I have decided to switch from an Olympus system to one of the two mainstream systems.
I absolutely love Oly glass (this is why I have been holding on to 4/3), but the full frame bodies like the D700 and the 5D II are simply too tempting.

My initial plan, due to budget considerations, is to get a crop-sensor body (40D, D200, or D300 - I am *not* considering the 50D, D90, or D80), and then upgrade to a D700, its higher res successor, or a 5D II later.

Now I need to decide which lenses I will be getting, and that is where the choice between systems gets tricky.

Initially, I want to get a nice "walkaround" zoom. The lens should be full-frame capable (not DX or EF-S), sharp, and reasonably fast.
Also, the lens has to be immediately useful on a cropped sensor body. I.e. a 28-70 mm lens will probably *not* fit the bill.

I doubt that coming off the ZD 14-54 f2.8-3.5 I could be tempted with an f3.5-5.6 consumer zoom. You never know, of course - I know next to nothing about Canon and Nikon glass, and maybe some of these are excellent!

Canon lens choice is more or less clear: if I will be going with a Canon system, the first two lenses I will be getting are the 50 mm f1.4 and the 17-40 f4 L ($300-ish and $650-ish, respectively).

With Nikon it is much harder to decide. Did they ever make any affordable, full-frame capable lens that will be comparable to Canon's 17-40 L? Are there any non-zoom Nikon lens combinations I should be considering? Are there any Nikon lenses I should be avoiding like plague?

Complaints of experience-ruining frame rates, small draw distances, crashes, and more plague Rockstar's port of top-rated action adventure.

Complaints of experience-ruining frame rates, small draw distances, crashes, and more plague Rockstar's port of top-rated action adventure.

If you said that they both posed topless, well, you’d be correct.  The actual answer I was driving at was that they’ve both had their Facebook accounts deleted.

According to Nick O’Neill at All Facebook, there are (not surprisingly) quite a few Lindsay Lohans on Facebook.

So, what did Lindsay do as soon as she found out her account was shut down?  The same thing Robert Scoble did, she blogged about her experience, only at her MySpace profile:

okay, so i love myspace, because it is secure, and the people at myspace don’t disable your account because they think that you are a fake you.

[..]

when i typed my password and “log in” name in, a red sentence came up saying..

Account Disabled
Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here.

wow! i was in shock. i clicked on the link that they told me to click on and then to another link that said: my account may of been disabled by mistake. once i got to that it gave a note saying why it was disabled which stated the note saying that it was disabled because they believe that i was a fake of myself. genius.

Lohan, in her own way, criticized the vaunted Facebook Connect, the account management system that the social network has opened up for other blogs and sites to use as a way of managing their site’s userbase.

To paraphrase Lohan, it’s infuriating that Facebook arbitrarily decides who is and isn’t the real account holder, and it’s equally infuriating that they don’t at least offer account holders the opportunity to respond to the company’s accusation before the account is shut down.

The sentiment is almost identical to the insight of Scoble’s reaction to his account being deactivated:

Facebook claims it is a “utility.” Well, I like how Kara Swisher put it. Hint: “utilities” have due process and don’t just shut down someone’s account without a warning. You should see the comments on my last post. Some people didn’t even knowingly break the rules and never got a good answer for why their accounts were shut down.

Turning away from the amusing similarities between Scoble and Lohan for a moment, it’s interesting to note the echo outside the bubble on this one.

As social networking tools go more and more mainstream, people who are real celebrities as well as those with real world influence (and not just the “Internet Famous”) will have the same scenarios have happen to them we’ve experienced a year prior. For more proof of this, see CNN’s epiphany over Twitter’s Mumbai coverage versus our epiphany over Twitter’s earthquake coverage a year earlier.

The difference here is this bad bit of PR could be avoided for Facebook.  They’ve had a year to figure out how to straighten out their account deactivation process, and they’re in the midst of talking up how awesome Facebook Connect is to everyone. Any bit of blowback they get on this is well deserved.

