HELIOLITH

Ok, the main purpose of this entry is to draw your attention to that column over on the right entitled “michael’s Bookmarks.” Its a syndicated, daily updated rss feed (via feedroll) of my latest favorite links that I’ve saved through the free service known as delicious. So it’s a sort of “linkblog,” stuff that I think is very worthwhile reading (or listening, etc.) but that I don’t necessarily find the time to devote a log entry to.

##delicious digression::
By the way, if you haven’t created a free list of bookmarks at delicious, I highly recommend you register now. You could read the about page first if you want, but I am confident you’ll be impressed with the system. You add a bookmarklet to your browser (or an extension in firefox) and you can share your links with anyone, by simply sending them a link to your page, or a link to an rss feed of your page. Your tags themselves are searchable, and you can get feeds of other people’s lists, or even of common tags across all the lists. The meta-tagging system is a lot like flickr, if you know about that one.
##end delicious digression

So in short, delicious gets way more links than helio7, and if I had the time, many of them would surely deserve an entry here.

Here are a couple of examples:

Right now, the 3rd entry is entitled, “programming initiative for girls” which is about an education program called Rapunsel, which is targeted at young women (ages 11-13) to learn simple programming skills to design, create, and control a their own character, or pet. Jill Walker, over at misbehaving.net quotes one of the program directors as saying, “while middle school girls are as interested in and as good at technology as their male peers, only 7% of programmers in the US are women. That’s why this project is targeting girls at this age.” If you goto their site you can even vote for your favorite toon! I hope their program spreads far and wide.

Another couple that are musically oriented are the excellent mp3 downloads of Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawyer Fred von Lohmann’s closing argument in the landmark Grokster v. MGM case that I blogged about last Thursday. The remarks are really excellent without the techno re-dub, but the dj remix adds a joyous, underground ambience that I really enjoyed. mp3 #1, mp3 #2. Oh thanks Cory of BB!

Oh and you have got to go check out slambush.net watch the video on the main page. It’s like one in a series of many hip hop artists and poets that are entering in a “slam Bush” contest. The video editing on the “trailer” is tight & is guaranteed to either give you goosebumps, make you giggle, or hopefully, both!

I don’t think there’s a genre of music now without a large group of dissidents against the current administration, go check out Punk Voter’s extensive collection of pro-voting, end-the-madness information (thanks Ginevra!). I mean even Springsteen came out against him… who’s next? Britney Spears? Oh no, I forgot, she promised never to question him, I saw it in Fahrenheit 9/11!