If "the Earth Stood Still," would you save your dog?

Save RC Cola!  Without it we're goners.

As a Web-o-centric publicity stunt for the much-hyped "The Day the Earth Stood Still," 20th Century Fox has created an amusing site called "The Earth's Vital List," which asks fans worldwide to assemble a list of things they'd 'save' if the world ended.  Heavy, eh? 

Of course not.  Any possibility that this question would be taken seriously was nuked on arrival by a bit from the press release, which, after immodestly declaring this project "a truly interactive application of global proportions," quotes a Fox marketing executive as saying, "I plan to put macaroni and cheese at the top of my list."

And that appears to be the path consumers have followed.  Which is not to say that the nine pages of dogs people have listed are frivolous choices (there are only four pages of "moms").  But it is to say that just about everything else is:  For every "modern medicine" that the more serious players have elected to save, there are 50 X-boxes, tweezers, ukuleles, Yodas, "me's," marijuanas, unicorns and roller coasters. So basically, if faced with the dilemma of which things to save in the event of a total apocalypse, the mass consciousness would elect to save ... everything.  Sounds about right.

Probably the biggest knock on video games is that no matter how much time you devote to them, the skills you acquire while playing don’t much translate back to real life. It’s always a little sad to hear about the guy who won the Madden NFL challenge, earning the title of best video quarterback in the nation, or the kid who cannot be outflanked in the newest army game. Champion or otherwise, get them out on a real gridiron, or a live battlefield, and it would be game over before the end of the first scream. 

Lee Olson playing Rock Band drums. (Courtesy L. Olson)

That’s why it’s so strange and compelling to pull up a YouTube video of Lee Olson playing virtual drums on Rock Band, one of the class of smash-hit music games —  in which gamers play along to real songs with simplified instruments — that’s remaking gaming culture and giving a huge revenue boost to the music industry. His hands are a blur as the drumsticks flash around the pads to nail the beats, rolls and fills in perfect time. And equally difficult to see is the line between this virtual drumming and the real thing.

The idea of Rock Band is simple: The game delivers the notes of each song to the player in the form of a conveyor belt of colored dots. To keep up with the song, players must “strike” the note on their toy instrument at the moment it’s about to fall off the end of the belt.

Think about it a minute, and you realize how well drumming is suited to video game simulation. A Fender Stratocaster has six strings and 21 frets — that’s 126 individual notes and tens of thousands of chord combinations, a variety not quite represented by the Rock Band guitar’s five oversized buttons. A standard drum set, however, only has about eight surfaces. The Rock Band set has five. And unlike stringed instruments, horns or winds, you don’t need to learn complicated fingerings, or how to breathe, blow, bow, strum or pick. All you gotta do is bang.

Olson, 30, plays on the game’s expert setting, where the player has to hit most or all of the notes from the real song. In a metal rock cut like System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” that means hitting 1,232 notes in a little more than three minutes.

And that’s exactly what Olson does. Flawlessly nailing 100% of the notes in a Rock Band song is called an FC — for full combination — and in this game, that’s the badge of stardom. Olson, an experienced drummer in real life, has FC’d about half of the nearly 500 songs Rock Band has made available. Many of those performances are archived on YouTube, where Olson’s videos have been viewed close to 6 million times.

    The DrumRocker from Ion, built by real e-drum engineers.

“There are a lot of really great drummers online — famous drummers,” he said from his home in Virginia, referring to drummers who play “irl” — in real life. “But I’m getting a lot more views than most of them. And that’s just the weirdest thing.”

Yet it makes sense if you think about it, he said. “It’s a deadly combination. People love video games, and they love drums. Even people who don’t play are fascinated.”

Which about sums up the weird brilliance of Rock Band, a new form of entertainment that plugs into two major culture currents at once — video games and pop music — by giving people who’d never pick up an instrument the illusion of being a long-haired axmaster for a day. It’s air guitar turned up to 11.

But Rock Band drummers won’t let their instrument be dismissed with a rimshot.

“It’s easy for people to say it’s not real drumming — it’s just a plastic drums set. But it’s a lot more like drumming than most people like to think it is,” Olson said. “It really completes a lot of what you’d need to learn how to play for real.”

Ian Drennan — gamer code name v1g1lance — is proof positive of that assertion. Drennan bought Rock Band last November and began playing at the medium difficulty setting. After two months of practice, he’d hit the expert level and decided he liked playing enough to buy a set of real electronic drums. (E-drums are the equivalent of an electric guitar or electric keyboard — same basic shape as the acoustic kind.)

“As much as I like to say I would’ve eventually bought a kit,” said Drennan from his home in Atlanta, where he’s a software designer, “I don’t believe I would have, had I not actually picked up the game and started playing it.” Rather than seeing the game as a substitute for the real thing, Drennan sees it more as a tool to speed up learning, and make it fun. “I don’t think learning drums in Rock Band will make someone a good drummer. But it’s a really good way to build that initial limb independence, timing and coordination that you need to become one.