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

What Would You Ask Robert Scoble?
LiveStream: Pete Cashmore and Robert Scoble at CommunityNext!
SXSW Plague Takes Down Twitterers
Scoble Lands Channel 9 interview with Bill Gates!
Loic Lemeur’s “Video Twitter” to Announce Funding [Video]
PicApp Makes it Easy to Legally Blog the Latest Britney and Lindsay Pictures
Robert and Shel: Making New Media Less Hippie; More Naked

div style="FLOAT: right"img title="iPod Shortage Spreads" alt="iPod Shortage Spreads" hspace="5" src="http://www.ubergizmo.com/photos/2008/12/ipod-shortage.jpg" vspace="5" border="0" //div pLike a plague, the iPod is experiencing shortages at certain reseller channels, with Amazon.com recently extending the lead times of the 8GB iPod touch 2G to three to five weeks instead of the initial 11 days, while the 16GB variant stays at three to five weeks. Heck, even the screen-less iPod Shuffle is experiencing shortage on certain colors and capacities this week among retailers such as Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart and Crutchfield.com. This is pretty surprising considering the current economic climate that we're in at the moment, and it goes to prove that music has turned into an essential part of our everyday life for many of us. /p pPermalink: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/12/ipod_shortage_spreads.html"iPod Shortage Spreads/a from Ubergizmo (a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com"US/a, a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/fr"FR/a) | a href="http://www.uberbargain.com/"Good deals/a | Hot: a href="http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2008/11/blackberry_storm_review.html"Storm Review/a/p pmap name="google_ad_map_081203180244" area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/081203180244?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/ area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//map img usemap="#google_ad_map_081203180244" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgamp;client=ca-pub-7335032025195922amp;channel=9684588219amp;output=pngamp;cuid=081203180244amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2008%2F12%2Fipod_shortage_spreads.html"//p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/k4MYykic64k_01k0X1kE2L35KsU/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/k4MYykic64k_01k0X1kE2L35KsU/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=pZbfyyZQ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=Y4GrdSN1"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=Y4GrdSN1" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=G9VHEhvd"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=NpZWL3to"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=NpZWL3to" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?a=mfOaiQYL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/ubergizmo?i=mfOaiQYL" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ubergizmo/~4/E7XTwUr_Ekk" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/windowosxvirus.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="804" height="359" style="display:block;float:none;" /Mac OS X, mythically immune to common computer plagues, has actually always a href="http://gizmodo.com/5100996/false-alarm-apple-mac-os-x-anti+virus-recommendation-is-old"welcomed antivirus software/a. Or, uh, a href="http://gizmodo.com/5101266/apple-removes-antivirus-support-note-reiterates-os-xs-built+in-protection"maybe not/a. Confused? No worriesmdash;here's how OS X and Windows differ on resisting viruses and other nasties./p pIt's not a matter of opinion: OS X emis/em less susceptible to catching a cold than Windows. So is Linux, for that matter. There are two major reasons (and a href="http://gizmodo.com/5100217/the-simpsons-gets-20-years-of-apple-jokes-out-of-the-way-at-once"Steve Jobs' pee/a actually isn't one of them). First, Windows is a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/154800/.html"on 89.6 percent of the world's computers/a, while OS X is on just 8.9 percent of them. Second, the Unix architecture that OS X and Linux are based on is inherently more secure than Windows, particularly pre-Vista versions. (If these reasons are familiar to you, you may not know the subtler side-effects of each reason that strengthen the case even more, so read on.)/p pThere are a few different ways that Microsoft's mammoth market share actually hurts Windows and helps OS X. For one, writing nastiness that the vast majority of the world's computers are susceptible to is a more efficient use of resources than writing the same evil for a sliver of the population. In biology, a more homogeneous population is more susceptible to a genocidal plague. Same principle applies to the vast, Windows-powered ecosystem. I don't mean someone could write a virus that wipes ieverybody/i out. Just that if everybody's running Windows, the population is a much easier target./p pThe flipside of thismdash;which you might not have consideredmdash;is that most malware writers obviously use Windows. They're going to whip up code for the OS they're familiar with and know best. And more to that point, most of the tools and scripts used to wreak havoc on computers are written for Windows. The same ecosystem that provides the biggest, most susceptible audience also provides the most fertile breeding ground for the nasty executables./p pBut suppose this was some bizarro world where OS X was king. Would Microsoft run ads about how virus-plagued OS X was? Well, it would still be more prudent to run anti-virus software, since there'd be a lot more thrown crap thrown at the Mac OS, but if malware acted mostly like it does today, it likely wouldn't have the same impact as it did on Windows pre-Vista./p pA lot of that is because of the way permissions work in OS X vs. Windows. Basically, Unix-based systems are architected so that they require administrator privileges to modify the OS and are traditionally more strict in enforcing them. Critical areas are walled off from normal usersmdash;you see this when OS X asks for a password to install updates or change a system setting. A standard non-admin user account is restricted; bad software can't wreak much havoc at all without that password./p pThis is precisely what Vista's somewhat-maligned User Account Control attempts to replicate, limiting points of intrusion and requiring explicit user permission to get anywhere deep. On Windows, historically, the enforcement of these restrictions has been lax in the name of convenience./p pa href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasicarticleId=9007883pageNumber=1"This is not to say/a that OS X is invulnerable, a href="http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-251586.html"by any means/a. The main applications folder is a href="http://www.macforensicslab.com/ProductsAndServices/index.php?main_page=document_general_infocPath=11products_id=174"relatively unprotected/a, and any running app can write to it and most of what's inside. Coupled with OS X's app-bundling architecture, this makes it easier to replace program executables or sneak in a piggybacking one. Even then, however, the malware would need to elicit elevated permissions to do any hardcore damage to the core OS; it could, unfortunately, nuke your relatively unprotected Home folder though. Another point of vulnerability, or at least a pain point, according to Mac Forensics Lab, is OS X's centralized address book, which also has weak defenses. If the Home folder book did require the same level of permissions, it would be kinda unusable, because you'd have to elevate permissions