Japanese study on line

Here's a survey of Japanese language study aids and dictionary lookups for mobile phones and web.


[via Scott]

gizmag Article: On-product magazines could change the media landscape

Here's an idea: On-product magazines , little magazinelets attached to common grocery store consumer products like bottled water. The pages are designed to withstand refrigeration without going bad with condensation.


The company that makes it, ModernMedia Concepts, apparently has a patent on the idea, but I wonder how defensible it is. Spitfire Ventures' FingerTip books, is very similar and probably more durable.

Glassblowing in Seattle

This Youtube thing is the coolest app I've seen in ages. They apparently support WMV no problem, as long as the file size is under 100MB.

HD Camcorders

PCWorld says HD Camcorders aren't yet worth buying. That's what I concluded too, though recently a gadget-loving friend told me that he is loving his new Sony and the positively brilliant images you can get.

Anorexics unite

Proof that the social networking sites are a force for evil as well as good: A Stanford doctor who studies these things notes that anorexics and bulemics have their own web sites, and that people who visit them tend to end up in the hospital more often than those who don't.

YouTube

Whenever one generation of apps becomes popular and mainstream, there are people who try to push the analogy to the next level of computing and networking power. Sometimes it works and sometimes not. The people at FlickR have a popular web app that lets you easily share digital photos for free. Now a company called YouTube wants to extend that to video. Here's a sample video I just uploaded:

Born Into Brothels

“It’s nearly impossible to photograph in the red light district”, begins Zana, a London-born photographer with degrees in religious studies whose first big project focused on infanticide in India. But children can take pictures there, so a few years later she started http://www.kids-with-cameras.org/, an organization that tries to empower impoverished children by selling the photographs they take of their everyday lives.

These children grow up and play in the most hellish of circumstances. Their parents are prostitutes, drug users, uneducated, and extremely poor. Although they laugh and play innocently like children anywhere, you know it’s inevitable that they are only a few short years from joining the sad tragedy of the rest of their neighborhood in Calcutta, so Zana tries to intervene by giving them cameras and teaching them to photograph the world around them.
Through a couple of high-profile non profit fundraisers, she fights India’s terrible bureaucracy to enroll most of the children in good boarding schools where mostly they now are all doing well.

The street scenes of India, amid extreme crowding and terrible poverty, remind me of my week there a few years ago. I never met any children but I often wondered about the lives of the young beggars I saw everywhere. This documentary gave me a chance, I think, in some small way to meet some of them.