Ethical questions raised from the advent of the internet

Jason Calcanis (founder of Weblogs, and the man who relaunched Netscape as a Digg) is posing ethical questions that arise in the age of the internet. Here's an interesting question he poses: Now that it's so easy to read newspapers via pocket pc's, computers, blackberry's, cell phones, and anything else high speed, do we have an obligation to stop reading print copies for the sake of nature preservation? Jason estimates that in 15 years he's read 5,475 newspapers, and wonders how many trees did that come from, how much fuel was used to produce everything. So the question is, "is it wrong to subscribe to the print edition of New York Times if I have high-speed web access all day long?"

Free education online

Here's a great article revealing a large amount of free educational resources provided on the web from universities around the country. Free content such as lectures from the University of Washington on Greek Mythology, American Revolution, and Heroic Fantasy.



Also the University of Berkeley California has created an entire catalog of lectures directly on Google Video. everything from Physics to Journalism to Biology is available directly on Google Video.

Technorati Tags:
google, video, free, education, seminars, lectures

Every episode of The Simpsons free online

This can't last long, but someone is streaming every episode from the first 18 seasons of The Simpsons for free online. You have to wade through hoards of ads, but on the up-side, you can watch any episode you want without dropping a dime.

Also, if you're looking for some Jon Stewart clips, here' s a collection of interviews etc that he did NOT on the the Daily Show itself.

Technorati Tags: the simpsons, simpsons, the daily show, daily show, jon stewart, free, vod, streaming

Free cup of coffee on Yahoo

This is relatively insignificant, but if you're dying for a free cup of coffee, on Friday Yahoo will be buying you one from Dunkin Donuts if you set your homepage to Yahoo.com that day.

I moved into Manhattan this weekend, and will be without Cable/Internet for a while, so posts will be limited. You can walk around my neighborhood here.

Google Videos are going strong - 2263 views and 25 downloads.

Technorati Tags: free, coffee, dunkin donuts, yahoo

Preview the entire first episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip on AOL

AOL is offering a free preview of Studio 60 on Sunset Strip - the entire first epside - for one week leading up to the series premiere Monday, September 18th. I haven't decided if I want to watch it ahead of time, but if you do, it's here.

Technorati Tags: aol, television, video, studio 60 on sunset strip, broadband tv, vod

More apple rumors - video ipod finally here?

Loving the rumors based on 'investigation'
- Apple announced their updated iMacs early last week, to possibly pave the way for bigger, more interesting announcements at tomorrow's press conference
- There were no iPod ads in this weekend's circulars, which rarely happens
- there is a picture floating around of a banner set up early at the conference room
There's almost 100% certainty that a video download service will be launched tomorrow, but will a true video iPod be joining it?

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, rumors, video, video ipod, video download, movie download

Tracking the Facebook buzz

The above chart displays the amount of blog postings about "facebook" over the last 90 days (this is a dynamic chart, so if you are reading this months from now, it will look different). Take a look at how many people posted in the first few days about the new "news feeds" feature that displays a river of news about your friends - up to 1600 a day! This is a perfect example of tracking buzz online. Hopefully the heads of facebook are paying attention to this too, reading everyone's feedback, and responding to them to create a discussion about their new features. You can probably tie every spike on this graph back to a feature role out, and it shows the level of interest people in the community have about them, good or bad. Personally I like the ne features, and I hope everyone doesn't turn them off. But privacy options are there now, and hopefully the community works with Facebook to get everything to a level they're comfortable with, and doesn't just disband and find another social site to use.

Technorati Tags: facebook, technorati, blog search, buzz tracking, news feed

ClaimID to manage your identity

It's pretty common these days for anyone who wants to know something about you to use Google paint a picture of who you are.  Getting a job sometimes can come down to what comes up in a web search, regardless of your resume.  Given its importance, services such as claimID are now giving you ways to "claim" the sources that you want to represent you.  Ultimately all it does is let you aggregate which sources you'd like on the web to reflect you, pull them into one place as a picture of you, and then use the collective of links to optimize in search engines so that claimID is the highest ranking source revealed when someone searches for you.
Check out my profile here.  My claimID is now 7th ranking for "skobac" and 6th for "kevin skobac" on Google.  On Yahoo it's 8th for "skobac" and 3rd for "kevin skobac."

Technorati Tags: kevin skobac, skobac, kskobac, kbskobac, claimid, identity, control your identity