“If you play a song in the game enough, you get the muscle memory down,” he said. “So when you take it upstairs to the real kit, you’re just changing what you’re hitting, you’re not changing when you’re hitting it.” The game’s elite drummers hasten to point out that Rock Band’s drums are still a simplified version of the genuine article. The small game kit — basically just four pads and a pedal for the kick drum — not only breaks often but is missing a few key parts, and doesn’t permit much nuance with volume or rhythm — the elements of what drummers call groove.

And not all drum teachers are on board with the game’s virtues, either. When I told my own instructor, Jonathan Brown, about how neat I thought the game was, his skepticism was clear.

“Kids today more often than not will take the easy way out on things,” he said. “To become half-decent at any instrument takes hours of weekly practice for years. But you can master Rock Band in a couple of weeks. You do the math.”

So I might skip the trip to Best Buy this time around. But even Brown’s  concerns might be addressed eventually. The limitations of the game drum sets are already vanishing. The digital instrument maker Alesis just built a kit for Rock Band that’s more or less indistinguishable from lower-end electronic percussion products the company has been selling for years.

Twenty-year-old Calin Scoggins of Dallas even figured out how to plug his $2,000 Roland electronic kit directly into the game. He’s taken advantage of the professional-quality kit’s fidelity to widen the gap between himself and the competition. Scoggins — alias Someguy913 — is ranked No.1 among the thousands of Rock Band expert drummers listed on Scorehero.com, the game’s de facto record-keeping site. Scoggins has the top score on nearly 80 different songs.

“You obviously want to have fun when you’re doing it,” Scoggins said. “Because if you don’t have fun you’re going to get burnt out really fast.”

See? He’s already starting to sound like a real rock star.

Google has released a set of tools that allows bloggers and Web designers to embed entire books in their blog posts. Though Google's Book Search has let Web cruisers flip through digitized volumes for a few years now, this embeddable technology might do for public domain books what YouTube's embeddable player did for online video. How about the utopian world where every other website you go to, someone has embedded an interesting book and turned it to just the right page so you can begin flipping through it?

This doesn't work for all books, of course. Plenty of copyrighted books come without any sort of preview (You can't read a single page of John Grisham's "The Firm," for instance), and others do strange things like omit random pages to make reading the whole thing impossible (see Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow").  But for many academic works, classics whose copyright has expired and books that were never copyrighted in the first place, the Google preview works just fine.  Try it yourself.

And after you do, read the first three chapters of "The Heart of the Internet," (after the jump) and write a 200-word summary to share with the class.

NOTE: I moved the embedded book to after the jump.  Our blogging platform (Typepad) appears to have trouble rendering the book in Internet Explorer.  It works fine in Firefox.

— David Sarno

Over at Zazzle, where users can customize hats, shoes, mugs, bags and a bunch of other products with their own original designs, there's been a flurry of political T-shirt making. The result is a kind of user-generated commerce -- which, like YouTube and other user video sites -- creates a spectrum of results, from the top-notch on down (and down).

The 2008 election is spawning a kind of T-shirt arms race. A search on the site for Sarah Palin already yields more than 2,500 results. John McCain gets about 9,000, and Barack Obama about 20,000 (Joe Biden paraphernalia is in very short supply.)

"V.P. = Very Pretty" reads one shirt with a photo of Palin. "Omamma" says another. 

And showing how online T-shirt design is barely a half-step behind the blogosphere, current events-wise, there are already Zazzle shirts riffing on the "lipstick on a pig" nontroversy, and from both sides of the aisle. One simply says: "Palin: pig with lipstick" above the image of a big hog. Another declares, "This Little Piggy Likes Palin."

Obama and McCain also have plenty of supporters and detractors. In a strike back against criticism of Obama for his stint as a community organizer in Chicago's troubled neighborhoods: "Jesus was a community organizer," argue the shirts. (Not everyone agrees.)

Obama also has a healthy number of funny shirts that don't deify him quite so much, like the one that says "NO" and uses his famous campaign logo (with a red line through it) for the 'O'.

Zazzle has actually organized T-shirts into "anti," to make it easier to find shirts attacking the candidate you don't like. 

McCain takes some good licks here. "No country for old men," says one shirt. Another with a picture of the candidate's face declares, somewhat ungrammatically, "Less Jobs, More Wars." McCain has plenty of supporters too, but it has to be said that -- at least judging by the shirts on Zazzle -- they're not as imaginative when it comes to slogans.  "McCain is my homeboy"?

Zazzle sells your T-shirt for you and gives you a meager 10% royalty -- which doesn't seem like much, given that you did all the hard work of coming up with a catchy slogan and typing it in to the Internet. It's hard to see anyone making much money that way. Still, it's fun to design your own shirts -- here's what I came up with after fiddling around with it for a few minutes. These puppies are going to go like hotcakes.

-- David Sarno

(no, i didn't actualy list the shirt)

The first of Arianna Huffington's local news hubs, Huffington Post Chicago, is up, and from the looks of it the Windy City is an inspired launching pad for the announced local site model. For starters, Chicagoans have John Cusack, who wrote the first blog post on the site's Chicago slate. The Greek food (at least according to Huffington herself ) is divine. And there's a certain Midwestern modesty that makes boasts about Chicago never seem grating. (Getting all excited over a lake, for example... presh!) When L.A. or New York loves itself, outsiders call it "arrogance" or "narcissism." But in Chicago, it's just hometown pride.

