For quite some time now I am interested in new types of media and try to get a feeling for how people will consume and produce information in the future. One project I am actively following at the moment is EveryBlock which is run by Adrian Holovaty of Django fame.

The basic idea is to offer the people all relevant news for the block which they live in. Current information range from civic information (e.g. restaurant inspections, crimes,...) to news articles. Adrian's team really tries to push the limits when it comes to making information available for anybody in an innovative way. If you got interested make sure to listen to this excellent podcast in which Adrian talks about the project and the future of journalism in general.

Inspired by the cool videos from Make magazine, here is a simple idea for making a sugar sprinkler. All you need is a nice bottle and a bottle pourer.

I still remember how my father and I investigated the sky through a telescope during those crystal clear summer nights and learned more about the Universe. Yesterday at TED Microsoft presented for the first time their new project WorldWide Telescope which allows anybody to explore the Universe just by using their computer.

From what I can see the execution of the idea is absolutely stunning. I can't wait to show it to my father.

The offical site for the project can be found here.

Over at copyrighteous Benjamin wrote a nice post about how online stores could fill in the type of the credit card you are using automatically.

"Any decent credit card system knows that if a sixteen digit credit card number starts with 4, it's a Visa."

Actually some websites are already smart enough, e.g. shopify. However I would be interesting to know why not more websites are implementing a similar system like shopify has.

Have a look at the following video made by Sun to promote their customer facing wikis.sun.com. I especially like the way it shows how collaboration on the web has been evolved in recent years.

They are running their wiki's on Confluence developed by Atlassian. It is a really nice piece of software which I enjoy working with every day.