to make any and every change./p pThis brings us to OS X's biggest security hole, the one that it actually shares with every operating system: you. It doesn't matter how good baked-in security is if a user throws out the welcome mat for whatever crap comes their way. On the flip side, you're also the first, and best, line of protection. Don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine, anti-virus software or notmdash;whatever OS you're running./p pemSomething you still wanna know? Send any questions about viruses, VD or the 1995 Dustin Hoffman film/em Outbreak emto tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line./em/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=ea76be512a1b5e82408e9e88bbf3d629p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=ea76be512a1b5e82408e9e88bbf3d629p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=ea76be512a1b5e82408e9e88bbf3d629" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=B8GNhwRg"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=0peLo6HL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=H669PA1I"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=H669PA1I" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=h8BN2hCC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=h8BN2hCC" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/5AiJS0lUyg8" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/12/windowosxvirus.jpg" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="804" height="359" style="display:block;float:none;" //p div style='float:right; margin-left:-9px;'script type="text/javascript" digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/Why_OS_X_Shrugs_Off_Viruses_Off_Better_Than_Windows'; /scriptscript src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js" type="text/javascript" /script/div pMac OS X, mythically immune to common computer plagues, has actually always a href="http://gizmodo.com/5100996/false-alarm-apple-mac-os-x-anti+virus-recommendation-is-old"welcomed antivirus software/a. Or, uh, a href="http://gizmodo.com/5101266/apple-removes-antivirus-support-note-reiterates-os-xs-built+in-protection"maybe not/a. Confused? No worriesmdash;here's how OS X and Windows differ on resisting viruses and other nasties./p pIt's not a matter of opinion: OS X emis/em less susceptible to catching a cold than Windows. So is Linux, for that matter. There are two major reasons (and a href="http://gizmodo.com/5100217/the-simpsons-gets-20-years-of-apple-jokes-out-of-the-way-at-once"Steve Jobs' pee/a actually isn't one of them). First, Windows is a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/154800/.html"on 89.6 percent of the world's personal computers/a, while OS X is on just 8.9 percent of them. Second, the Unix architecture that OS X and Linux are based on is inherently more secure than Windows, particularly pre-Vista versions. (If these reasons are familiar to you, you may not know the subtler side-effects of each reason that strengthen the case even more, so read on.)/p pThere are a few different ways that Microsoft's mammoth market share actually hurts Windows and helps OS X. For one, writing nastiness that the vast majority of the world's personal computers are susceptible to is a more efficient use of resources than writing the same evil for a sliver of the population. In biology, a more homogeneous population is more susceptible to a genocidal plague. Same principle applies to the vast, Windows-powered ecosystem. I don't mean someone could write a virus that wipes ieverybody/i out. Just that if everybody's running Windows, the population is a much easier target./p pThe flipside of thismdash;which you might not have consideredmdash;is that most malware writers obviously use Windows. They're going to whip up code for the OS they're familiar with and know best. And more to that point, most of the tools and scripts used to wreak havoc on computers are written for Windows. The same ecosystem that provides the biggest, most susceptible audience also provides the most fertile breeding ground for the nasty executables./p pBut suppose this was some bizarro world where OS X was king. Would Microsoft run ads about how virus-plagued OS X was? Well, it would still be more prudent to run anti-virus software, since there'd be a lot more crap thrown at the Mac OS, but if malware acted mostly like it does today, it likely wouldn't have the same impact as it did on Windows pre-Vista./p pA lot of that is because of the way permissions work in OS X vs. Windows. Basically, Unix-based systems are architected so that they require administrator privileges to modify the OS and are traditionally more strict in enforcing them. Critical areas are walled off from normal usersmdash;you see this when OS X asks for a password to install updates or change a system setting. A standard non-admin user account is restricted; bad software can't wreak much havoc at all without that password./p pThis is precisely what Vista's somewhat-maligned User Account Control attempts to replicate, limiting points of intrusion and requiring explicit user permission to get anywhere deep. On Windows, historically, the enforcement of these restrictions has been lax in the name of convenience./p pa href="http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasicarticleId=9007883pageNumber=1"This is not to say/a that OS X is invulnerable, a href="http://news.zdnet.com/2424-9595_22-251586.html"by any means/a. The main applications folder is a href="http://www.macforensicslab.com/ProductsAndServices/index.php?main_page=document_general_infocPath=11products_id=174"relatively unprotected/a, and any running app can write to it and most of what's inside. Coupled with OS X's app-bundling architecture, this makes it easier to replace program executables or sneak in a piggybacking one. Even then, however, the malware would need to elicit elevated permissions to do any hardcore damage to the core OS; it could, unfortunately, nuke your relatively unprotected Home folder though. Another point of vulnerability, or at least a pain point, according to Mac Forensics Lab, is OS X's centralized address book, which also has weak defenses. If the Home folder book did require the same level of permissions, it would be kinda unusable, because you'd have to elevate permissions to make any and every change./p pThis brings us to OS X's biggest security hole, the one that it actually shares with every operating system: you. It doesn't matter how good baked-in security is if a user throws out the welcome mat for whatever crap comes their way. On the flip side, you're also the first, and best, line of protection. Don't do anything stupid, and you'll be fine, anti-virus software or notmdash;whatever OS you're running./p pemSomething you still wanna know? Send any questions about viruses, VD or the 1995 Dustin Hoffman film/em Outbreak emto tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line./em/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=ea76be512a1b5e82408e9e88bbf3d629p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=ea76be512a1b5e82408e9e88bbf3d629p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=ea76be512a1b5e82408e9e88bbf3d629" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=PwzhLTWx"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=6WmrsnkT"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=0162X4LQ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=0162X4LQ" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Qp80bvek"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=Qp80bvek" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/PY6_BIcKVqE" height="1" width="1"/

