OMG This could be SO useful: Xerox launches Trailmeme - syncs with WordPress

From site:

"Trailmeme is a new kind of Web publishing that you can use to create a trail of content on a specific topic that’s interesting to you. You can also read other peoples’ trails and walk them to keep up with any updates they make.
The technology allows you to gather related content from the Web in one place, in an order or sequence that you think helps make sense of it all. Any number of pages can be collected, organized, and annotated in whatever way you think is best. Trails don't need to go in a straight line, either. You can make a whole map of content from different sites, connecting web content in multiple and meaningful ways.

When you are done making your trail, you can publish it and people can find it on Trailmeme.com. They can easily read all the pages in the trail in order without ever having to leave the Trailmeme site, or move around between various markers as they wish.

What do you mean by "Blaze", "Publish" and "Walk"?

Blaze: Picking the pages for your trail and connecting them in a manner that you like.

Publish: Making your trail publicly viewable for other people.

Walk: Finding other people’s trails and reading them.

And there's more!

Trailmeme is not the only place where this technology can be used. The Trailmeme for Wordpress plugin allows you to create trails out of posts on your own self-hosted Wordpress blog. This can help you reorganize your blog in a variety of ways, rather than just having reverse-chronological order as the organization. There is also a similar plugin for MediaWiki. And finally, the Trailmeme Firefox toolbar and Bookmarklet (all browsers) bring the trail experience right to your browser!

The Winners of Google's Project 10 to the 100

Project 10100 Winners

We are pleased to announce the winners of Google’s Project 10100.

Thousands of people from more than 170 countries submitted over 150,000 ideas. From that group, we narrowed it to the final 16 ideas for public vote.

The following five ideas received the most votes and are the winners of Project 10100. Over the past 12 months, we have reviewed concrete proposals to tackle these ideas. We are pleased to give a total of $10 million to five inspiring organizations working on solutions to each of these global challenges:

Make educational content available online for free

Idea: Make educational content available online for free

Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Enhance science and engineering education

Idea: Enhance science and engineering education

Project funded: FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST.

Make government more transparent

Idea: Make government more transparent

Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Drive innovation in public transport

Idea: Drive innovation in public transport

Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting.

Provide quality education to African students

Idea: Provide quality education to African students

Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to Masters and PhD study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.


Each idea is a broad, ambitious, many-year mission. We are excited about the potential of the projects proposed by these innovative organizations. We hope you will follow the progress on their websites.

Thank you to everyone who has supported Project 10100 either by voting on ideas or submitting your own. Your participation has helped make these ideas come to life.

Dissection of a Twitter Hack: Australian teen triggers global Twitter scare

Ben Grubb
September 22, 2010

UPDATE

An Australian teen has caused havoc on Twitter by discovering an "exploit" that hit thousands of users, including US President Barack Obama's press secretary, and resulted in the tweets of a former British PM's wife linking to hardcore porn.

Melbourne student Pearce Delphin, 17, triggered the Twitter scare by testing computer code that opened alert boxes in web browsers saying "uh oh" when a user hovered over infected messages or tweets, with their mouse.

But later, some mischievous users of the site started using the exploit to make people "retweet" infected messages (when they hovered over a tweet with the code inserted) that they had not authorised.

Twitter engineers were pressed into finding a fix for the exploit within hours of it being discovered.

Speaking to this website, Pearce, who is studying year 12 at Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School, said that he was surprised that "so many famous people got infected". He said it was Twitter's responsibility, not his, to keep the site secure.

"When one considers entities like the White House, you don't expect someone to actually be sitting there refreshing the Twitter home page and mousing over links from whoever they're following," he said. "I guess regardless of power or fame, on the internet you have to be as careful as everyone else about security risks; this is one of the few areas that affects everyone on an equal scale."

Read the full & fascinating story:

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/security/australian-teen-triggers-global-twi...

Yo! Distributers!: How To Make Money With The New Independent Film Distributors’ Business Model | Truly Free Film

Guest post by Sheri Candler.

Yesterday we ran part one highlighting the problem.  Today, Sheri points to how distributors will benefit financially from the new model.

It may be that while you are in audience building mode, you will be spending more than making to develop a truly exceptional experience for your community. If you start this now before your entire business collapses, you will fare better.

