What is it with network television's season-ending obsession with job loss? By D. K. Holm Special to MSN Entertainment

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Unemployment Lines

If the vastness of television somehow taps in to both the zeitgeist and mass subconscious of our culture at the same time, what are we to make of the 2006-2007 season finales? What fears or worries are producers touching on? What national upheaval are we going through that only the cultural antennae of television have picked up? Because almost every season finale ended on a similar note: Someone, somewhere in the show, lost a job.

Actually, it's a little more complicated than that, at least insofar as there was a great deal of variation on this common theme. The simplest version saw Assistant D.A. Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) on "Law & Order" hand in his resignation after his boss, Arthur Branch (Fred Dalton Thompson), minimized McCoy's role in a celebrity murder trial. Branch didn't accept it, and the viewer's assumption was probably meant to be that McCoy would be back next season (though the political aspirant Thompson won't).

Meanwhile, over on "Criminal Minds," Supervisory Special Agent Aaron "Hotch" Hotchner (Thomas Gibson) spent most of the hour trying to justify his employment as head of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis unit to his boss, Erin Strauss (Jayne Atkinson, of "24"). The episode's surprise ending had upstart newcomer and senator's daughter Special Agent Emily Prentiss (Paget Brewster, who came in to replace Lola Glaudini) assigned the undercover task of helping Strauss end Hotchner's career.

In the medical world, "Grey's Anatomy" ended with several people not getting the job of chief of surgery at Seattle Grace, which reverted back to Dr. Webber (James Pickens Jr.), while George's wife, Callie (Sara Ramirez), was named chief resident, a job Bailey (Chandra Wilson) wanted. Meanwhile, George ( T.R. Knight) failed his intern test and chose to leave Seattle Grace altogether.

On "House," the eponymous acerbic physician (Hugh Laurie) managed to lose all his little ducklings: Foreman (Omar Epps) quit earlier in the season, Chase (Jesse Spencer) was impulsively fired, and Cameron (Jennifer Morrison) resigned in solidarity with Chase. Are there any doctors left in this "House"?

Other shows have further variations. The whole of the current season of "The Shield" has been preoccupied with Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) holding on to his job in the face of much opposition. "Boston Legal" wrapped up its third season with Jerry "Hands" Espenson (Christian Clemenson) back at the firm; "Veronica Mars" ended the season (and the series) with Keith Mars' (Enrico Colantoni) future as police chief in question; the last few episodes of "30 Rock" dealt in part with Jack Donaghy's (Alec Baldwin) executive position in jeopardy; the whole future of "The Unit" now hangs on a governmental probe; the incident-heavy finale of "Ugly Betty" had Daniel (Eric Mabius) resign his editor's post to his brother/sister Alexis. On "My Name Is Earl" the titular character lost his recently-landed job because he chose to sacrifice himself so that another might go free. And Homer Simpson has been going back and forth on his safety inspector job at the nuclear power plant, though it is only one of about 156 jobs Homer has had on "The Simpsons" over the years.

Finally, on the only network program that is actually about ordinary old jobs, "The Office" ended the season with Michael (Steve Carell), Jim (John Krasinski) and Karen (Rashida Jones) all failing to get the new corporate position, which turns out to be Jan's job (and she is subsequently fired). When Michael fails to get it, he returns and takes back his old position as Scranton branch manager, kicking Dwight (Rainn Wilson), whom he'd assigned as a replacement, back downstairs. Oh, and to our surprise, Ryan ( B.J. Novak), whom we didn't know had even applied for it, does get Jan's old job.

Clearly America is worried about its jobs. Or maybe it is only Hollywood writers and show runners, whose guild is poised for a joint East and West Coast simultaneous strike.

But movies were there first. Back in the late 1990s, Hollywood issued so many films on the theme of the horror of the workplace that it was almost a genre unto itself. Call it heroic alienation. Some of the premiere films in the cycle were "American Beauty," "Office Space," "Fight Club," "In the Company of Men," and "Clockwatchers." Meanwhile, television, which has always alternated, especially in sitcoms, between the household setting and the workplace, began to evince a greater anxiety about jobs and survival on the job.

What's curious about most shows set in the workplace is how much fundamental equanimity there is among co-workers. Sure, there's the occasional spat, affair, or competition, contrived to punch up a story line. But for the most part, staff members all love each other so much. "Grey's Anatomy" takes this to extremes, with its constant closet fumblings and roundelays of inter-office romance. This surely runs counter to the experience of most working Americans, who hate all their co-workers just as much as their co-workers hate them back.