With this site, the HuffPost is building on their own improvement to the Drudgian aggregation model they've applied with great success to the political realm -- where linking trumps reporting.  Huff Chicago reportedly employs only one paid staffer, who will no doubt toil on the reader's behalf to find the best that other Chicago web sites have to offer. As of today, breaking news headlines link overwhelmingly to stories from the Tribune and Sun-Times, even adopting the old-fashioned headline style that made print media famous (Cop Shot Wednesday Dies, for instance, and No Convention Spot for Blago--referring to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, an Obama ally).   

The site is another sign that we're being weaned off newspapers as we know them, with their expensive staffs and their writerly approach to the world. For the service/lifestyle stuff, the HuffPost Chicago front page offers Chicago's Cheapest Gas, which is a simple link to the database on Chicagogasprices.com. Seriously, why pay a reporter to whip up a few amusing paragraphs about gas prices, when you can just write a headline, link and vroom -- your readers have everything they need? Same goes for the headline that advises you to "Slow Down and Eat Well at the Slow Food Chicago's Heirloom Tomato Fest." It's not offering you a food writer's metaphor-filled trip through the history and lore of tomatoes and the Slow Food movement. One juicy link is enough for the reader to decide if she wants to go, or not.

Though the Chicago Tribune is the beneficiary of plenty of HuffPo's link love, it's still not sure whether to be proud or worried about the new arrival.  Writes columnist Phil Rosenthal:  "It's not clear whether this local Post fills a void or creates its own real estate in the media landscape, which is in retreat and recession on several fronts of late." 

Make that several, plus one.

-- Maria Russo

Looks like Google Maps has now added a couple of cool, traveler-friendly features.  A new "More" button allows you to overlay your map with both user-uploaded photos (see above) and regional Wikipedia entries  (below).  You can also upload and tag your own images to G-Maps via a service called Panoramio, a Spanish company that Google bought last year whose large database of photos has already been made available on Google Earth.

For the traveler interested in ditching  heavy travel guides and going digital, the Wikipedia entries dotting landmarks both major and minor would seem to be a good way to investigate the neighborhood before you leave the hostel.

Cities like Paris are already papered over with both photos and in Wikipedia articles, to the point where it's hard to see the streets underneath if you have these options turned on.  You might think that if this feature catches on, and people all over the world begin upload their images to Google Maps, that the world as we know it might drown in a giant pile of photographs.  Though I guess that's already sort of happening.  Ah, who needs geography anyway?

Note: I have been advised that I'm several weeks late on this news.  But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you.

Drums: the realest Rock Band instrument

Probably the biggest knock on video games is that no matter how much time you devote to them, the skills you acquire while playing don’t much translate back to real life. It’s always a little sad to hear about the guy who won the Madden NFL challenge, earning the title of best video quarterback in the nation, or the kid who cannot be outflanked in the newest army game. Champion or otherwise, get them out on a real gridiron, or a live battlefield, and it would be game over before the end of the first scream. 

Lee Olson playing Rock Band drums. (Courtesy L. Olson)

That’s why it’s so strange and compelling to pull up a YouTube video of Lee Olson playing virtual drums on Rock Band, one of the class of smash-hit music games —  in which gamers play along to real songs with simplified instruments — that’s remaking gaming culture and giving a huge revenue boost to the music industry. His hands are a blur as the drumsticks flash around the pads to nail the beats, rolls and fills in perfect time. And equally difficult to see is the line between this virtual drumming and the real thing.

The idea of Rock Band is simple: The game delivers the notes of each song to the player in the form of a conveyor belt of colored dots. To keep up with the song, players must “strike” the note on their toy instrument at the moment it’s about to fall off the end of the belt.

Think about it a minute, and you realize how well drumming is suited to video game simulation. A Fender Stratocaster has six strings and 21 frets — that’s 126 individual notes and tens of thousands of chord combinations, a variety not quite represented by the Rock Band guitar’s five oversized buttons. A standard drum set, however, only has about eight surfaces. The Rock Band set has five. And unlike stringed instruments, horns or winds, you don’t need to learn complicated fingerings, or how to breathe, blow, bow, strum or pick. All you gotta do is bang.

Olson, 30, plays on the game’s expert setting, where the player has to hit most or all of the notes from the real song. In a metal rock cut like System of a Down’s “Chop Suey,” that means hitting 1,232 notes in a little more than three minutes.

And that’s exactly what Olson does. Flawlessly nailing 100% of the notes in a Rock Band song is called an FC — for full combination — and in this game, that’s the badge of stardom. Olson, an experienced drummer in real life, has FC’d about half of the nearly 500 songs Rock Band has made available. Many of those performances are archived on YouTube, where Olson’s videos have been viewed close to 6 million times.

    The DrumRocker from Ion, built by real e-drum engineers.

