Inspired by athletes, driven by students, Project Blue Sky is a community-based grass-roots initiative. With the upcoming Vancouver games in mind, our team at the Masters of Digital Media program has  been developing an online widget that will reside on a social network, specially created for the project. The social network encourages enviro-conscious teens, young adults and athletes to blog, upload photos and videos, and share their stories with the world. The widget will take peoples saved kilometers  and aggregate them.

WHY?????

With less than a year before the world visits Vancouver to celebrate the Winter Games, Project Blue Sky encourages everyone in the province to work together to reduce the amount of carbons emitted using kilometers as our common metric.

Every little bit helps, and if everyone in BC contributes even just 5 car-free km each week, we can accumulate 1 000 000 000 km! That’s our goal.

Contribute to the goal creatively by turning off lights at home, using energy-saving bulbs or turning down your heat or air conditioning. We’ll be tracking the total contributions everyone makes so we can all be kept up to date on our progress. Remember, the sky’s the limit.

Send us your kilometers, and share your stories with the world: upload a video, share pics of you in action and post your stories. Let’s team up and keep our climate-friendly province, well – friendly.

Below you can input your kilometers and help reach our goal!

The great thing about the widget is that the widget can be shared across 80 social networks! Facebook, MySpace, iGoogle, Friendster, Hi5 and many many more! Simply click Get & Share at the bottom of the widget and you will be able to post the widget to your personal profile on many social networks!

So I am back in Second Life, everyday I wake up go to school and log into my second life. Above you can see my avatar Naly Heron. She is my digital representation in Second Life. I notice that these days I am wondering off and getting things for her that I want for myself in my real life. For example I bought Naly Heron some blue eyes… I have always wanted blue eyes. I also bought her some tattoos - I would never get a tattoo, Naly Heron has one tho! I really enjoy mixing realities, either putting digital characters in real life or vice versa, inserting real life characters in second life. You can do this in either video or still format. Video of course is much cooler but more difficult. Stills are pretty simple…. Check out the video below for some really cool blended realties video footage.

Google is launching a new satellite on September 4th. This satellite will provide google earth and it’s users high resolutions pictures of earth. The satelltite is called GeoEye-1 and is the highest ground resolution and colour publicily available. 

“ It is our goal to display high-resolution imagery for as much of the world as possible, and GeoEye-1 will help further that goal.” — Kate Hurowitz (Google)

With Google updating these images once a month… these images will be more up-to-date than their current system.

 Slydial.com is a very cool service offered for US phone numbers. This site lets you connect right to anyones voicemail. You don’t have time to talk or don’t really want to talk at a certain time. Slydial is very easy to use and a great tool to use when you still need to communicate but you just don’t want to deal with the drama/situations or are pressed for time. I tried it out and it’s great! 

See what the ladies on The View had to say about it:

 SuperCook.com is something that you should know about. When you start running out of food and have bits of ingredients here ant there, this website is going to help you out. Basically you enter in the search tool the ingredients that you have in your house. The engine will then go give you options to what you can make with your ingredients. Right now I have chickpeas and beans… Festival Refried Beans, Taco Pie II … are among some of the results given. 

‘Supercook returns recipes you can actually make right now with the ingredients you have. It even tells you exactly how many recipes you can make, broken down into ‘Starters’, ‘Entrees’ and ‘Dessert’ categories. With Supercook, finding a great recipe is no longer a hassle, simply put in all the ingredients you have at home and Supercook will instantly provide you with hundreds of recipes that are all within your reach. If a recipe requires ingredients you do not have, Supercook takes the guesswork out by clearly listing the additional ingredients you will need. This eliminates wasted time spent browsing through recipes to determine whether or not a recipe is right for you. ‘

Join Spike Lee and co-create a film using your mobile device.

At the Nokia Productions website you can find out the information that you need to start filming. This years theme is humanity. There will be three acts for this film and you can keep up to date with what’s going on by reading Spike Lee’s Blog and by reading the Mini Missions.

NOKIA PRODUCTIONS 
Most films are made for the masses. This one is made by them. Join a production crew of thousands and play a part in creating Spike Lee and Nokia Productions’ latest film collaboration.

Register for your chance to win a Nokia mobile phone in our weekly giveaway, when you upload. Not to mention a chance to attend the big Hollywood premiere and meet the director himself, Spike Lee.

Join the Nokia Production group on JumpCut.

Upload original material: be it video clips, photos, or music, and check PUBLIC. This is a collaboration after all.

Mix your own material or remix entries from other members using Jumpcut’s online editing suite.

Vote for your favorites. Spike will choose the winning entries from the group’s Top Ten picks.

Nokia and Live Nations have gotten together to create an online service called Ticket Rush. This service is about a year old however, I just found out about it today.This site is stricly for North American concerts. This is a VIP program, which will give fans the ability to purchase premium seats, VIP parking spaces and special access to premium bar and lounge areas from its website. The site also offers a music search engine that provides information on tour dates, concert tickets, artists and venues. Live Nation owns, operates or has booking rights in more than 160 venues, which last year hosted 26,000 events in 18 countries. 

You give them your phone number and they text you when tickets to new shows are available fore purchase. Best part about this is that you get notified before the general public does.

Watch out everyone! The coolest portable game device was just released by Sony yesterday! This cool little gadget is going to be cheaper than any of it’s previous versions. Not only that it doubles as a telephone. With a built in microphone that will let you connect to Skype. Sony has previously bundled these devices with Skype and have spent much time perfecting it’s VOIP power. This new gaming device also has a new anti reflective screen, making it easier to see the screen outside. The best thing about the 3000 is that can hook right up to your TV via an s-video cable. This is a complete new addition to the device. The prices have not been released yet, but it is rumored to be released at $199 US.

Today I stumbled upon some very important and cool information. In Feburary of 2009 the FCC in the US is moving away from analog TV to be fully Digital. This means if you have an analog television set, it probally won’t work anymore. Google has stepped forward and realized that this is a fantastic opportunity.

‘The space between the channels on your television is where the future of communication, wireless Internet, and even portable television lives. The potential for these White Spaces is limited only by creativity, ingenuity, and the need for clear rules of the road. The Wireless Innovation Alliance, a coalition of creators, developers, and leaders in technology, urges the FCC to determine and adopt rules that will realize the potential of TV white spaces for us all. Learn more about the Alliance and their Partners.’

Basically this is an initiative started by Google to let the FCC know that this whitespace should be accessible by everyone. This will be a huge push forward in wireless communication.
For more information visit :

 Wireless Innovation Alliance

 Free The Airwaves 

Public Knowledge

Free Press

Well it looks like Apple is giving their iPhone users a little break. They are extending their already 60 day free trial for another 60 Days.

Apple stated on their website:

‘The transition from .Mac to MobileMe was rockier than we had hoped.  While we are making a lot of improvements, the MobileMe service is still not up to our standards. We are extending subscriptions 60-days free of charge to express appreciation for our members’ patience as we continue to improve the service.’

On my Mac I run Tiger and this seemed to be a huge problem when .mac became mobileme. Things were not working , files needed to be found and deleted… something an average person would not know how to do.

Props to Apple for giving us more time to save up 100 bucks for the yearly subscription. 

MobileMe is a necessity for smart-phone communication and Apple seems to be doing a great job so far. You do get 20G of storage … which isn’t so bad.