This is where "The Office" excels, as it does in so many other areas. There is a palpable tension among the fellow employees of Dunder-Mifflin, who otherwise have nothing in common. Yet they cling to their unrewarding jobs just as you or I do, fearful of change and of losing a certain income. Television, in its monolithic bumbling, apparently has stumbled onto something with its season-ending exploitation of viewers' subterranean fears of being dumped from their jobs. Clearly, other shows and new series developers would be wise to get with the program and start exploring with more realism the essential experiences of American life, or face their own form of cancellation. Or in the words of Donald Trump, "You're fired."

--
Plotted by http://evrewhere.com/andrew/

TELEVISIONfiRM

Top Chef Criticizes Gordon Ramsay, Hell's Kitchen
By Probst Fan
"I try to treat the [Top Chef] contestants the way I would treat the cooks in my kitchen - you have to be firm, you have to criticize them, but you do it in a way to build them up, not rip them apart." Colicchio said he works nights so ...
Reality TV Scoop - http://www.realitytvscoop.com/

Going on television.
By tewalkerjr
You get a call from your pr firm: "Can you be on 'Morning Call' tomorrow around 9 am?" The answer to this question, unless you will be on an airplane at that time, is "Yes." Dentist appointments, meetings with the CEO, whatever -- it all ...
What I've Learned So Far - http://tewalkerjr.com/blog

fyi: Google Alert - television firm

News Alert for: television firm

Law firms forced to shed marketing aversion
In Business Las Vegas - Henderson,NV,USA
Many immediately think of high-profile and often silly television, radio and billboard ads that are still a staple of personal injury and traffic ticket ...
See all stories on this topic

Declaring Independence
On Wall Street - New York,NY,USA
It offers a variety of television and radio advertisements for local campaigns. The program also gives brokers access to training for qualified retirement ...
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Ad:bree : The furture of Social Networking (Niche Marketing)

3 more executive requires as well:

 

- regionally displaced

- high strung live sales environment

- mandatory scheduled breaks

- salary +quarterly bonus variable upon delivered deliverable

- understands, has done, Media Sales

- long tail thinker

- understands SEO

- needs a change of job; but not location / yet

So ad:bree its a new sales world right? / sorry, sales environment.

How many of you get it?
How many want to seriously use its potential to sell a group of dis-similar products?
Or are just peeping Toms?

http://www.adbree.com/profiles/blog/show?id=795648%3ABlogPost%3A1237#add-comment

The value is in the niche networking, the ability to put on holsters and fire it out like the old west virtually. you can taunt your competition. You can harass your local vendors for betting prices publicly. You can change the way you do business. This is the first Social Network i Have seen with a purpose -- however yet defined.

Day Two: How the South of France Does Nightlife

Cannes Newbie Matthew Creamer Finds All Manner of Angels on La Croisette

 

By Matthew Creamer

Published: June 19, 2007

CANNES (AdAge.com) -- Because Cannes has long played host to lavish celebrations of art (film) and art-like substances (porn and ads), it's easy to forget, amidst the expected glamor, a simple fact about this culture. The French, let's just agree, might know film and literature and wine, but they have a strange idea of what nightlife should be.

Matthew Creamer gets down with French night life.

Take the goings on at the restaurant Baoli late Monday night. This was the setting mostly: a lovely, open-air scene, wonderful Asian-inspired food and wine, great conversation with our host, Initiative. But as the hour grew near midnight something changed. It's hard to know exactly when, but if I had to throw out a guess I'd go with the moment the DJ played Robbie Williams' 1997 hit "Angels." I once saw a documentary that argued this song's ascendancy symbolized the death of Britpop, the dashing of the hopes credible Labor government and shattering of the whole late 1990s Cool Britannia zeitgeist. I thought that was hyperbole. I'm a believer now, though, after witnessing the sight of a few dozen attractive, successful professionals swaying their arms in the air in unison to the chorus:

"And through it all she offers me protection
a lot of love and affection
whether I'm right or wrong
and down the waterfall
wherever it may take me
I know that life wont' break me
when I come to call she wont forsake me
I'm loving angels instead"

Cheese clearly is a large part of the Cannes diet, and I'm not talking about Camembert. Was there some ironic intent? Hard to say, and even if there was, it was erased by what came next. "Angels" begat "Hotel California" begat "Should I Stay or Should I Go" begat "Magnificent Seven" begat "Year of the Cat" begat "Sweet Home Alabama" begat "Sweet Dreams." To make it throb just a little, the DJ turned up the volume to deafening levels on the choruses. The strobes flipped on. Sparklers were lit. Big fruity drinks with colorful, flashing ice cubes were brought to many of the tables, including Initiative's. There we took deep draughts of the sugar-alcohol-sugar solution, a taste I'd be belching up well into the next calendar day.

