” by remixing and overlaying a range of sounds taken from New York’s Lower East Side.

The SoundMap features a visual representation of the Lower East Side, overlaid with a series of dots. Each dot represents an audio sample recorded at that particular place. To select a sample, click and drag one of circles over the chosen dot. The sample will then automatically start playing.

Beautiful: Folk Songs for the Five Points

[gefunden auf dem sofa]

In 1900, the costs of moving away from one's home town were high. You'd see your family and friends only once every year or two. You'd talk on the phone or communicate via telegraph only in an emergency. These costs discouraged enough folks from moving that every town had its intellectuals. (...)

In 2006 (...) you can get the benefits of moving, associating with other smart interesting people, without many of the costs formerly imposed on those who moved away from their home towns. (...)

Where formerly intelligent people were more or less randomly distributed and "lay where they fell", our society is now sorting people by intelligence into smart and dumb towns and regions.

Philip Greenspun about the way smart people (well, all people, actually) aren't confined to staying where they were born, increased mobility, and lower costs of moving away from your birthplace. There's a good point there. After all, this isn't a completely new phenomenon, as it basically started with the industrialization, when people flocked to the cities to get jobs. Where will this end? Smart clusters in the big cities and some nice SmartCommunities on the one hand, and brain-drained regions in the hinterland on the other?

oooph: Berkeley Webcasts. Wow! (No irony.)

[via die romantische komödie]

With iSee, users can find routes that avoid these cameras ("paths of least surveillance") allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being "caught on tape" by unregulated security monitors.

Institute for Applied Autonomy's iSee.

The US National Archives and Google take on online videos. That is, historic videos. They just started their (very cool) project with

• historic NASA videos (such as the first moon landing)
• old United Newsreels (US Government-funded propaganda, pardon: "newsreels for overseas viewers"), like "Everybody Joins U.S. War Effort", where celebrities show their support
• and Behind These Scenes, a look behind the scenes of the Interior Department itself.

Definitively amusing, maybe even educating, and pretty surely worth it.

Ever wondered how to keep all your folders organized? Well, nowadays, there's Google Desktop Search and all that. But a system that also looks cool? Ok, ok, gadget-o-mania. But here you go:

Think of Tactile as a 3D file explorer with the ability to organize in a 3D space by exploiting useful visual and audible cues...

Many features of modern 2D desktops remind us that there isn't enough room to organize large numbers of files....

The Tactile 3D UI allows you to roam around a 3D space and place objects where you want. Each object gives clues as to its contents by emitting sounds and mapping thumbnails and icons onto certain faces. Other cues include a faster rotation rate for recently accessed content, different lighting for read-only files, and variation in collision sound effects based on file size.

Also, there's a neat section about future interfaces.
Tactile 3d by Upper Bounds.