Video of the Day: Internet Recycling Network

A global recycling network allows members to pass on unused items and help keep them out of landfills. The website Freecycle enables its 6 million members worldwide to recycle through barter and give stuff away. Fred Katayama reports from New York.

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Looking For Someone? Ask Spock

Social networking is rapidly making the Internet less about facts, figures and databases and more about people -- finding people, connecting people and learning about people.

That's making the Web a more dynamic place, but with so many social networking options, how can you make sense of it all? You could spend all day searching a dozen different sites, not knowing who or what you'll find.

That's where Spock.com comes in. It's not another social network -- but rather it's a new people search concept that makes finding people you care about easier. That could either celebrities, politicians and such that simply interest you, or drilling down to people you actually know.

You can search by name or simply attributes and descriptors, like "Syracuse alum" or "web designer."

For instance, try this search for web designers from San Francisco. See what comes up. The search isn't entirely perfect but you'll see a variety of good hits that are well organized with information on each entry that is presented pretty clearly, including relevant links to go next for further information or to contact individuals.

The beauty of a site like Spock.com, however, is how open-ended it is. Try experimenting for yourself. Try entering several different types of searches and see what comes up for you. You may find Spock.com to be another online tool that really adds up to helping your life.

This post was brought to you by your friends at Spock.com.

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Oh, The Excitement of Watching Cheese Age!

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Video: It's Not YourSpace, It's OurSpace Parents Say

MySpace.com has a reputation for being the premiere online teen hangout -- but perhaps it is undeserved. A recent survey reveals that nearly 40 percent of MySpace users are between the age of 35 and 54. Facebook.com says its fastest growing demographic for its users is older than 25.

Is the Internet getting old? What do kids think of all this?

Tamsen Fadal has the story.

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Save Some Green for the Greens

In golf, it comes down to two things -- your concentration and your mind and the gear you've got.

You can take care of your head because now you can just go online to get the best golf gear with the best golf deals.

You know Saveongreen.com is the real deal because it was created by golfers, for golfers, originally as an online golfing community.

And Save On Green works with many different retailers, who tailor deals for the site. There is no need to scour websites looking for a deal, purchasing a product and then realizing that it could have been purchased cheaper. When you shop at Save On Green you will get the best price possible.

The site was created to help offer the beginning golfer to the expert golfer a one-stop shop to find deals on products they need to start, or improve, their golf game. There is also a place to request a deal. Once a request is sent, SaveOnGreen.com will search for the best deal for you!

And since golfers have other interests too, the website also includes a section for other deals like electronics, travel, coupons, etc. It really is one stop shopping for all Internet shopping--whether you are a golfer or not!

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Teaching, Avatar-to-Avatar

Under the guise of his avatar, Aaron Uhrmacher from Text 100 Public Relations Company came to an Ithaca College island on Second Life to present to a class, also in the guise of their avatars. No plane ticket needed to get to this island.

There in a virtual world, students' avatars from Kim Gregson's Qualitative Research class sat in a virtual amphitheatre on the side of a hill while Uhrmacher presented them with real-world information. After the presentation, the students typed in questions and Uhrmacher responded verbally.

Second Life is an Internet-based virtual world that enables its members to play, do business, and otherwise communicate with each other through avatars. Second Life has its own economy, through which members can purchase land and create a virtual island, monitoring who is allowed on the island and what kind of activity can take place there.

"This is a great opportunity for the students; they get to meet people they never would otherwise on a regular basis. They don't just hang out there -- this is education so they need real life experiences, and for a virtual world that is as real as you can get," says Gregson, pointing out that Uhrmacher won the Young PR Professional of the Year Award.

What's the educational result? "They are definitely more engaged with the topic and their papers are better; they seem to do more thinking about different questions and they spend more time on the class," says Gregson.

And that's not all. After class they invest more time blogging about theclass experience. For some there is also a language benefit. "They are talking to people from all over, not just the U.S.," says Gregson, noting that not only is it a diverse experience but also, "I hear things like, 'O.K. I can do this in Spanish' or 'Does anybody speak Italian?'"

Gregson, assistant professor of television-radio in the Roy H. Park School of Communications and a leader in the use of the Internet/alternative media, explains that that these virtual islands in Second Life amount to a server that allows those who purchase space to create a virtual island and monitor who is allowed on that island.