Was there dancing, you ask?

Oh, there was dancing.

If you told me there were a dozen different versions of "The Robot," each originating in a different Central or Eastern European country, I would, having surveyed that dance floor, believed you. It was, all said, a glorious moment for herky-jerky, mechanistic, seizure-like moves. And, by the time Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" wafted into the French night, I'm not ashamed to say I could feel my limbs starting to convulse a bit. Fortunately, this was right at the time a car arrived to spirit us away to the patio bar at the Carlton to do things I'm better at (drinking while sitting) and then the Gutter Bar (drinking while standing).

Camped out at the Carlton was James Blunt, singer of the massive drivel hit "You're Beautiful" and a performer at Cannes. He wore a black leather jacket and seemed smaller than he does in the video where he bares his torso and jumps into the ocean. But that was all for celebrities of the mainstream kind. His table was next to one dominated by media bigs like Procter & Gamble's Bernhard Glock, former Unilever and now Digitas CEO Alan Rutherford and a rotating crew of agency folk like Carat's David Verklin, Universal McCann's Nick Brien -- one of the droves who made it to Cannes without any luggage -- MediaVest's Bill Tucker, and Initiative's Richard Beaven.

But, really, it was a Robbie Williams kind of night. Just before 5 a.m., a poignant Cannes moment explained Mr. Williams continued relevance to me: A very senior agency ad exec was suffering with a persistent case of the hiccups and kindly woman from a hot creative agency advised him to "drink upside from his cup." When the afflicted exec struggled to work this out, she didn't give up. No, she walked him through it. And, you know, the hiccups stopped, a cure that facilitated, if nothing else, another round. And another round -- both the concept and the thing itself -- is nothing less than a raison d'etre in these parts.

Walking back to my hotel, La Croisette still (except for a rival journo hooking up on a street corner), I realized I'd been given some truth: There really are angels out there.

25 Sites Cnet Says is worth Noteing

To keep you ahead of the curve, we've rounded up 25 innovative Web sites and services that are well worth watching. Some of them help you design your own personalized Web site mashups; others enable you to create video mixes, build wikis, share personal obsessions, and more. But take note: A number of these sites are works in progress, and user-generated sites depend on developing a critical mass of content, which doesn't happen right away. With that in mind, check out the following dot-com destinations. One of them may become the next big Web hit.

Mashups, Maps, and More

Build your own Web feed, poll friends and strangers, and find your way with these tools.

Popfly

Popfly provides a friendly, visual way to build your own mashups.If you haven't already discovered the world of mashups, Microsoft's Popfly is a good place to start. Mashups combine multiple Web-based sites or applications to produce all sorts of useful things, such as an overlay of traffic information over Google Maps. With Popfly, you can create your own mashups--and you don't have to know a lick of code to do it. Just drag prefab building blocks, connect them, and you have an instant mashup that you can add to an existing Web page or turn into its own site. For example, you can easily produce a mashup that grabs pictures from a site like Flickr and then displays them in a rotating cube.

Yahoo Pipes

You need a little patience to learn how to build a mashup using Yahoo Pipes.Like Popfly, Yahoo Pipes lets you create your own mashups or "pipes." As with Popfly, you drag and drop prebuilt modules, and then create connections between them. But Yahoo Pipes is much harder to use than Popfly, and the way to go about building your own mashup isn't always obvious. But if you're willing to do some digging and learning, you can build very useful stuff, such as a mashup that uses Yahoo maps to show the locations of all apartments for rent in a certain neighborhood.

BuzzDash

If you were the type of child who continually asked, "But why?" BuzzDash should satisfy your endless curiosity.Are foreign movies better watched with subtitles or with dubbed dialog? Is it okay to cry at work? Who is the best center fielder of all time--Willy Mays, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Ty Cobb, or Ken Griffey, Jr.?

If these are the kinds of issues that keep you awake at night, we have a Web site for you. BuzzDash lets you participate in, comment on, and see the results of numerous quick opinion polls. The polls are organized by topic, such as movies, football, and politicians; and if you have a burning question you want answered, you can create your own survey.

Wayfaring

Wayfaring.com lets you create personalized maps, such as one that pinpoints shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.If you're obsessed with cartography, wander over to Wayfaring.com. Here you can easily create personalized maps for a walking tour of London, say, or a wine-tasting trip through Napa or a pub crawl through Seattle. The site provides the tools you'll need to build annotated maps--complete with descriptions, Web links, and photos of your favorite stops--and then post them for others to view and discuss. It's fun to check out the maps other users have created. One of my favorites: a map of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, including links to Web sites that discuss each wreck.