Here’s the latest Storytelling Engine from John Seavey. Click here to read John’s description of what a Storytelling Engine IS, anyways. Check out more of them at his blog, Fraggmented.

Storytelling Engines: George Romero’s “Dead” Films

Normally, when I talk about a series’ storytelling engine, what I’m really doing is trying to take a look at a long-running (or occasionally short-running) series from a different perspective. Instead of just seeing the elements of the series as part of the story the writer is telling, I’m looking at them as story-generating components–the supporting cast fulfills this function, the setting adds this potential, the protagonist moves the plot this way, and so on. But it’s very rare that I think that writers consciously consider their status quo as a machine that generates plots.

In the case of George Romero’s seminal zombie movie series (”Night of the Living Dead”, “Dawn of the Dead”, “Day of the Dead”, “Land of the Dead”, “Diary of the Dead”), though, that’s pretty much exactly what they are. Romero starts with a set of postulates that function as his “engine”, and then takes other stories and runs them through the engine to see what the result will be. It’s a storytelling engine that takes the world as it is, applies a major change, and observes the logical result.

The change is, of course, the dead coming back to life. Romero postulates an event (never explicated, but hinted as some sort of radiation wave released by a returning satellite) that causes every recently-deceased corpse in the world to re-animate and seek out living humans with an instinct to consume their flesh. (Their bite is invariably lethal, although Romero never makes it clear whether this is an effect of their status as zombies, or just due to the normal infections that would result from being bitten by a septic, rotting corpse.) They retain traces of their former personality, but generally have limited intelligence and diminished physical capacity (they’re slower, but stronger.) Being dead, they’re pretty much immune to pain, and the only way of permanently killing them is with damage to the head. But more importantly, the event affected living humans as well, even if it doesn’t show. Anyone who dies in the series re-animates within minutes of their death as a zombie, unless that death is due to head trauma.