Gregson is currently designing and developing two islands; one island, complete with palm trees, a hill and a building that looks a lot like the college's own Park School the Ithaca College campus; this island allows those who enter, such as Uhrmacher or prospective students, to experience the Park School. The second island will be the Center for Independent Media, which will focus on media outside of the traditional means, such as blogs, podcasts, and Second Life, created by individuals.

Are there more of these virtual presentations to come? "Absolutely," says Gregson, who plans to bring a speaker from Los Angeles and one from North Carolina to the island for her Audience Research class. Beyond that, Gregson is currently working with an experimental film class who will show their work at an experimental film festival on the Ithaca College island.


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Easy Web Forms For Your Site

The thing that makes the Internet so different from television is interactivity.

The Web is all about two-way communication. Your site can't merely present information, or even compelling images and graphics.

You need to have a conversation with your visitors.

That's where a good web form comes into play.

Whether it's taking comments from customers, or collecting contact information for sales leads, your site needs forms.

Adding a simple email form or contact form to a website can often be a tough task for an inexperienced web designer. A lot of people who start a website or a small Internet business use simple templates to put a website together while having little or almost no knowledge of HTML programming.

Those who have already used Forms4Free have praised the fact that it has helped liberate them from other services that process their form remotely and use their redirect page as an advertising billboard. Also, if the customer needs further assistance, Forms4Free works with the customer, after they order the formmail file, to fix anything that might be wrong with their form or to resolve any other technical issues until the form works perfectly. It’s a valuable service that will be around for a long time.

Using formmail is important, because it enables webmasters to process their form through their own website, as opposed to using an outside service, which processes forms for the customer on their own server.

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Extreme Web Makeover: Free Fonts

Internet technology has come a long way. You can easily add the latest animations, images, sounds and video to give your website an extra 3D appeal and added pizzazz.

With all these bells and whistles, though, you need the right font to pull it together and deliver your site's basic message in a way that users can read and doesn't make them want to just move on to someone else's page that may be easier to scan.

Luckily, you can get free fonts from UrbanFonts.com, a new Web 2.0-powered site offering a wide range of both utilitarian and imaginative typefaces and dingbats for a variety of web-based and desktop tasks.

“Of course fonts may not be as exciting or as sexy as the latest in Flash technology, but they can be just as vital to the success of your web design, if not more so,” said a company spokesperson. “Without the right fonts in place, even the best looking web site can be difficult to navigate and difficult for customers to use.”

Urbanfonts.com houses thousands of free fonts and free dingbats in a variety of categories, grouped by use, alphabetically, by author and by popularity. There’s even a list of UrbanFonts favorite fonts. Fonts can be displayed with custom colors and custom text to ensure the font would be suitable in a project before downloading and installing it. Some are serif fonts, some are fun and stylish and still others are in the style of foreign languages.

All contribute to implementing successful design strategies. The dingbat section contains symbols to fit a wide variety of needs, from transportation and flowers to smilies and sports.

Urbanfonts.com makes it easy to download the best free fonts.

Make sure your website puts your personality online and visit Urbanfonts.com today!


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"i am so very happy"

That's a direct quote from Jitu, who thinks he has met the girl of his dreams thanks to Lover's Planet, the site to find russian brides.

Meeting the girl of your dreams can be real.

Lover's Planet dating service offers profiles and photos of single Russian women and Ukraine women, as well as ladies from other countries of Eastern Europe.

Each year millions of men from US, Canada and Australia meet and marry their brides from Russia and other countries of Eastern Europe. Marrying exotic international women has long been talked about.

Today the Internet and Lovers Planet brings it closer than ever.Check out Lovers Planet because it also offers important tips to be aware of when considering Russian dating. Start with their Skeptic's Introduction to Dating in a Virtual World, and move on to a comparison of Russian and American dating traditions and don't forget Lovers Planet's answer to why do so many American men turn to Russia for love?

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Online Falcon Cam Goes Live

Punxsutawney Phil was the first to predict an early spring, but now there's another sign that warmer weather is just around the corner: Harrisburg, Pa.'s peregrine falcons have returned to their nest on the 15th floor ledge of the Rachel Carson State Office Building.

