Good Stuff

Lots on interesting stuff in this article. This weekend, although we never got the shot, I thought about how easy it would be with a car, cell phones, and digital video camera to organize a long shot from a hotel window that zooms down onto an image overhead of 7 people trying to get into a car. I was sort of planning it in my head, but alas the poker tables and other Vegas festivities got in the way....

Interesting tid-bits from this article:

Not that long ago, in 1989, the world watched demonstrators sit passively in Tiananmen Square and fight the authorities with little more than a papier-mâché Statue of Liberty. Poland's Solidarity movement had to print protest material with homemade ink made from oil because the Communist government confiscated all the printers' ink.

In 2004, in Ukraine's Independence Square, they had cell phones.

Using the phones' SMS messaging technology, demonstrators sent messages to meet to 10 or so friends, who'd each SMS the message to 10 more friends, and so on. It's called "smart-mobbing."

And

Anyone want to guess the third-most used language on the Web, behind English and Chinese? Farsi. Iran now has about 75,000 individual Web logs. That's because a young, Toronto-based Iranian journalist who publishes as Hoder created tools in Farsi to make it possible. Only 10% of the Iranian blogs could be called political; most discuss music, movies, poetry and Iranian or Western culture. "Iran's most interesting political conversations take place in taxis," said Hoder.