CircleUp

CircleUp makes social planning easier by letting you organize your contacts into different communities.Anyone who has ever tried to organize an event--or to get a group of people to respond to a simple question like "Who can drive the kids to Little League this week?"--knows how tough it is to filter and organize the answers into coherent, usable form. That's where CircleUp comes in handy. Use this site to send an e-mail or instant message to a group of people; then wait for it to return a consolidated summary of responses to you. It's simple, it's free, and it will liberate you from the recurring feeling that you're herding cats whenever you try to coordinate an activity involving more than two people.

Organizers, Searchers and Optimizers

The Web has so much information that it's hard to keep track of everything. These sites will help you pull content together and move around the Internet more efficiently.

Pageflakes

Using Pageflakes, you can customize a Web site with just the news and information you want.The Web is just as chaotic as the world--but Pageflakes can organize both of them for you. This super-customizable version of a home page enables you to pick the news and information feeds you want to read, and to specify the " flakes," or applets, you want to include. Flakes let you add all sorts of cool stuff to your page--movie times, to-do lists, a notepad, e-mail, a horoscope--even sudoku or a personal blog. If you're looking for one-stop browsing, this is it.

Spock

Spock is a search engine dedicated to finding information about people.If you spend more time than you should googling folks, you need to check out Spock.com, a search engine designed to dig up information about people. Start by typing in a name, or a search term that describe a group of people--for example, Motown Singer, or Rastafarians. The site then searches through various social networking sites such as MySpace and Friendster, along with more-general Web sites, and reports on what it finds.

For many searches, you'll get multiple categories of links. For instance, type in Barack Obama, and you'll get groupings like 'Democrat', 'Senator', and '2008 Presidential Candidate'. Click any link, and you'll find pages related to both Obama and the larger category. There are also links to photographs, tags, Obama's

Wikipedia entry, his Senate site, and so on. Spock is currently in beta form (its public launch is scheduled for sometime before September), and at the moment you need an invitation to gain access to it, but with luck you can wangle one by filling out the form on the site.

Swivel

Swivel charts everything from crime statistics to American Idol contestant popularity.Data and graph fanatics, you have a home. Swivel, holds a mind-boggling array of charts and graphs--from a line graph illustrating the relationship between wine consumption and crime in the United States over the past 30 years to a pie chart showing the percentage breakdown of bird flu cases in 14 Asian countries. But the site's most outstanding feature is its ability to integrate different charts containing seemingly unrelated data. Want to compare the national murder rate to the cost of a first-class stamp, or to total hours of media use in U.S. households, over the same period of time? Now you can.

Clipmarks

Clip elements of your favorite Web pages, and save them to your Clipmarks profile.The Internet is the best research tool in existence. That's the good news--and the bad news. Though finding information online is easy, keeping track of it all can be tough. Most people end up copying and pasting information from Web sites, printing it out, or bookmarking pages--with no good way to keep it all organized or find what they want fast.

Clipmarks solves the problem neatly by installing a toolbar that hitches on to Internet Explorer or Firefox. As you surf the Web, use the Clipmarks toolbar to clip and save sections of a page--text, graphics, and even YouTube videos. Clipping something automatically archives it under your Clipmarks profile, though you can also save it directly to your blog or send it via e-mail. You can even share your clip collections, or look at archives that other users have assembled.

OpenDNS

One reason the W eb sometimes feels poky, even when you use broadband, is the Internet's Domain Name System. When you type a URL (such as www.pcworld.com) into your browser, DNS servers must translate that alphanumeric information into a numeric IP address (such as 70.42.185.10) that Web servers and your PC can understand. Typically your ISP's DNS servers handle the translation work.

But OpenDNS speeds up the translation (called "name resolution") by handling the process on its own high-speed DNS servers. The service includes other cool time-savers, as well, such as the ability to create keyboard shortcuts. For example, instead of typing www.pcworld.com each time, you might arrange to type in the letter p and jump immediately to your favorite online destination.

Real Estate, Bookmarks, and Blogs

With these services, you can find a house, browse the Web from a single location, and make sure that your online prose never gets lost.

Trulia

Trulia gives you an idea of how much you'll have to spend when shopping for a home in a certain 'hood.There are plenty of real-estate sites on the Web, but this one comes with a twist. By combining social networking with mapping and search technology, Trulia gives you a high-tech way to find the home of your dreams. Use the different sliders and checkboxes to focus your search (price, square footage, and the all-important number of bathrooms), and Trulia will display qualifying homes that are for sale in the specified area, overlaid on a map. The site includes useful, city-specific real estate guides containing additional data on average home sale prices, most popular neighborhoods, crime statistics, and the like.