“There are a lot of really great drummers online — famous drummers,” he said from his home in Virginia, referring to drummers who play “irl” — in real life. “But I’m getting a lot more views than most of them. And that’s just the weirdest thing.”

Yet it makes sense if you think about it, he said. “It’s a deadly combination. People love video games, and they love drums. Even people who don’t play are fascinated.”

Which about sums up the weird brilliance of Rock Band, a new form of entertainment that plugs into two major culture currents at once — video games and pop music — by giving people who’d never pick up an instrument the illusion of being a long-haired axmaster for a day. It’s air guitar turned up to 11.

But Rock Band drummers won’t let their instrument be dismissed with a rimshot.

“It’s easy for people to say it’s not real drumming — it’s just a plastic drums set. But it’s a lot more like drumming than most people like to think it is,” Olson said. “It really completes a lot of what you’d need to learn how to play for real.”

Ian Drennan — gamer code name v1g1lance — is proof positive of that assertion. Drennan bought Rock Band last November and began playing at the medium difficulty setting. After two months of practice, he’d hit the expert level and decided he liked playing enough to buy a set of real electronic drums. (E-drums are the equivalent of an electric guitar or electric keyboard — same basic shape as the acoustic kind.)

“As much as I like to say I would’ve eventually bought a kit,” said Drennan from his home in Atlanta, where he’s a software designer, “I don’t believe I would have, had I not actually picked up the game and started playing it.” Rather than seeing the game as a substitute for the real thing, Drennan sees it more as a tool to speed up learning, and make it fun. “I don’t think learning drums in Rock Band will make someone a good drummer. But it’s a really good way to build that initial limb independence, timing and coordination that you need to become one.

“If you play a song in the game enough, you get the muscle memory down,” he said. “So when you take it upstairs to the real kit, you’re just changing what you’re hitting, you’re not changing when you’re hitting it.” The game’s elite drummers hasten to point out that Rock Band’s drums are still a simplified version of the genuine article. The small game kit — basically just four pads and a pedal for the kick drum — not only breaks often but is missing a few key parts, and doesn’t permit much nuance with volume or rhythm — the elements of what drummers call groove.

And not all drum teachers are on board with the game’s virtues, either. When I told my own instructor, Jonathan Brown, about how neat I thought the game was, his skepticism was clear.

“Kids today more often than not will take the easy way out on things,” he said. “To become half-decent at any instrument takes hours of weekly practice for years. But you can master Rock Band in a couple of weeks. You do the math.”

So I might skip the trip to Best Buy this time around. But even Brown’s  concerns might be addressed eventually. The limitations of the game drum sets are already vanishing. The digital instrument maker Alesis just built a kit for Rock Band that’s more or less indistinguishable from lower-end electronic percussion products the company has been selling for years.

Twenty-year-old Calin Scoggins of Dallas even figured out how to plug his $2,000 Roland electronic kit directly into the game. He’s taken advantage of the professional-quality kit’s fidelity to widen the gap between himself and the competition. Scoggins — alias Someguy913 — is ranked No.1 among the thousands of Rock Band expert drummers listed on Scorehero.com, the game’s de facto record-keeping site. Scoggins has the top score on nearly 80 different songs.

“You obviously want to have fun when you’re doing it,” Scoggins said. “Because if you don’t have fun you’re going to get burnt out really fast.”

See? He’s already starting to sound like a real rock star.

Google has released a set of tools that allows bloggers and Web designers to embed entire books in their blog posts. Though Google's Book Search has let Web cruisers flip through digitized volumes for a few years now, this embeddable technology might do for public domain books what YouTube's embeddable player did for online video. How about the utopian world where every other website you go to, someone has embedded an interesting book and turned it to just the right page so you can begin flipping through it?

This doesn't work for all books, of course. Plenty of copyrighted books come without any sort of preview (You can't read a single page of John Grisham's "The Firm," for instance), and others do strange things like omit random pages to make reading the whole thing impossible (see Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow").  But for many academic works, classics whose copyright has expired and books that were never copyrighted in the first place, the Google preview works just fine.  Try it yourself.

And after you do, read the first three chapters of "The Heart of the Internet," (after the jump) and write a 200-word summary to share with the class.

NOTE: I moved the embedded book to after the jump.  Our blogging platform (Typepad) appears to have trouble rendering the book in Internet Explorer.  It works fine in Firefox.

— David Sarno

Over at Zazzle, where users can customize hats, shoes, mugs, bags and a bunch of other products with their own original designs, there's been a flurry of political T-shirt making. The result is a kind of user-generated commerce -- which, like YouTube and other user video sites -- creates a spectrum of results, from the top-notch on down (and down).

The 2008 election is spawning a kind of T-shirt arms race. A search on the site for Sarah Palin already yields more than 2,500 results. John McCain gets about 9,000, and Barack Obama about 20,000 (Joe Biden paraphernalia is in very short supply.)

"V.P. = Very Pretty" reads one shirt with a photo of Palin. "Omamma" says another. 

