There’s a group you can join and petition against those big entertainment industries suing P2P services, it’s called EFF or Electronic Frontier Foundation.  This site explains what the group is all about and how they are fighting to promote progress in arts and science.  I don’t know how they are aiming to beat this, but it’s interesting to look through they mission statement and if it intrigues you enough and you feel very strongly about the freedom of downloading music online, join the foundation or sign the petition.  Hopefully, the big time industries don’t use your info from the site to hack in and find a way to sue you for copyright infringement.

In doing research on my paper for the copyright debate, I came across this article about how Radiohead started this precedence of putting their 7th album, In Rainbows, online for a name-your-own-price deal. This dude from Nine Inch Nails did a sort of experiment to see how well his friend’s album would do if it was a pay $5 for a quality recordings or just get it for free. Many more opted for downloading it for free making him upset at the results. Then putting his own recordings up online he made about $750,000 in only three days… probably b/c Nine Inch Nails has a bigger fan base than his friend. But anway, I thought it was interesting that other artists were trying this approach out and finding benefits to it instead of trying to sue all of us P2P users.

This article on TechCrunch is about social networking environments, FriendFeed and Socialthing. There exists websites similar to facebook where you know what all your friends are doing online. The article talks about how Socialthing is easier to use and works with gmail and facebook to register your friends without having to enter in the information again. I know through this class how huge web 2.0 and social websites are, but I don’t think I could ever get into something like this. I spend almost my entire day on my computer, but I have more work to do than to search around to see my friend’s new blog post…no offense.

I came across an article releasing news that a gmail application called G-Archiver has tapped into user’s gmail accounts taking all of the data.  It’s a scary thought to think your personal e-mails are freely distributed to these scamming programmers. The article continues to mention it is the user’s own fault that they put their information in a third party application without knowing much about it.  Many companies that use gmail’s features don’t realize gmail has the right to forward information if they are legally obligated to give it.  The article ended by saying you’d be lucky to even get a mention from gmail that your information was provided to another source.  I thought gmail was the best e-mail application ever… but i guess there are some downfalls with it as well.

Apparently, there’s another University giving out iPhones. This article I found is pretty interesting…Oklahoma Christian University thinks its important to give incoming students an iphone over a laptop. I wonder what kind of deal was worked out with Apple. There’s also a youtube video kinda mocking the Apple ads. The school seems to be pro-Apple all the way.

Online chatting, in my opinion, has decreased in popularity due to other means of instant communication like text messaging. I found this article about AOL’s move to “open” their chatting to other competitors.  This allows interfaces to be used on different services similar to AOL, like Adium (a chat service for Mac users).  The article also mentions the merging of gmail as a chatting service.

I didn’t even know half of these existed…but I do LOOOOOVE shortcuts.

check on some helpful shortcuts and their popularity results from this site I found where people vote on their favorite shortcut… apparently ctrl+T is for new tab is the favorite, and that’s the one I actually use too.

I found a blog dedicated to those who love typography. It may sound a little silly, but type actually brings up lots of issues to blog about. This one I found praises small caps, all its abilities, and why it should be used more often. For those, uninterested in that topic, there’s also lots of cool examples of type uses and wallpapers to use. I think its coolio.

Wikipedia for the printing and graphic communication industry. It isn’t as developed as THE wikipedia, but this site offers basic definitions and related articles for terms in the print world. I signed up for the account, and I believe it will be helpful to me in the future…and maybe for you if you check it outtttttttt.

We see it almost everyday…at least I do. The colorful Google logo is now as recognizable as Nike or NBC. Here’s an article brought to you by the graphic designer herself, explaining how she came about the iconic logo for the web.