The Trulia Voices section hooks you up with other people to discuss neighborhoods, housing issues, or real estate in general. Trulia is relatively new, so that section is as yet quite sparse. But if the site gains traction, Trulia Voices may prove to be the most useful tool of all.

Tip: To view some cool time-lapse maps showing how an area (such as Las Vegas) has developed over time, hop to Trulia Hindsight.

PopURLs

Forget site hopping. Head to PopURLs, and scan all your headlines in one place.If you're an information hound, you probably spend lots of time jumping from Digg to Del.icio.us to YouTube to Fark to Google News to anything-dot-com. With PopURLs, you no longer need to waste time hopping around the Internet. An aggregator of all things informative, PopURLs features massive lists of headlines, videos, blogs, and content from all of those sites, as well as plenty of others.

One nice bonus is that you can search some of the sites--Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia, among others--straight from PopURLs. It's also easy to tweak the way PopURLs looks and works, too, including customizing the layout of the feeds so you can put the ones you view most regularly on top. The scrapbook is a particularly useful feature; just click the 'Add to Scrapbook' button next to any headline, and PopURLs will save it (and up to 19 other favorite items).

Goowy

Goowy lets you run different applications and widgets, all from the Web.For several years, observers have speculated that the Internet will become, in essence, a vast operating system, with applications built on top of it. To a great extent, that's the premise underlying Goowy. Create an account, and you can start building your own desktop, with applications for e-mail, contacts, instant messaging, file management, and more. You can also add prebuilt widgets, called "minis," to your desktop, for news, stocks, weather, and other tidbits of information.

Don't expect the site to replace your desktop at this point: Goowy lacks full-blown applications and doesn't access your hard drive. Still, it's a glimpse into what may be the future of the Internet.

BlogBackupOnline

If you have a blog and you aren't sure that your blog provider will always have a backup in case of a crash, head over to BlogBackupOnline pronto. The site is straightforward: Log in, enter information about your blog, and the site diligently backs it up every day (provided that you use one of the 11 supported blogging services--Blogger, Friendster, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Multiply, Serendipity, Terapad, TypePad, Vox, Windows Live Space, or WordPress). The site is also a great tool if you ever decide to move your blog from one platform to another. After you've backed up your blog, BlogBackupOnline can bring all of your old entries into the new service.

Ma.gnolia

Ma.gnolia is an online keeper of bookmarks, with plenty of community aspects to boot.If you're a fan of the social bookmarking site Del.i.cio.us but wish that it were a little more social--and a little less geeky--check out Ma.gnolia. As with Del.icio.us , you can save and share bookmarks and tags. But Ma.gnolia presents a far more appealing design , and it has a few nice extra talents, such as the ability to let you save snapshots of your favorite pages.

Ma.gnolia excels on the social networking front. You can join groups, share bookmarks, and browse groups and discussions for more bookmarks on topics that fascinate you. If you're strictly interested in bookmarking and tagging, Del.i.cio.us remains the best place to go. But if you want to share your findings with others, Ma.gnolia is worth a taste.

Five Ways to Create and Share

These services help you put your thoughts together and publish them on the Web, whether you're most comfortable talking, shooting video, or just typing.

Yodio

With Yodio, you can create an audio postcard that makes your picture worth a thousand words.Of course your friends and family want to see all of your pictures from your Venetian vacation--but wouldn't it be better if they could also hear your voice, telling you cool details about what they're looking at, or narrating a story regarding some gondola hijinks?

Yodio lets you combine photos with sound files to create an audio postcard. To make a recording, call a special Yodio phone number and start talking (or you can record your own MP3 file and upload it). Once you've transferred photos to the site, you can add sound and publish your postcard on the Web for others to admire. The site also has a scheme for making money from your productions, though we wouldn't bet the farm on it.

Meebo Rooms

Goal, or no goal? With Meebo's multimedia chat rooms, you can discuss videos and pictures with other fans.You may have heard about Meebo , the Web-based instant messaging program that lets you communicate with people over various IM services, such as AOL Instant Messenger and Yahoo. (See our review of Meebo.)

Well equally cool is Meebo's newest launch, Meebo Rooms, which lets you participate in multimedia chats. You'll find chat rooms on everything from sports to SpongeBob Squarepants, and the rooms support videos and photos that you can discuss with fellow fans. If you can't find a topic you're interested in, simply create a new room and post visuals for others to discuss. You can even embed rooms into your site or blog, and use them to lure people to your own Web destination.