And showing how online T-shirt design is barely a half-step behind the blogosphere, current events-wise, there are already Zazzle shirts riffing on the "lipstick on a pig" nontroversy, and from both sides of the aisle. One simply says: "Palin: pig with lipstick" above the image of a big hog. Another declares, "This Little Piggy Likes Palin."

Obama and McCain also have plenty of supporters and detractors. In a strike back against criticism of Obama for his stint as a community organizer in Chicago's troubled neighborhoods: "Jesus was a community organizer," argue the shirts. (Not everyone agrees.)

Obama also has a healthy number of funny shirts that don't deify him quite so much, like the one that says "NO" and uses his famous campaign logo (with a red line through it) for the 'O'.

Zazzle has actually organized T-shirts into "anti," to make it easier to find shirts attacking the candidate you don't like. 

McCain takes some good licks here. "No country for old men," says one shirt. Another with a picture of the candidate's face declares, somewhat ungrammatically, "Less Jobs, More Wars." McCain has plenty of supporters too, but it has to be said that -- at least judging by the shirts on Zazzle -- they're not as imaginative when it comes to slogans.  "McCain is my homeboy"?

Zazzle sells your T-shirt for you and gives you a meager 10% royalty -- which doesn't seem like much, given that you did all the hard work of coming up with a catchy slogan and typing it in to the Internet. It's hard to see anyone making much money that way. Still, it's fun to design your own shirts -- here's what I came up with after fiddling around with it for a few minutes. These puppies are going to go like hotcakes.

-- David Sarno

(no, i didn't actualy list the shirt)

The first of Arianna Huffington's local news hubs, Huffington Post Chicago, is up, and from the looks of it the Windy City is an inspired launching pad for the announced local site model. For starters, Chicagoans have John Cusack, who wrote the first blog post on the site's Chicago slate. The Greek food (at least according to Huffington herself ) is divine. And there's a certain Midwestern modesty that makes boasts about Chicago never seem grating. (Getting all excited over a lake, for example... presh!) When L.A. or New York loves itself, outsiders call it "arrogance" or "narcissism." But in Chicago, it's just hometown pride.

With this site, the HuffPost is building on their own improvement to the Drudgian aggregation model they've applied with great success to the political realm -- where linking trumps reporting.  Huff Chicago reportedly employs only one paid staffer, who will no doubt toil on the reader's behalf to find the best that other Chicago web sites have to offer. As of today, breaking news headlines link overwhelmingly to stories from the Tribune and Sun-Times, even adopting the old-fashioned headline style that made print media famous (Cop Shot Wednesday Dies, for instance, and No Convention Spot for Blago--referring to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, an Obama ally).   

The site is another sign that we're being weaned off newspapers as we know them, with their expensive staffs and their writerly approach to the world. For the service/lifestyle stuff, the HuffPost Chicago front page offers Chicago's Cheapest Gas, which is a simple link to the database on Chicagogasprices.com. Seriously, why pay a reporter to whip up a few amusing paragraphs about gas prices, when you can just write a headline, link and vroom -- your readers have everything they need? Same goes for the headline that advises you to "Slow Down and Eat Well at the Slow Food Chicago's Heirloom Tomato Fest." It's not offering you a food writer's metaphor-filled trip through the history and lore of tomatoes and the Slow Food movement. One juicy link is enough for the reader to decide if she wants to go, or not.

Though the Chicago Tribune is the beneficiary of plenty of HuffPo's link love, it's still not sure whether to be proud or worried about the new arrival.  Writes columnist Phil Rosenthal:  "It's not clear whether this local Post fills a void or creates its own real estate in the media landscape, which is in retreat and recession on several fronts of late." 

Make that several, plus one.

-- Maria Russo

Looks like Google Maps has now added a couple of cool, traveler-friendly features.  A new "More" button allows you to overlay your map with both user-uploaded photos (see above) and regional Wikipedia entries  (below).  You can also upload and tag your own images to G-Maps via a service called Panoramio, a Spanish company that Google bought last year whose large database of photos has already been made available on Google Earth.

For the traveler interested in ditching  heavy travel guides and going digital, the Wikipedia entries dotting landmarks both major and minor would seem to be a good way to investigate the neighborhood before you leave the hostel.

Cities like Paris are already papered over with both photos and in Wikipedia articles, to the point where it's hard to see the streets underneath if you have these options turned on.  You might think that if this feature catches on, and people all over the world begin upload their images to Google Maps, that the world as we know it might drown in a giant pile of photographs.  Though I guess that's already sort of happening.  Ah, who needs geography anyway?

Note: I have been advised that I'm several weeks late on this news.  But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you.

Google allows the embedding of books

Google has released a set of tools that allows bloggers and Web designers to embed entire books in their blog posts. Though Google's Book Search has let Web cruisers flip through digitized volumes for a few years now, this embeddable technology might do for public domain books what YouTube's embeddable player did for online video. How about the utopian world where every other website you go to, someone has embedded an interesting book and turned it to just the right page so you can begin flipping through it?

