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32 years ago today a little film called Star Wars was released in only 32 theaters. To celebrate, I thought I’d repost a favorite article from a couple of years ago for Ed Copeland’s Star Wars Blog-A-Thon. Two great lessons about SW that I hold dear to this day: * The early drafts were so stunningly awful and so unlike the finished film, it’s such a great reminder that any bad script has the potential to reach great heights like Star Wars.

Zoomify makes high-quality images zoom-and-pan for fast, interactive viewing on the web! Just JPEGs, HTML, and Flash!

Recently, Channel 4 commissioned some research from OTX into the relationships that kids aged 12-24 have with technology. The report is called A Beta Life, and I thought I’d share a few of the salient points and how they relate to the future of television on and offline. Some top-line stats may surprise you about the average 12-24 year old

Recently, Channel 4 commissioned some research from OTX into the relationships that kids aged 12-24 have with technology. The report is called A Beta Life, and I thought I’d share a few of the salient points and how they relate to the future of television

Google Web Elements allow you to easily add your favorite Google products onto your own website.

Your free G.ho.st® ("ghost") Virtual Computer (VC) includes a desktop, file storage and applications. Your VC lives securely in the internet cloud and is accessible from any computer or mobile phone! Your VC requires no installation, anti-virus or backup.

Even before the rise of YouTube as a central hub for video, we’ve been obsessed as a culture with sharing funny and amazing videos with our friends. While most videos get a couple views and fade into the background, a select few not only gain tens of millions of views, but make a lasting impact on culture as well. These videos quickly become Internet memes that nobody can ever seem to stop talking about. From the Dancing Baby of the 1990s to the phenomenon that is Susan Boyle, the web has seen its share of viral video sensations. However, these 20 are the cream of the crop. They have been seen by millions and discussed by millions more. Many of them are part of not only Internet culture, but mainstream culture too. Here are the top 20 YouTube and video memes in chronological order.

Even before the rise of YouTube as a central hub for video, we’ve been obsessed as a culture with sharing funny and amazing videos with our friends. While most videos get a couple views and fade into the background, a select few not only gain tens of mill

FunnelBrain.com is an academic question and answer site that provides an environment for collaborative online learning. Students work in teams to create review questions and answers, paired with video explanations, for academic subjects. Users have access to wiki-style content creation tools, as well as a learning management application known as the "Funnel" that tracks and monitors learning progress and focuses the student's attention on a particular question at a particular time with a spaced repetition algorithm. FunnelBrain and its members believe that learning is most fun and effective when it's a shared group effort. So whether you're prepping for an upcoming math quiz with your classmates, working with the AP Biology Group to create study materials for the exam or helping other students understand a complex economic theory by sharing a video examplation, FunnelBrain provides the tools and community for your success.

The Smithsonian Institution wants your POV as we begin to imagine our future. Submit a video with your vision and ideas. We're looking for a few friends and fans from around the world to help us form the future Smithsonian experience. A revolutionary Web and New Media Strategy project is underway, and we invite you to collaborate with us as we envision a rich new media future for the Institution. Using your web cam, digital camera, or cell phone, record your thoughts on where we should focus our energies with respect to this question: Given the news ways of acquiring & sharing knowledge through technology: the internet, social networking, photo & video sharing, and cell phones—where do you see the Smithsonian's museums and websites going in the future? How can we make education more relevant to you in a digital age?

URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Below, issues to consider and a breakdown of popular services, including recommendations and services to avoid (the new DiggBar being one of these).

Google Short Links allows users to easily create descriptive shortcuts to web URLs. This makes it easier for users to recall and share the locations of important documents and web sites. Free for organizations using Google Apps "Add it now" will add this service into your control panel where you can continue the setup process

everyone is making things that connect to twitter. the arduino environment makes it easy to interface hardware to the internet. this, plus a strong disdain for twitter, was all that was necessary to turn a joke into reality: a toilet that will post to twitter with every flush. hey, it's more useful and relevant than just about everything else on twitter!

everyone is making things that connect to twitter. the arduino environment makes it easy to interface hardware to the internet. this, plus a strong disdain for twitter, was all that was necessary to turn a joke into reality: a toilet that will post to twi

Educate is an iPhone/iTouch application designed to support teaching professionals in schools, universities and colleges.

Cobocards are virtually created flashcards. You can print them and study offline, edit them again and again, compare with older versions, check the status of your knowledge, upload pictures and graphs, include formula with LaTeX, share your flashcards with friends, set a deadline for exams,...