Squidoo

Squidoo makes it easy to create (or look for) Web pages that reflect your passions.Got an obsession or special passion you want to convey to the world? Squidoo is your ticket. Using the site's simple tools, you can build a "lens" (aka, a Web page) that includes information on any topic that's close to your heart, whether it's cats or Kafka.

A lens can be quite different from a blog. With lenses, you share links to resources, book recommendations, YouTube videos, Flickr photos, eBay auction items, and other cool Web content related to a single subject. Even if you don't build your own lens, the site is worth visiting to see what others have done. You can learn a lot more about lemonade or laptop bags than you ever thought possible.

SplashCast

Build your own streaming media channel using the tools on SplashCast.For anyone who has ever dreamed of becoming a broadcast mogul, here's a quick (and free) way to get a taste of what it might be like. SplashCast lets you create your own streaming media channel that combines video, music, photos, text, narration, and RSS feeds. A wizard walks you through the steps of building your channel. Start by uploading media files from your hard drive, or point to files on other sites. Add captions, commentary, and RSS feeds, and your channel is ready to go. Once you're done finessing your channel, you can send it to friends and family, or syndicate it to blogs and social networking sites. So far, there's no way for you to make money from your channels, but the site plans to start a revenue-sharing model.

Eyespot

With Eyespot, it's a cinch to create a video mix and share it with others.To create a video all you have to do is point your cell phone, digital camera, or camcorder at something, press a button, and stay focused. The result: an instant movie. What's not so easy, though, is organizing, editing, and combining your video clips to create something aesthetically pleasing. Eyespot simplifies this process. Upload your videos to the site, and then use its tools to crop and mix them either with other clips you supply or with free video from the site. You can even add effects, transitions, and titles before publishing your video mix for the world to see.

Sites for Collaborative Work and Play

Whether you're putting together an important document or an anniversary party, these services will help get everybody involved. Also, check out a snazzy online photo editor and a new way to search.

Approver.com

Approver.com lets you keep tabs on a document while passing it around to different recipients--and track its progress.Anyone who has collaborated with multiple people on a document knows the true meaning of frustration. You have to distribute the file to the entire group, convince every person to review it by a certain date and time, and get them all to sign off on it. Approver.com lowers the pain quotient considerably. Upload the document you want to track, and the site routes it to everyone who needs to see it. It also lets you set deadlines for reviewing the document, and keep track of approvals and comments. Approver.com works with a number of apps, including Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, and Open Office; alternatively, you can use the site to create documents, and have your colleagues read them online.

Pbwiki

Create a community of opera lovers (or anything else) by building your own wiki.Though the whole world seems to know about Wikipedia these days, many people and organizations don't realize how useful it can be to build their own wiki. In business settings, it's an ideal way to share information within a group. For individuals, it's perfect for planning a get-together, organizing a fan club, or sharing memories with family members. Pbwiki makes creating miniature versions of Wikipedia a breeze. The site's simple, Web-based tools are perfect for building a wiki--you don't need to have any HTML know-how--and getting others in on the editing action.

MyPunchbowl

MyPunchbowl handles online invitations, sets up message boards, and maps your party with Google Maps.Planning a party, but unsure of what date works best for your friends? MyPunchbowl is basically Evite with a little extra kick. Like any self-respecting online invitation site, MyPunchbowl lets you create party invitations and then track who's coming, who's not, and who has yet to respond. But the site also enables you to send pick-a-date e-mail messages to see which day works best for people, set up message boards (useful for organizing things like who's bringing the vino), and produce a map of the shindig's location using Google Maps. You can also create an after-party message board where people can share comments, photos, and videos--if, um, appropriate.

Picnik

From sepia to soften, Picnik's photo editor lets you apply any number of effects. Now all we need is an old gum tree.You probably have hundreds or thousands of digital photos on your PC. And a lot of those photos would probably benefit from a little tweaking. But that doesn't mean that you have to download and install photo editing software. Picnik supplies a nice suite of tools for editing photos online. All you have to do is upload your photos, or have Picnik grab them from a site like Flickr (which doesn't have editing features), and then get to work. Picnik offers tools aplenty for performing simple editing--cleaning up red-eye or resizing photos, say--as well as doing more-extensive work, such as changing the exposure, fixing a color cast, or applying special effects.

Quintura

With Quintura, search and you shall find a standard results list, along with a visual diagram of related terms.Quintura provides a new way for you to search for things on the Internet. When you enter a search term, Quintura returns an ordinary list of results on the right-hand side, while on the left it offers a visual map (or "cloud") of related terms. Click any of these words, and the list of results changes to encompass the new term as well, which can help you narrow your search. The process may sound clunky, but it's surprisingly effective.

