It’s official! According to The New England Journal of Medicine, social networks (who you associate and drink beer with, not who you call a “friend” on Facebook) have a huge influence on weight gain and hence obesity.
The Washington Post has created an excellent narrated animation which brings home this point by plotting these findings in an evolving chart
Local “kingpin” Lolly Jackson might be running into some financial difficulties or maybe just discovered some taste, as he’s put one of his prized possessions, a pink 1959 Cadillac Elderado up for sale on Autotrader. It’s the same car featured in this Car Torque article.
Wannabe buyer’s should contact Lolly directly and might need to go over to his “place” for a bit of a skop and giggle.
Of course I could be completely mistaken and there’s another Lolly in Jo’burg who’s selling a pink Cadillac…
[thanks Darren for the link]
A while back I posted about a fantastic online and offline mapping application called Schmap (available on Windows and Mac *shortly*), which takes planning a trip to a foreign destination to another level.
Here is a description of the Schmap guides from the web site:
Schmap’s series of digital travel guides integrates dynamic maps with useful background reading, suggested tours, photos from the traveling public and reviews by local correspondents (for sights and attractions, hotels, restaurants, bars, parks, theaters, galleries, museums and more) to profile 200 destinations throughout the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Anyway, imagine my surprise when I was contacted by their Managing Editor to say that one of the photos I took in Seattle last year and posted on Flickr (licensed under a Creative Commons license) was short-listed for inclusion in the third edition of the Schmap Seattle Guide, to be published later this month. I had the option of opting out of course but why would I want to do a silly thing like that?
It seems that the Schmap team rummage around on Flickr in search of CC-licensed pictures for inclusion in their various city map guides and then contact the photographers for permission to use them, with attribution of course.
Basically, this strategy makes a lot of sense for both parties. Schmap get to choose from a massive database of free pictures, which are tagged, and therefore they don’t need to hire a professional photographer. The amateur photographer gets to have his or her picture published in a guide that will be downloaded and used by hundreds of thousands of people and can wallow in the novelty. Simply brilliant and the CC-license is of course the enabler in this whole process.
Now if only my picture actually gets selected…
UPDATE: My picture was eventually included in the third edition of the Schmap Seattle Guide
Who would ever have thought that the anti-blogosphere poster child, David Bullard, would be crowdsourcing on his very own blog not even 2 months after the highly publicised Bullardgate affair?!
For those of you unfamiliar with the neologism “crowdsourcing”, it basically refers to the action of harassing the collective intelligence of a mass of netizens (often bloggers) by using the Internet as a communication channel.
In this case of brilliant irony, I doubt that Bullard is aware of the term or realises that by asking his readers to come up with a new name for his print column and offering a bottle of champers as a reward; he is effectively “crowdsourcing”…
Could this be proof that the Net and the open, sharing philosophy behind it just really makes sense and unconsciously transforms it’s biggest critics? Whatever the case, if you’re up to the challenge why not give Mr. Bullard a helping hand…
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