To catch all the action, state officials have activated a live falcon Webcam today on the Department of Environmental Protection's Web site, Keyword: "Falcon."

"The adult peregrines have been difficult to track this year. After aperiod of unusually low activity on the ledge, they have finally begun to greet each other and exhibit breeding behavior," DEP Director of Environmental Education Jack Farster says. "Much of the courtship behavior seems to have taken place at other locations nearby."

Such courtship behavior includes food offerings by the male and displays of flight and hunting skills. The male does these acts seemingly to demonstrate his ability to be a good provider. Based on previous years' timing, the female Peregrine falcon should begin to lay eggs sometime this month. Last year, her first egg was laid March 25. The eggs began hatching on May 3 and the young falcons began to fledge, or take their first flight, in June. Also last year, for the first time, the pair produced five eggs, all of which hatched. Unfortunately, only two survived, state officials say.

This will be the eighth nesting season for this female peregrine falcon. The male is entering into his third nesting season. Carson, the original male at this site, injured on Dec. 16, 2004, still resides at ZooAmerica in Hershey.

Last year, the falcon feed was offered in two formats: Windows Media for broadband viewers and a dial-up version in Real Player. Due to theoverwhelming demand for the broadband feed, only the Windows Media format will be offered this year in order to provide as much access to the feed as possible, state officials say. The falcon cam will run daily from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m.

The live video of the falcons will continue through the end of June.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Nest production to date has produced 29 eggs, 28 hatched(15 male and 13 female); nine males and eight females have survived.

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Majority In Poll Say Bloggers Important To Journalism

A majority of Americans (55%) in an online survey say bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and 74% say citizen journalism will play a vital role, according to a new poll.

Most respondents (53%) also say the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) say the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

The results are based on a recent We Media -- Zogby Interactive poll.

The We Media survey results were released by iFOCOS and pollster John Zogby as part of an iFOCOS conference on media innovation hosted by theSchool of Communication at the University of Miami, with major support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

In the national survey of adults, 72% say they were dissatisfied with the quality of American journalism today. A majority of conference-goers who were polled on the subject agreed -- 55% say they were dissatisfied,and 61% say they believed traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.

Nearly nine out of 10 media insiders (86%) say they believe bloggers will play an important part in journalism's future.

"We are now seeing mainstream acceptance of what we call the Power of Us -- the value, credibility, and vital expression of citizen and collaborative media," says Dale Peskin, a managing director of iFOCOS, the organization that conducts the annual We Media conference. "We've arrivedat a tipping point. A new definition of democratic media is emerging in our society."

Peskin says that, until recently, many traditional news enterpriseshave been skeptical about We Media. "They were either fearful or dismissive of our 2003 research forecasting and documenting the change in the media ecosystem," he says. "Now the Zogby poll provides additional evidence that 'We Media' is an essential component -- perhaps the essential component --for the agenda for news and information into the future."

"The research documents the widespread recognition that control and influence on how we know what we know is shifting to a vastly moredistributed network of empowered individuals and organizations," says Andrew Nachison, co- founder of iFOCOS. "This obviously will have a big impact on how media organizations evolve and conduct business, but it's really about how we all discover, create, share and apply information, and that's important to all industries, to entrepreneurs, to non-profits, to governments, to individuals and to society as a whole. We are all part of the ecosystem."

The Zogby Interactive survey of 5,384 adults nationwide was conducted Jan. 30 - Feb. 1, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.4 percentage points. The Zogby Interactive survey of 77 members of the media who attended the Miami conference carries a margin of error of +/- 11.4 percentage points. While periodic audits show the results from Zogbytelephone and Internet surveys closely track each other, a companion telephone survey of this topic was not conducted.

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Site To Be YouTube For Homemade Campaign Ads

A new website has opened to host user-generated political television ads.

Campaignads.org is the first non-partisan website that will provide a vehicle for creative artists, political activists, issue advocates,political and advertising professionals to come together, decide what isimportant and then affect the debate, site organizers say.

It will be old media meets new as consumer-generated ads move from the Internet to television and other media and back, they say.

"The presidential campaign is already heating up. And today, the public have the tools and the voice to affect the debate through advertising. We are going to propel that force into motion," says Laura Crawford, founder of Campaignads.org.


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