This doesn't work for all books, of course. Plenty of copyrighted books come without any sort of preview (You can't read a single page of John Grisham's "The Firm," for instance), and others do strange things like omit random pages to make reading the whole thing impossible (see Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow").  But for many academic works, classics whose copyright has expired and books that were never copyrighted in the first place, the Google preview works just fine.  Try it yourself.

And after you do, read the first three chapters of "The Heart of the Internet," (after the jump) and write a 200-word summary to share with the class.

NOTE: I moved the embedded book to after the jump.  Our blogging platform (Typepad) appears to have trouble rendering the book in Internet Explorer.  It works fine in Firefox.

— David Sarno

Over at Zazzle, where users can customize hats, shoes, mugs, bags and a bunch of other products with their own original designs, there's been a flurry of political T-shirt making. The result is a kind of user-generated commerce -- which, like YouTube and other user video sites -- creates a spectrum of results, from the top-notch on down (and down).

The 2008 election is spawning a kind of T-shirt arms race. A search on the site for Sarah Palin already yields more than 2,500 results. John McCain gets about 9,000, and Barack Obama about 20,000 (Joe Biden paraphernalia is in very short supply.)

"V.P. = Very Pretty" reads one shirt with a photo of Palin. "Omamma" says another. 

And showing how online T-shirt design is barely a half-step behind the blogosphere, current events-wise, there are already Zazzle shirts riffing on the "lipstick on a pig" nontroversy, and from both sides of the aisle. One simply says: "Palin: pig with lipstick" above the image of a big hog. Another declares, "This Little Piggy Likes Palin."

Obama and McCain also have plenty of supporters and detractors. In a strike back against criticism of Obama for his stint as a community organizer in Chicago's troubled neighborhoods: "Jesus was a community organizer," argue the shirts. (Not everyone agrees.)

Obama also has a healthy number of funny shirts that don't deify him quite so much, like the one that says "NO" and uses his famous campaign logo (with a red line through it) for the 'O'.

Zazzle has actually organized T-shirts into "anti," to make it easier to find shirts attacking the candidate you don't like. 

McCain takes some good licks here. "No country for old men," says one shirt. Another with a picture of the candidate's face declares, somewhat ungrammatically, "Less Jobs, More Wars." McCain has plenty of supporters too, but it has to be said that -- at least judging by the shirts on Zazzle -- they're not as imaginative when it comes to slogans.  "McCain is my homeboy"?

Zazzle sells your T-shirt for you and gives you a meager 10% royalty -- which doesn't seem like much, given that you did all the hard work of coming up with a catchy slogan and typing it in to the Internet. It's hard to see anyone making much money that way. Still, it's fun to design your own shirts -- here's what I came up with after fiddling around with it for a few minutes. These puppies are going to go like hotcakes.

-- David Sarno

(no, i didn't actualy list the shirt)

The first of Arianna Huffington's local news hubs, Huffington Post Chicago, is up, and from the looks of it the Windy City is an inspired launching pad for the announced local site model. For starters, Chicagoans have John Cusack, who wrote the first blog post on the site's Chicago slate. The Greek food (at least according to Huffington herself ) is divine. And there's a certain Midwestern modesty that makes boasts about Chicago never seem grating. (Getting all excited over a lake, for example... presh!) When L.A. or New York loves itself, outsiders call it "arrogance" or "narcissism." But in Chicago, it's just hometown pride.

With this site, the HuffPost is building on their own improvement to the Drudgian aggregation model they've applied with great success to the political realm -- where linking trumps reporting.  Huff Chicago reportedly employs only one paid staffer, who will no doubt toil on the reader's behalf to find the best that other Chicago web sites have to offer. As of today, breaking news headlines link overwhelmingly to stories from the Tribune and Sun-Times, even adopting the old-fashioned headline style that made print media famous (Cop Shot Wednesday Dies, for instance, and No Convention Spot for Blago--referring to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, an Obama ally).   

The site is another sign that we're being weaned off newspapers as we know them, with their expensive staffs and their writerly approach to the world. For the service/lifestyle stuff, the HuffPost Chicago front page offers Chicago's Cheapest Gas, which is a simple link to the database on Chicagogasprices.com. Seriously, why pay a reporter to whip up a few amusing paragraphs about gas prices, when you can just write a headline, link and vroom -- your readers have everything they need? Same goes for the headline that advises you to "Slow Down and Eat Well at the Slow Food Chicago's Heirloom Tomato Fest." It's not offering you a food writer's metaphor-filled trip through the history and lore of tomatoes and the Slow Food movement. One juicy link is enough for the reader to decide if she wants to go, or not.

Though the Chicago Tribune is the beneficiary of plenty of HuffPo's link love, it's still not sure whether to be proud or worried about the new arrival.  Writes columnist Phil Rosenthal:  "It's not clear whether this local Post fills a void or creates its own real estate in the media landscape, which is in retreat and recession on several fronts of late." 

Make that several, plus one.

-- Maria Russo

Looks like Google Maps has now added a couple of cool, traveler-friendly features.  A new "More" button allows you to overlay your map with both user-uploaded photos (see above) and regional Wikipedia entries  (below).  You can also upload and tag your own images to G-Maps via a service called Panoramio, a Spanish company that Google bought last year whose large database of photos has already been made available on Google Earth.