-Create an online experience that makes the lives of your community better, easier, richer and be the number 1 site they visit for news, information, resources and community tailored to what interests them.

-Fill the vacuum of the lack of curation. People are confused by where to find things they like and overwhelmed by the choice. In a sea of content, be their favored destination. In this way, you can take on the likes of Netflix, a company that offers a huge range that makes finding content specific to personal interests nearly impossible because they don’t intimately know who their customers are. You will know this.

-Lock in the community by maintaining a dialog that will turn their initial attention into a revenue stream for your brand. A subscription model is what you should aspire to, but you cannot rush to that without first showing what you have to offer and reeling them in. First offer the ability to sample, share and then buy.

-Innovate in the online experiences you build to keep the community engaged and interested in making the circle bigger for you and for them. Incentivize those who are the most active at enlarging the community. Take the money you would have spent on outside marketers and use it to think of interesting incentives for your tribe.

I fear the problem for all of you will be waiting to see if another business model becomes successful before you decide to reinvent your own. This is extremely detrimental because waiting only results in being that much further behind. The first ones to embrace a new model win. It is why Netflix beat out Blockbuster. By the time Blockbuster conceded the model Netflix forged was legitimate, they could never catch up. Entrenched companies usually misjudge the speed with which change happens. Now is the time.

Sheri Candler is an inbound marketing strategist who helps independent filmmakers build identities for themselves and their films. Through the use of online tools such as social networking, podcasts, blogs, online media publications and radio, she assists filmmakers in building an engaged and robust online community for their work that can be used to monetize effectively.

She can be found online at www.shericandler.com, on Twitter @shericandler and on Facebook at Sheri Candler Marketing and Publicity.

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The New Independent Film Distributors’ Business Model (Pt. 1 of 2) | Truly Free Film

Guest post by Sheri Candler.

In this second post, I want to focus on how to rehabilitate the film distribution entities so that they may continue to exist. I know what you are thinking “What’s she on about? We’re fine. We survived the latest shake out and are all the stronger for having less competition.” I am here to tell you that is fallacy. The old ways of bringing films to market are fading fast and it is time to reinvent your business. I want to acknowledge my gurus Gerd Leonhard, Seth Godin and Clay Shirky (though he is more my go to guy on all things having to do with immersive storytelling and audience collaboration) for being a constant source of inspiration for me in looking toward the future of media.

When Ted announced on his Facebook page that he would take part in a panel discussion at the upcoming Woodstock Film Festival concerning the new distribution paradigms, I had to look at who would be involved in this discussion. What people and companies would be taking part who are practicing radically changed business models for film distribution? It was as I thought; none. I posted a link on his page (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100326/1452138737.shtml) asking all involved in the discussion to read it and then talk about how they see the new paradigms. I don’t know if anyone did, but I did get a response from Dylan Marchetti from Variance Films explaining to me how his company functions to actively engage audiences for films they’ve booked in the theater. It was a lengthy exchange that resulted in my writing this post. I don’t think he read the article before he spoke because the point of that piece was to inform on how businesses need to form ecosystems around their companies, not continue only to sell copies of the content they distribute. Distribution companies should not be focused on selling copies, either for viewing or for owning. They should be selling access, creating networks of devoted fans around their brand and developing customized experiences instead. In other words, selling things that cannot be copied. This means they must first gather and cultivate a community of engaged followers and then develop, acquire, produce, and source material with only these people in mind.

Read the full post on trulyfreefilm.com

Today's must watch doc on data viz -Journalism in the Age of Data' on Brain Pickings

Excerpt:

By Maria Popova

It’s no secret we have a data visualization fetish, but that’s not just because we like looking at pretty pictures; it’s because we believe the discipline is an important sensemaking mechanism for today’s data deluge, a new kind of journalism that helps frame the world and what matters in it in a visual, compelling, digestible way. Stanford’s Geoff McGhee, an online journalist specializing in multimedia and information design, tends to agree. His excellent Journalism in the Age of Data explores data visualization as a storytelling medium in an hour-long film highlighting some of the most important concepts, artists and projects in data visualization from the past few years.
Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?”

Read more: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2010/09/29/geoff-mcghee-data-journalis...