Alphabetical Listing

Keep an eye on these sites--you may be looking at Google 2.0. Here they are listed in alphabetical order.

Approver.com BlogBackupOnline BuzzDash CircleUp Clipmarks Eyespot Goowy Ma.gnolia Meebo Rooms MyPunchbowl OpenDNS Pageflakes Pbwiki Picnik Popfly PopURLs Quintura SplashCast Spock Squidoo Swivel Trulia Wayfaring Yahoo Pipes Yodio

The 3D Real/Virtual World Hybrid: How Far Away?

From TechCrunch.com

How long will it be until we can stroll through the streets in a virtual world that is identical to our own? Given the state of a number of technologies, not very long. Over the last couple of years we've seen Microsoft Street Side and Virtual Earth as well as similar efforts from Google. But different technologies are now being deployed that are even more interesting that the results achieved from large companies taking and processing massive numbers of photos into now-standard 3D views.

Two standouts are Microsoft's Photosynth Project and newcomer Everyscape, which Brady Forest wrote about today on O'Reilly Radar.

Photosynth

First, Photosynth. The idea is to take many pictures of a given thing or area and combine them into a 3D image. Fly around it, zoom in whatever. The results are jaw-droppingly beautiful - see the demo video above by Blaise Aguera y Arcas from earlier this year. The BBC also just announced a partnership with Microsoft; they've launched a new site using Photosynth technology that will show 3D photographic representations of historic sites around the UK (Ely Cathedral, Burghley House, the Royal Crescent, Bath, the Scottish Parliament buildings and Blackpool Tower Ballroom). For now, though, Photosynth only works on Windows machines.

Everyscape

Everyscape is a much simpler product technically but is quite a bit more useful in the near term. They turn regular 2D pictures into 3D images that look like they were taken with special cameras. Viewers can pan around a 3D area, and move from point to point. See the demo on their site to get a feel for it. The video at the top of the post was created by founder Mok Oh and seems to show features that go way beyond the early beta version of the product.

Everyscape launches this Fall, promising ten cities. Users will also be encouraged to submit their own photos to be included in the models.

The company is attacking Google and Microsoft head on in those companies' efforts to photograph the world and let people meander through it. They may have a chance - there are no special downloads required and they'll be relying on users to take many or most of the photos used in the service. Whether they make it or not is unclear, but it's fun to play with these products anyway. Good luck to them.

Fotowoosh is another service we've covered with much simpler goals than Photosynth or Everyscape: they just turn a single 2D photo into a 3D image. But the results are very cool.

'Logging on means holidaymakers never fully switch off'

More than a third of all UK travellers are unable to completely switch off when on holiday, regularly using the internet whilst abroad, according to a new survey.

Forty per cent of UK travellers admitted to going online at least twice during their trip abroad.

The key users of the internet when abroad is the 21-35 year age group, stating that the main purpose for both sexes logging on is to check and send personal emails.

However, a greater number of men than women tend to check their work emails while on holiday, with women tending to use the internet to book day trips and research the destination.

The survey of 1,769 UK adults, carried out by OnePoll, identified a growing trend among over-50s to get connected to the internet.

The 'silver surfer' generation emerged as the age group who used the internet abroad more on a daily basis than any other age group, logging on to stay in touch with loved ones: checking and sending personal emails and uploading photos and 'blogs'. 

The poll was commissioned by the 'While in Egypt Stay Connected' (WIESC) project for United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which creates metropolitan wireless networks in Egypt and is helping the country's internet infrastructure to be on par with that of other tourist destinations.

Nihal Soliman, marketing advisor for the project, said: "Given the growth of internet use whilst abroad, the WIESC project brings Egypt in line with many other tourist destinations. The project will enable travellers to use the internet more easily when on vacation in Egypt."

The WIESC project will deliver the newest wireless technology to two of Egypt's key tourist areas, Luxor and Sharm El Sheikh, to further the wireless internet access already available in select airports, cafes and fast food restaurants across the country. The project also involves a hotel connectivity programme across Egypt to facilitate in-room internet access in many 3* and most 4-5* hotels.

by Phil Davies 

Location-Based Search? Patented! Owner Plans To Sue Everyone

A patent holding company named Geomas has the rights to a broad and obvious patent on location-based search that just about every local search or online yellow pages site probably violates. The company has apparently raised $20 million from some of the growing list of investment firms drooling over the innovation-killing patent-hoarding lawsuit rewards and is kicking things off by suing Verizon for daring to put its phone book online in the form of Superpages.com. This is the type of patent that should be tossed out following the Supreme Court's Teleflex ruling, but for now it's wasting plenty of time and money in everyone's favorite courthouse for patent hoarding lawsuits in Marshall, Texas . While the article notes that it may have been "new" to think about creating location-based search when the patent was filed, that doesn't account for whether or not it was an obvious next-step. Does anyone actually believe that without this patent Verizon wouldn't have thought to put its yellow pages solution online or that Google wouldn't think of creating a local search tool? That seems difficult to believe. 28 Comments

google: brown sauce edinburgh

result: http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=32651

( thing) by iain (4.4 y) ( print)

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1 C!