For the traveler interested in ditching  heavy travel guides and going digital, the Wikipedia entries dotting landmarks both major and minor would seem to be a good way to investigate the neighborhood before you leave the hostel.

Cities like Paris are already papered over with both photos and in Wikipedia articles, to the point where it's hard to see the streets underneath if you have these options turned on.  You might think that if this feature catches on, and people all over the world begin upload their images to Google Maps, that the world as we know it might drown in a giant pile of photographs.  Though I guess that's already sort of happening.  Ah, who needs geography anyway?

Note: I have been advised that I'm several weeks late on this news.  But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you.

Obama, McCain, Palin T-shirt arms race goes nuclear

Over at Zazzle, where users can customize hats, shoes, mugs, bags and a bunch of other products with their own original designs, there's been a flurry of political T-shirt making. The result is a kind of user-generated commerce -- which, like YouTube and other user video sites -- creates a spectrum of results, from the top-notch on down (and down).

The 2008 election is spawning a kind of T-shirt arms race. A search on the site for Sarah Palin already yields more than 2,500 results. John McCain gets about 9,000, and Barack Obama about 20,000 (Joe Biden paraphernalia is in very short supply.)

"V.P. = Very Pretty" reads one shirt with a photo of Palin. "Omamma" says another. 

And showing how online T-shirt design is barely a half-step behind the blogosphere, current events-wise, there are already Zazzle shirts riffing on the "lipstick on a pig" nontroversy, and from both sides of the aisle. One simply says: "Palin: pig with lipstick" above the image of a big hog. Another declares, "This Little Piggy Likes Palin."

Obama and McCain also have plenty of supporters and detractors. In a strike back against criticism of Obama for his stint as a community organizer in Chicago's troubled neighborhoods: "Jesus was a community organizer," argue the shirts. (Not everyone agrees.)

Obama also has a healthy number of funny shirts that don't deify him quite so much, like the one that says "NO" and uses his famous campaign logo (with a red line through it) for the 'O'.

Zazzle has actually organized T-shirts into "anti," to make it easier to find shirts attacking the candidate you don't like. 

McCain takes some good licks here. "No country for old men," says one shirt. Another with a picture of the candidate's face declares, somewhat ungrammatically, "Less Jobs, More Wars." McCain has plenty of supporters too, but it has to be said that -- at least judging by the shirts on Zazzle -- they're not as imaginative when it comes to slogans.  "McCain is my homeboy"?

Zazzle sells your T-shirt for you and gives you a meager 10% royalty -- which doesn't seem like much, given that you did all the hard work of coming up with a catchy slogan and typing it in to the Internet. It's hard to see anyone making much money that way. Still, it's fun to design your own shirts -- here's what I came up with after fiddling around with it for a few minutes. These puppies are going to go like hotcakes.

-- David Sarno

(no, i didn't actualy list the shirt)

The first of Arianna Huffington's local news hubs, Huffington Post Chicago, is up, and from the looks of it the Windy City is an inspired launching pad for the announced local site model. For starters, Chicagoans have John Cusack, who wrote the first blog post on the site's Chicago slate. The Greek food (at least according to Huffington herself ) is divine. And there's a certain Midwestern modesty that makes boasts about Chicago never seem grating. (Getting all excited over a lake, for example... presh!) When L.A. or New York loves itself, outsiders call it "arrogance" or "narcissism." But in Chicago, it's just hometown pride.

With this site, the HuffPost is building on their own improvement to the Drudgian aggregation model they've applied with great success to the political realm -- where linking trumps reporting.  Huff Chicago reportedly employs only one paid staffer, who will no doubt toil on the reader's behalf to find the best that other Chicago web sites have to offer. As of today, breaking news headlines link overwhelmingly to stories from the Tribune and Sun-Times, even adopting the old-fashioned headline style that made print media famous (Cop Shot Wednesday Dies, for instance, and No Convention Spot for Blago--referring to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, an Obama ally).   

The site is another sign that we're being weaned off newspapers as we know them, with their expensive staffs and their writerly approach to the world. For the service/lifestyle stuff, the HuffPost Chicago front page offers Chicago's Cheapest Gas, which is a simple link to the database on Chicagogasprices.com. Seriously, why pay a reporter to whip up a few amusing paragraphs about gas prices, when you can just write a headline, link and vroom -- your readers have everything they need? Same goes for the headline that advises you to "Slow Down and Eat Well at the Slow Food Chicago's Heirloom Tomato Fest." It's not offering you a food writer's metaphor-filled trip through the history and lore of tomatoes and the Slow Food movement. One juicy link is enough for the reader to decide if she wants to go, or not.

Though the Chicago Tribune is the beneficiary of plenty of HuffPo's link love, it's still not sure whether to be proud or worried about the new arrival.  Writes columnist Phil Rosenthal:  "It's not clear whether this local Post fills a void or creates its own real estate in the media landscape, which is in retreat and recession on several fronts of late." 

