Emily Davidow
links for 2008-04-16: Tastes of Freedom
Posted on 04.16.08 by Emily
umbra says my garden is safe
Mmm… Basil growing in my NYC rooftop garden, certified safe by Umbra. Who knew Seeds of Change (my organic seed source) was owned by M&M/Mars? Anna did.

Filed under: food and gardening and happiness and links and technology and webstuff


Streams of Consciousness
Posted on 03.15.08 by Emily

Oprah’s online book club event with Eckhart Tolle for A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose is truly wonderful. You can watch it on her site, download (video, audio and transcript) or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes. The most exciting part is the use of Skype, allowing people from all over the world to participate in the live event using video chat. Whether you’re interested in the topic, technology or both, it’s worth registering (free) to see how it works and check out the extended materials.

 

In the amazing TED Talk above, Dr. Jill Taylor (author of My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey) reaches the insights Oprah and Eckhart discuss through a stroke. As a neuroanatomist, she was able to observe her own stroke from the inside out. She uses a real human brain as a prop, showing how differently the left and right hemispheres experience the world, outlining an anatomy of enlightenment and “circuitry of peace.”

Her talk highlighted for me how we are literally out of balance individually and collectively. “Modern” education focuses almost solely on the left brain and undervalues development of the right side. We need to develop the whole thing and use everything we’ve got. Bring back arts, music and movement and add in meditation. (Of course, if you use more than 5% of your brain, you don’t want to be on Earth anymore…)

Filed under: better world and consciousness and creativity and culture and happiness and health and interconnected and science and senses and video and webstuff


links for 2008-03-05: Just Need 989 More Fans
Posted on 03.05.08 by Emily

links for 2008-02-21: girls love fonts
Posted on 02.21.08 by Emily

Filed under: creativity and culture and design and emily approved and links and passions and technology and typography and webstuff and women


The Latest Issuu
Posted on 02.20.08 by Emily

Copenhagen-based ISSUU invites everyone to upload and turn their documents into beautiful turn-the-page magazine experiences for free.

Once uploaded, people can bookmark, share and comment on it. Text is searchable so the document is easy to find. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of publications. Finally, you can also post and embed Issuu documents on any external site.

Now actually, it’s still not a joy to quote, because you apparently can’t deep link in there, and you can’t copy and paste text and do all the things you could do with a standard webpage (or PDF for that matter). But it’s so close… you can almost taste it. And you can just embed the whole darn thing… In any case, this is a wonderful way to share the experience of a printed thing (without the waste and expense of printing and shipping).

N.B. to those who like to tear, save and share the parts they like out of printed things… you’ll love Skitch.


AllVoices Launches Participatory News Hybrid
Posted on 02.18.08 by Emily

AllVoices.com map

I had the pleasure of getting to know the dynamic Amra Tareen last month (over a weekend of women in tech hosted by Mary Hodder) and learn about the exciting development of AllVoices.com Currently she’s in Lahore, covering the Pakistan election and launching the site.

Walter Lippmann observed in 1922 in his book Public Opinion:

News and truth are not the same thing, and must be clearly distinguished. The function of news is to signalise an event, the function of truth is to bring to light the hidden facts, to set them in relation with each other, and make a picture of reality.

Providing multiple points of view by inviting mobile voice and text messages, images and videos from the field and weaving them with local and regional news stories, wire services and blog posts, Allvoices creates context around local events and begins to make a clearer picture of reality.

You can see the human dimension of local events with unedited, unmediated news from the street alongside that from multiple media outlets. Everyone can participate by contributing news, asking questions and discussing with others on the site.

This is a great example of a new kind of top-down bottom-up hybrid that Kevin Kelly describes in his recent article “The Bottom is Not Enough” and what can happen when, as Clay Shirky writes, Here Comes Everybody.


links for 2008-02-12: connect the dots la la la la
Posted on 02.12.08 by Emily

Filed under: activism and advertising and animals and better world and creativity and culture and links and love and marketing and photography and science and taste and technology and travel and video and webstuff


@Everyone - Open Social on Earth… Come Play
Posted on 01.31.08 by Emily

sardiniawjohnborthwick.pngOne minute I’m checking messages in Facebook, the next I’m frolicking through olive orchards in Sardinia with John Borthwick wearing an astronaut suit. Oh what a world we live in…

More compelling than Scrabulous, Unype is a Facebook social network application that lets people see, chat and Skype with each other in Google Earth. Unype works with the Open Social API, so you can interact with people from Facebook, Ning, Orkut, hi5 and more to come. See Twitter messages and Upcoming event overlays too. You can mark up your favorite places and share recommendations, videos and 3d models.

There’s also a fun geography quiz game where you answer by flying to the correct place. Highly recommended for Miss Teen USA contestants, and such. eiffeltower480.png.

Filed under: creativity and culture and marketing and people and technology and travel and webstuff


GhostGarden and More GPS Games
Posted on 01.29.08 by Emily

Ghost Garden

The surreal romance of aristocratic expat Lucy and castaway Jack enchanted me as I strolled through Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens in early January, following their love story on a handheld HP GPS device preloaded with Anita Fontaine’s spooky sweet Ghost Garden, part of the 2008 Sydney Festival. As I traveled through the gardens, certain locations would trigger animated scenes that revealed the story, set in the 1800s. I could feel the past, present and future all melting into one, and I got excited imagining the day when it be easy to create my own site-specific adventures for people to discover as they’re traveling through a space.

Garmin Colorado400T
That day turned out to be less than a month away! Wherigo is a flexible gaming platform that Garmin is embedding in their new Colorado 400t Handheld GPS unit (Pictured at right. Thanks, Brady!) Wherigo Builder allows anyone to build alternate reality games, tour guides, local reviews, real estate marketing apps, scavenger hunts, pub crawls or Victorian love stories that are site-specific by mapping out zones, creating a story and then sharing it online. (Alternately, you could write it directly in Lua, a programming language whose name means “moon” in Portuguese and is also what World of Warcrafters use to build on top of their platform.) If you have a PocketPC Device, you can download the Wherigo Player and start playing.

Anything similar for the iPhone’s fauxGPS maps or soon to be true GPS?

For now, you can enjoy my Emily Approved Sydney recommendations in Google Maps and in Google Earth.

Filed under: art and consumerism and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and gardening and love and senses and technology and travel and video and webstuff


Loving Words
Posted on 11.06.07 by Emily

Lower Case n
“Lower Case N, Standing on a Hill,” from classic Sesame Street

My day started off with some of the brilliant skits and songs that instilled in me an early and abiding love for letters, letterforms and language: Lower-case N, Standing on a Hill from Sesame Street, Easy Reader and the Adventures of Letterman from Electric Company. I love learning that was Morgan Freeman, Gene Wilder, Joan Rivers and Zero Mostel. I’m feeling the urge to indulge in an extended experience. (Thanks, Panopticist!)

Not long after, I discovered Hyperwords, an excellent FireFox extension that lets you select any word and translate it, look it up in a dictionary or thesaurus, shop it, search it, blog it, slice it through a tin can and still apply many more commands than I have time to explore right now. One especially handy feature is being able to select any currency amount and convert it on the fly. (Despite how painful it is to convert prices in [any currency] to U.S. dollars now.)

Filed under: art and creativity and culture and design and emily approved and happiness and love and typography and video and webstuff


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