Plastic Logic is using our proprietary technology leadership in plastic electronics to create a range of products enabling information access, organization, and consumption. Differentiated by a stunning form factor (the size of 8.5 x 11-inch paper), the Plastic Logic reader features a big readable display. Yet it's thinner than a pad of paper, lighter than many business periodicals, and offers a high-quality reading experience. The Plastic Logic reader supports a full range of business document formats, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Adobe PDFs, as well as newspapers, periodicals and books. It has an easy gesture-based user interface and powerful software tools that will help business users to organize and manage their information. Users can connect to their information either wired or wirelessly and store thousands of documents on the device. The reader incorporates E Ink technology for great readability and features low power consumption and long battery life.

Random House's e-book list has authors for downloading with 'rich media' content to phones, computers, PDAs and e-readers

We have a lot of geotagged photos Almost ninety million, as I write this, and the numbers keep growing especially as nearly every new "smart" phone released to market has not only a camera but also the ability to capture location information with it. For every geotagged photo we store up to six Where On Earth (WOE) IDs. These are unique numeric identifiers that correspond to the hierarchy of places where a photo was taken: the neighbourhood, the town, the county, and so on up to the continent. This process is usually referred to as reverse-geocoding. Over time this got us wondering: If we plotted all the geotagged photos associated with a particular WOE ID, would we have enough data to generate a mostly accurate contour of that place? Not a perfect representation, perhaps, but something more fine-grained than a bounding box. It turns out we can.

We have a lot of geotagged photos Almost ninety million, as I write this, and the numbers keep growing especially as nearly every new "smart" phone released to market has not only a camera but also the ability to capture location information with it. Fo

Here you'll find a range of amazing paper models to build a whole world of improbable automata! We've just launched another model: 'FEEDING TIME AT THE ZOO' This model is now available to buy, so have a look at the special page to see more details.

The user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter,

Smashwords is a self-publishing platform and online bookstore for indepedent ebook authors, publishers and readers. We offer multi-format, DRM-free ebooks, ready for immediate sampling and purchase, and readable on any e-reading device. At Smashwords, our authors and publishers have complete control over the sampling, pricing and marketing of their written works. Smashwords is ideal for personal memoirs, novels, short fiction, non-fiction, essays, screenplays, newsletters, poetry, or other written forms that haven’t even been invented yet. It's free to publish on Smashwords. For readers, Smashwords provides an opportunity to discover new voices in all categories and genres of the written word. For registered members, the site offers useful tools for search, discovery and personal library-building, and each week we add new features based on feedback from Smashwords members.

In order to explore games in libraries, researchers from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, the American Library Association and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana are working together. As the project grows, Director Scott Nicholson hopes that it will attract other researchers: “The advantage to having a common place to gather, both physically and virtually, is that it allows us as a group of researchers to explore gaming in libraries more effectively than if we were all working individually. Our connection with the profession through the ALA will allow us to focus on the most important issues with the scholarly rigor that good science demands.”

In order to explore games in libraries, researchers from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, the American Library Association and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana are working together. As the project grows, Director Scott Nicholson hopes that it will attract other researchers: “The advantage to having a common place to gather, both physically and virtually, is that it allows us as a group of researchers to explore gaming in libraries more effectively than if we were all working individually. Our connection with the profession through the ALA will allow us to focus on the most important issues with the scholarly rigor that good science demands.”

The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

Hope vs. Despair looks at our collective mood on Twitter. It is a simple way of tracking people’s feelings – about the economy, their pork chop sandwich…whatever’s top of mind. The measuring device tracks tweets every 30 seconds, looking at the frequency of smiles and frowns, specifically :) vs. :( We’ve always been interested in building connections between the real and the digital world, so we created a way to physically display the results of our experiment in our office.

PureDepth has been talking up its "Multi-Layer" 3D display technology for quite some time now, but it looks like the displays should finally be rolling out en masse, with the company announcing that volume production of its new 12.1-inch displays was slated to begin this week, which follows those first few 20.1-inch displays that wound up in slot machines. For those not up to speed, the displays themselves make use of two LCD screens placed a few inches a part, which lets them display three dimensional images without the need for special glasses and, according to the company, without the headaches often associated with 3D setups. It also looks PureDepth is getting increasingly confident in the technology and its future, and it's now even gone so far as to establish a Japanese arm of the company that it hopes will help it garner a bigger foothold in the country.

PureDepth has been talking up its "Multi-Layer" 3D display technology for quite some time now, but it looks like the displays should finally be rolling out en masse, with the company announcing that volume production of its new 12.1-inch displays was slat