Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

Monday I participated in a design review for Youthgive, a youth oriented charitable community web site. At the table were a number of writers, thinkers and designers with strong knowledge of web design and Internet development, such as Howard Rheingold and game developer Anselm Hook. Part of what we did was to share links to innovative web sites such as OpenLayers, Wayfaring, Wetpaint and ID Mashups.

Following up and tracking many of the new mashups, creative displays of local based information, I found MappedUp. Of course anything that looks this cool was done in Flash. MappedUp is an application that tracks a large number of RSS news sources and displays their latest items on a world map, geographically and in real-time. It’s been developed by Jeroen Wijering a grad student in the Netherlands.

GG Bridge from Presidio. Originally uploaded by goblue72.

So, it was good get outside and see what other folks are doing. A meeting on the Presidio campus with the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin Headlands out the window allowed the mind to air out a bit. I need to do this more often.

Finally I ended the week by impulsively starting up another blog, Tubular Times, devoted exclusively to the explosion of online video. It’s on Goggle Blogger, which handles Flash video more gracefully than this WordPress blogging software does.