Brokekid.net

Did you know? You can create flowcharts and diagrams in Google Docs using the "Insert Drawing" option.

This new feature in Google Docs is like the "Drawing Canvas" of Microsoft Office and, on a closer look, you’ll find that the shapes drop-down in Google Docs is remarkably similar to what you have in Office.

…To create a drawing in Google Docs, open a document, presentation, or a spreadsheet, and click Insert > Drawing. Then, select the type of object you’d like to insert from the toolbar.

inSTEDD

A looming issue in many developing countries is the lack of access to technology and internet service to begin addressing serious issues.

One simple technology that is not lacking is cell phones and inSTEDD is leveraging their ubiquity to begin solving serious health and emergency related problems.

inSTEDD combines cell phones and the internet to “communicate, share and analyze information more seamlessly, make better decisions, and take more effective action in the face of a public health threat or natural disaster.”

From ReadWriteWeb -

…members of the InSTEDD team spoke about how they have been building SMS and mapping applications, in the Mekong Delta in the jungles of South East Asia…Some of the issues InSTEDD came across in the Mekong Delta were figuring out multilingual issues, human interaction design for 140 characters, ad-hoc team creation, and data integration of disconnected systems.

The people in villages need more data, however currently they don’t get this. It’s not necessarily a technical problem, but economic and sociological problems. For example 3G may cover the area, but inhabitants can’t afford it. Another issue is that mobile phones don’t necessarily support the different languages spoken by people, or different people speak different languages and so collaborating is difficult.

The team behind inSTEDD has developed three open source technologies to begin bridging cultural, economic and technological hurdles so that they can continue supporting communities throughout the developing world.

Geochat – combines SMS, Twitter and email but offers SMS-only interaction for users. The system was built with the user in mind, making it simple to use on an SMS platform.

Mesh4x – works via HTTP and SMS, syncing data from diverse sources. It supports open standards and is a Semantic Web application.

Evolve – aims to provide collaborative decision making around data streams, sifting through information and identifying emerging health-related events. It also has automatic data classification and tagging.

It’s interesting to see such innovative technology being implemented in an appropriate cultural and technological context.

For more information -

changefeed: ->@instedd: Open Collaboration Experiment around Emergency Alerts, Disasters, Market Recalls, and .. http://tinyurl.com/c5mlsu

Hayley_Anne: Great use of technology to detect disease outbreaks! RT @BT_TGRI RT @ushahidi: Excellent ABC news coverage of InSTEDD: http://is.gd/p3cn

IntraHealthOPEN: Eric Rasmussen – OPEN Council Member and head of InSTEDD in the News via @changefeed->@instedd: http://tinyurl.com/d4mv88

inSTEDD.org

Did you know?

There have been a lot of new updates over the past week, I’m going to run through a few -

• Find and replace and drawing are now available on Google Docs
• Google Checkout for Nonprofits has been extended to 2010
• Google Services for Websites has been launched to help hosting providers to extend their services to include more Google tools like AdSense, Custom Search and Site Search
• Google Gadgets now allow “now allow administrators to upload gadgets to Google Apps that only members of their domain are able to see and add to their Google Sites”
• In Gmail Labs, you have the option to turn on Picasa, Yelp, YouTube and Flickr previews. A url in an email linking to any these sites will bring up a thumbnail of the image or video at the bottom of the message.

(via artculture.com)

From Obama Art

(via artculture.com)

From Obama Art

Did you know?

[FYI, more advanced than the usual Tips & Tricks]

YouTube recently added a subtitle feature allowing you to create further context and subtitling for your videos. The OUseful blog has figured out how to add relevant tweets from Twitter to your video as subtitles.

Why would you want to do that?

Tweeting in the US has become a ubiquitous habit and chances are if you’re having a live event, people are talking about it on Twitter. Recently popular events like Power Shift ’09 and SXSW can be found on Twitter by searching for the hashtags #powershift09 or #SXSW. Hashtags allow other Twitterers to follow these topics and keep up to speed on the latest news.

So say Idealist is video recording our upcoming Los Angeles Career Fair and we let people know ahead of time what our event’s hashtag is #cfLA09. When the career fair is over and the video is finished with production, we could search for hashtags relavent to the fair using search.twitter.com. From this data we could create a file to add to YouTube that would overlay the tweets on top of our video.

What’s the point?

Context is the point. By adding insight from our community as our event is happening offers more than just the message we’re conveying, we’re seeing the reaction to our message conveyed through Twitter.

Want to see this in action? Go to YouTube.com/Idealist and play the main video.

You’ll need to turn on Closed Captioning to see the text. Check it out!

(via artculture.com)

From Obama Art