Romero’s movies (and the various comic and novel spin-offs) focus on the consequences of this event for different groups. He never returns to the same set of protagonists (which allows him a lot of freedom when it comes to killing off characters), but the world is always the same. Humans find ways to survive the zombie apocalypse, some of which are co-operative (as in the small community of survivors in “Land”) and some of which are competitive and counter-productive (as with the nihilistic end to “Dawn”.) Different people cope with the psychological stress of the event in different ways (most of which aren’t good–if Romero’s movies have a common theme, it’s that people tend to come unglued in crisis situations.) And the zombie horde always gets larger–in fact, with the span of time separating the movies, the size of the zombie horde provides the only definitive timeline for the series. “Diary” might look like 2005 and “Night” might look like 1968, but the two both occur early on in the zombie plague.

Romero’s “zombie rules” provide a very interesting storytelling engine, precisely because they’re the only real element of an engine with very loose continuity from installment to installment. This faithfulness to the rules has meant that the entire zombie sub-genre of horror has found itself defined by Romero’s rules and the ground-breaking films that provided them, to the point where many zombie movies are essentially Romero movies in all but name. Some of them are loving homages, like “Shaun of the Dead”, others are rip-offs, like “The Dead Next Door”, and still others are deliberate reactions against or alterations of the Romero rules, like “Return of the Living Dead” or “28 Days Later” (or, for that matter, the James Gunn/Zack Snyder remake of “Dawn of the Dead”.) But the Romero rules now provide a practically inescapable framework for everyone following in Romero’s footsteps, a storytelling engine that has escaped its creator and run wild throughout the genre. Its simplicity is also its strength, something that is constantly proved with each new zombie movie, comic, or book that comes out.