Make that several, plus one.

-- Maria Russo

Looks like Google Maps has now added a couple of cool, traveler-friendly features.  A new "More" button allows you to overlay your map with both user-uploaded photos (see above) and regional Wikipedia entries  (below).  You can also upload and tag your own images to G-Maps via a service called Panoramio, a Spanish company that Google bought last year whose large database of photos has already been made available on Google Earth.

For the traveler interested in ditching  heavy travel guides and going digital, the Wikipedia entries dotting landmarks both major and minor would seem to be a good way to investigate the neighborhood before you leave the hostel.

Cities like Paris are already papered over with both photos and in Wikipedia articles, to the point where it's hard to see the streets underneath if you have these options turned on.  You might think that if this feature catches on, and people all over the world begin upload their images to Google Maps, that the world as we know it might drown in a giant pile of photographs.  Though I guess that's already sort of happening.  Ah, who needs geography anyway?

Note: I have been advised that I'm several weeks late on this news.  But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you.

Huffington Post Chicago: the Linky City

The first of Arianna Huffington's local news hubs, Huffington Post Chicago, is up, and from the looks of it the Windy City is an inspired launching pad for the announced local site model. For starters, Chicagoans have John Cusack, who wrote the first blog post on the site's Chicago slate. The Greek food (at least according to Huffington herself ) is divine. And there's a certain Midwestern modesty that makes boasts about Chicago never seem grating. (Getting all excited over a lake, for example... presh!) When L.A. or New York loves itself, outsiders call it "arrogance" or "narcissism." But in Chicago, it's just hometown pride.

With this site, the HuffPost is building on their own improvement to the Drudgian aggregation model they've applied with great success to the political realm -- where linking trumps reporting.  Huff Chicago reportedly employs only one paid staffer, who will no doubt toil on the reader's behalf to find the best that other Chicago web sites have to offer. As of today, breaking news headlines link overwhelmingly to stories from the Tribune and Sun-Times, even adopting the old-fashioned headline style that made print media famous (Cop Shot Wednesday Dies, for instance, and No Convention Spot for Blago--referring to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, an Obama ally).   

The site is another sign that we're being weaned off newspapers as we know them, with their expensive staffs and their writerly approach to the world. For the service/lifestyle stuff, the HuffPost Chicago front page offers Chicago's Cheapest Gas, which is a simple link to the database on Chicagogasprices.com. Seriously, why pay a reporter to whip up a few amusing paragraphs about gas prices, when you can just write a headline, link and vroom -- your readers have everything they need? Same goes for the headline that advises you to "Slow Down and Eat Well at the Slow Food Chicago's Heirloom Tomato Fest." It's not offering you a food writer's metaphor-filled trip through the history and lore of tomatoes and the Slow Food movement. One juicy link is enough for the reader to decide if she wants to go, or not.

Though the Chicago Tribune is the beneficiary of plenty of HuffPo's link love, it's still not sure whether to be proud or worried about the new arrival.  Writes columnist Phil Rosenthal:  "It's not clear whether this local Post fills a void or creates its own real estate in the media landscape, which is in retreat and recession on several fronts of late." 

Make that several, plus one.

-- Maria Russo

Looks like Google Maps has now added a couple of cool, traveler-friendly features.  A new "More" button allows you to overlay your map with both user-uploaded photos (see above) and regional Wikipedia entries  (below).  You can also upload and tag your own images to G-Maps via a service called Panoramio, a Spanish company that Google bought last year whose large database of photos has already been made available on Google Earth.

For the traveler interested in ditching  heavy travel guides and going digital, the Wikipedia entries dotting landmarks both major and minor would seem to be a good way to investigate the neighborhood before you leave the hostel.

Cities like Paris are already papered over with both photos and in Wikipedia articles, to the point where it's hard to see the streets underneath if you have these options turned on.  You might think that if this feature catches on, and people all over the world begin upload their images to Google Maps, that the world as we know it might drown in a giant pile of photographs.  Though I guess that's already sort of happening.  Ah, who needs geography anyway?

Note: I have been advised that I'm several weeks late on this news.  But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you.

Google Maps adds user photos and Wikipedia

Looks like Google Maps has now added a couple of cool, traveler-friendly features.  A new "More" button allows you to overlay your map with both user-uploaded photos (see above) and regional Wikipedia entries  (below).  You can also upload and tag your own images to G-Maps via a service called Panoramio, a Spanish company that Google bought last year whose large database of photos has already been made available on Google Earth.

For the traveler interested in ditching  heavy travel guides and going digital, the Wikipedia entries dotting landmarks both major and minor would seem to be a good way to investigate the neighborhood before you leave the hostel.

Cities like Paris are already papered over with both photos and in Wikipedia articles, to the point where it's hard to see the streets underneath if you have these options turned on.  You might think that if this feature catches on, and people all over the world begin upload their images to Google Maps, that the world as we know it might drown in a giant pile of photographs.  Though I guess that's already sort of happening.  Ah, who needs geography anyway?

Note: I have been advised that I'm several weeks late on this news.  But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you.