This experience has hammered home this point for me about social media: it works best when you view it as a way to create value, not as a tool to extract value. When I didn’t ‘get’ Twitter before, it was because I was trying to extract value from it, without really providing any.

The second iteration of our browser-based player is coming out in beta today. Here’s how it works:

1. Link to MP3s in your web page. These can be anywhere on the web.
2. Add a line of code to insert our Javascript library. We host this, so you just have to point to our URL.
3. Working play buttons appear next to MP3s.

After suffering bumps in the road to development, Apple’s iPhone takes the wireless industry by storm, and turns a power structure between carriers and manufacturers on its head in the process.

A great article that highlights not only why youth workers should blog, but could be interpreted as why everyone should blog.

For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states?

My experiences in the San Diego fires of 2007 gave me an interesting outlook on how Twitter, as a tool, could be applied in different circumstances. Just a few months after (and some even during) the 2007 firestorm some agencies are scratching the surface of what’s possible with this service.

Group 88 is 2,500 square feet of brand new coworking space especially designed for mobile professionals, small businesses and independents. Located conveniently on Route 10 immediate to the Avon-Simsbury line, it’s at the center of the major communities west of Hartford, including Simsbury, Avon, Farmington, Canton and West Hartford.

“Various studies find that the Internet transforms social capital toward distributed communities and new friends,” says Austin. “It may or may not compromise social capital by allowing people to ignore the local community and it may, at least sometimes, supplement social capital by augmenting existing social relations.”

Awesome compendium of images for Songbird. Designer Jonathan Koshi rocks.

The Little Prince encounters a fox and asks the fox to play with him. The fox replies that he can’t play with the Little Prince because he isn’t tamed. He explains that “taming” means to “establish ties”. If they establish those ties, then they will need each other. They will each be unique to the other. And, this great quote: “One only understands the things that one tames.” Taming takes time. It takes repeated simple encounters. It takes simple “rites” that make certain times special. The Little Prince “tames” the fox by visiting each day, first sitting at a distance, and then moving closer. The closing thought: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”