img class=face src=http://planet.ubuntu.com/heads/jono.png alt= pWhen I was a kid, I owned a a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_GenesisSega Megadrive/a (Sega Genesis for my American friends). I spent hours on that thing. Sonic The Hedgehog. Streets Of Rage. Desert Strike. Toejam And Earl. I loved it./p pOne game that was released was a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_SandiegoWhere In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?/a Back then it was marketed as emedutainment/em: essentially a sneaky way for parents to infiltrate their kid#8217;s leisure time with learning under the premise of it being #8220;fun#8221;. Of course, kids are smarter than parents give them credit for. Kids were wise to this and often avoided games like that like the plague. The mind of a 12 year-old concluded that enough time is spent in front of teachers, workbooks and exams without it invading precious Sega time. I was one such kid. I emhated/em the idea of edutainment. I didnt want to learn with my Megadrive, I wanted to shoot things with very large, very loud, deeply pixelated guns./p pThings change when you grow up (yes, I have grown up, smart arses). I now love learning. I love reading. I spend hours drowning in Wikipedia and exploring our world, our history and our patchwork of cultures. I love learning about people#8217;s experiences, perspectives and attitudes. I no longer have the 12 year-old mentality that learning is for school time. Learning really is genuinely emfun/em./p pNaturally, there are some subjects I like to learn about in more detail. Community (zing!). Computers. Free Software. Free Culture. Music. There are however some subjects that I develop a curiosity about and feel an urge to investigate. These subjects are not part of my daily interests and hobbies, but are temporary avenues of curiosity./p pOne recent example for me is emHistorical Jesus/em. A few days ago I read everything Wikipedia had to offer about about the subject. This was triggered originally by a history TV show which in turn inspired me to buy a book about significant events in human history. In this book I read about Jesus#8217;s Crucifixion and decided to further refresh my knowledge of the subject by hitting up Wikipedia. In this example we see two distinctive concepts: emPassive Education/em and emContent Aggregation and Linking/em:/p ul liemPassive Education/em - in my example of Historical Jesus, my primary focus was gathering the facts and the story. I was happy for this subject#8217;s learning to be passive. I was happy to merely consume the content and not interact with it much more than selecting what to learn./li liemContent Aggregation and Linking/em - learning has links and connections. I first watched a show about history. This intrigued me to buy the book on historical events. A section in that book inspired me to access specific content on Wikipedia. The thread that connected these different resources together was the subject of Historical Jesus and I aggregated the different pieces of knowledge together in my brain. My current knowledge of Historical Jesus draws from these different resources./li /ul pWhen we learn about our primary interests, learning is different. Our desire is often for emActive Learning/em. We not only want to know the subject, but we want to immerse ourselves in the execution and debate of it too. Much of this is not only collating general knowledge, as I did with Historical Jesus, but learning about more localised information too. When I learn about music, I want to know about local bands. I want to know when my favourite bands are coming to my area. I want to hear about music groups, gigs, and conventions near to me. I want to know about special offers in local music stores. In a nutshell, I don#8217;t just want to consume, I want to emparticipate/em./p pIn recent years, computers and the Internet have made both Active and Passive Learning incredibly accessible. The web has bolstered passive learning resources, and active learning has been thrusted towards us with online communities, social networking, community groups and discussion boards. No matter what you want to know about, the Internet can help you in both Passive and Active ways/p pBut lets get back to emWhere In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?/em. Although I could not stand the concept of emedutainment/em at the time, what that game emdid/em do that intrigues me is that it delivered education to people automatically. The education was emassociative/em: topics and concepts were delivered to you as you played the game./p pI find this really interesting. I find the concept of linking and associating different types of education and resources fascinating. This also holds huge opportunity for the desktop./p pA great example is a href=http://banshee-project.org/Banshee/a. For those who have been living under a rock for the last three years, Banshee is a media player. I have it open all day, delivering a fresh dose of metal to me all day long. Banshee not only plays music, but it brings many diverse music related activities together under the same roof: digital music, Internet radio, CD playing and ripping, meta-data editing etc. The Banshee bods have done a great job./p pBut the most interesting feature to me is its a href=http://www.last.fm/Last.fm/a integration. When I listen to a song (such as Hammerfall right now). The artist and track is posted to a href=http://www.last.fm/user/jonobaconmy Last.fm account/a. This in itself is not all that exciting. But what Banshee does that emis/em exciting is look up the artist of my current playing song and use Last.fm to make recommendations. It delivers those recommendations to me inside the application. That is emwicked cool/em. Sure, I could go and look up these recommendations on the Last.fm website, but I am unlikely to do that. Banshee does the work for me. The result is that this simple feature has helped me discover literally hundreds of new bands. Banshee linked and aggregated the data, and this resulted in better learning for this important part of my interests./p pYesterday I installed the a href=http://getsongbird.com/new 1.0.0 release of Songbird/a. Songbird is an iTunes like Open Source media player that holds some stunning promise. They have used Mozilla technologies and GStreamer to build a cross-platform media player. I know some of the guys who work on Songbird and wanted to give it a try: I had last used an early snapshot. While I don#8217;t want to turn this into a review (if you folks want a review, let me know and I will write one up), it ships with some interesting features that build on some of the concepts seen in Banshee. Oh, and Amarok folks, I know your media player has probably been doing all of this for years, so hold fire. img src=http://www.jonobacon.org/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif alt=:) class=wp-smiley / /p pIn Songbird, for the artist of the song I am currently listening to, Songbird will go and look up data from a number of resources and bring it together. It grabs a summary blurb, discography, members, tags and links of the artist from Last.fm, a photo slideshow from Flickr, videos from YouTube, and News from Google News. Again, I could find this information separately without ever installing Songbird, but Songbird not only aggregated this content, but it linked it to an opportunity of curiosity (what I am listening to). I might never typically go and look for more details about emHammerfall/em, but when I am listening to it, it often triggers my interest. Songbird satisfies that curiosity before I even know I have it./p pAnother great feature of Songbird that builds on emactive learning/em is that it uses a href=http://www.songkick.com/Songkick/a to look up all of the artists in my playlist to see if there are concerts and shows in my area. With this feature I now have a list of all the up and coming shows for the artists I like (including all those obscure metal bands). This provides me with direct access to the local community and opportunities. That is one stunningly helpful and outrageously cool feature. My media player is stopping being a place to merely consume music, and instead becoming a place to aggregate everything these is about the music I listen to and the artists that make it./p pThis is an even more valuable proposition for a desktop. Just think of the range of types of media we consume and the applications that we use to consume them. Now mix this with the range of online sources of education and content. It could be really interesting to pull together these threads into one cohesive experience. I love that Totem in Ubuntu can stream BBC content to me, but I would love it to show me some information and products about that content too. I would love Evolution to provide me with an ability to easily look up terms, acronyms and products in my emails with a single click. When I look at photos in F-Spot I would love to see pricing for prints and frames to put my pictures in./p pIt would also be fascinating to identify the work-flow of education in a computer. From sourcing content in Wikipedia, how does it flow through text editors, communications tools, online services and publishing mediums? How can we identify these links in the chain and optimise them?/p pBig subject. I know. But huge potential./p