musings about tech & miscellanea
Culture
Gaming can make a better world: Jane McGonigal
Aug 23rd
Provocative, from TED.com:
“Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how.”
Leo Laporte livestreaming his crowd surfing @ SXSW
Mar 13th
Crazy stuff! Leo Laporte has a customized livestreaming rig at SXSW and crowd surfing!
And here’s the video link of him starting out on his crowd surfing:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeremyjohnstone/4430516153/
Check out Leo’s livestream from South by Southwest at: http://live.twit.tv/
@LisaTickledPink gets Leo’d
Mar 10th
The power of social media is phenomenal! Leo Laporte and Kevin Rose of Digg.com while on Leo’s This Week in Tech pod/video-cast (Episode 238), randomly picked LisaTickledPink on Twitter to see how many followers they can get her. She started out with only 3 followers at around Sunday, March 7th, and at the time of this post less than 3 days later, she now has 16,766 followers and it continues to grow by the hundreds per few minutes.
You can imagine what Lisa was thinking when she got 4,000+ email notifications of followers, especially when Kevin Rose found her via a search for “I hate technology.” All is good; Lisa now has a very influential position in having so many “eyes,” Leo will reimburse any charges incurred, giving Lisa an iPad when they come out, along with another iPad to a randomly chosen follower.
Check out Leo’s This Week in Tech Episode 238 to see this all come about (starts around 24.:13 in the videocast), and the interview below with Lisa on New Zealand’s Radio Whammo Show, Kiwi FM. Simply amazing, Lisa got Leo’d with a virtual flash mob on her Twitter account. BTW, Leo’s This Week in Tech and This Week in Google are 2 of my favorite podcasts that I regularly listen to while on the road, and highly recommend them.
Masonic House in Brazil
Feb 6th
Masonic building (”Casa do Maçom”) spotted on Google Earth in Nova America, Brazil at coordinates 20 34 45.51 S, 48 34 34.14 W.
The “House of Mason John Baroni” offers lodging to Masons and their families from all over Brazil who undergo treatment at the local Cancer Hospital. It is in Barretos, a suburb of Sao Paulo.
Click on image to enlarge.
If you don’t have Google Earth, check out the satellite view on Google Maps and zoom in.