Thu Sep 07 2000 at 13:42:58

I think that brown sauce is a specifically british condiment (although if anyone here knows better please let me know). There are two major brands here in the UK: HP Sauce which comes in square-section bottles, and Daddies' Sauce which comes in more traditional round bottles. Of course there are many lesser varieties and supermarket own-brand versions, but HP and Daddies' are the market leaders. The actual blend of herbs and spices used within each manufacturer's sauce is naturally a trade secret, but I will investigate a little and attempt to find out exactly what they put in this sauce. Brown sauce is a similar consistency to tomato ketchup but is, naturally, brown rather than red, and has a sharper, slightly spicy flavour, with less of the sweetness usually associated with ketchup. It's the perfect accompaniment to bacon sandwiches and chip butties , and can also be used in cooking: I find that one or two dollops of brown sauce whenever a recipe calls for Worcestershire sauce can produce a subtle but tasty variant of the original dish. achan tells me that HP Sauce is available in Canada, further proof that they are indeed a civilised nation who not only know how to spell but also appreciate the finer things in life!

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(thing) by LordOmar (7.9 mon) (print)

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Tue Jan 30 2001 at 19:06:43

From: The Thorough Good Cook Sauces: 14. Brown Take a pound or two of steaks, two or three pounds of veal, lean ham, some pickings of fowl, carrots, and onions; put all these into a saucepan with a glass of water, and set it on a brisk fire. When scarcely any moisture remains, put it on a brisk fire, that the jelly may take colour without burning, and as soon as it is brown, moisten it with stock (or water), add a bunch of parsley and green onions, two bay-leaves, two cloves, and some champignons; salt it well, and set it on the fire for three hours, then strain. Dilute, little browning with your liquor, and boil it an hour over a gentle fire ; take off all the fat, and run it through a tammy.

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(thing) by ikeleib ( 3.2 y) (print)

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Fri Nov 29 2002 at 22:38:43

Brown Sauce is also called Sauce Espagnole and is one of the five mother sauces. Originally, Brown Sauce called for Bayonne Ham, veal , and partitridge. The currently accepted version comes from veal stock. There are several sauces that derive from Brown Sauce or demi-glace such as Polvrade, Medere, Chasseur, Bordelaise, Charcutier, and Robert. You will need: brown veal stock 5 pts mirepoix 8 oz tomato paste 2 oz pale roux 6 oz Procedure: Brown the onions from the mirepoix in the hot oil; add the remainder of the mirepoix and continue to brown Add the tomato paste; saute until lightly caramalized Add the brown stock; bring to a simmer Whip the roux into the stock. Simmer for appoximately 1 hour; skim surface as necessary Strain through a cheesecloth. Source: The New Professional Chef (5th Edition)

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(thing) by furballphat (3.4 y) (print)

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1 C!

Sat Nov 30 2002 at 0:33:43

Here in Edinburgh, brown sauce is a very different substance. Although we do still have HP and Daddies', it is not what will get produced when you ask for brown sauce.

Brown sauce, or chippie sauce as it is more commonly know is a thin liquid that comes from a nameless white plastic bottle. The sauce itself is very runny, dark brown in colour and has a sharp, acidic taste and very little in the way of a blend of herbs.

Chippie sauce is by far the most popular topping for chips around here and after getting served in any chip shop you will invariable be asked, "Salt and sauce?". Despite its popular appeal in the chip shop, you can't seem to get it in any supermarket or corner shop. Some chip shops have started selling old lemonade bottles filled with the forbidden sauce on their shelves, but there is no indication as to where this sauce comes from.

In my experience Edinburgh and the areas around it are the only places you can get chippie sauce. Elsewhere in Scotland and England they put a dollop of the thick sauce described above on top of your chips, in my opinion ruining them.

Sound Lands on Google Earth (CSM)

30-plus sounds are now available as "The Wild Soundscape Tour," a free add-on layer to Google Earth, the downloadable navigation tool that allows users to scan the planet using steerable satellite images. Through Bernie Krause's Web site, one can now not only see the Amazonian rain forest, but hear the monkeys, jaguars, birds, and musical frogs that call it home.