G-OGRAPHY: a southeast asian lady travels...

I stumbled upon this article about Tweet-A-Watt on Fast Company and followed the link to the Greener Gadgets Design Conference. A conference dedicated to the quest for sustainable consumer electronics and better solutions for the industry. They also host a design contest and on their website I saw this:



Behold, the Laundry Pod! I just love it. It makes doing manual laundry much sexier. I thought it deserved at least 2nd place. I do get that the Tweet-A-Watt is a "hipper" concept but I think they missed the point on making these gadgets accessible to a larger consumer base. I don't think everyone has a twitter profile nor would they even see any value about being able to tweet their energy consumption on a daily basis. I like how the other winning gadgets were actual objects one can use in the household to directly make an effect on the ecological footprint. More action less talk.

Do check out Greener Gadgets and this article on recycling gadgets on the New York Times

Oh, and this caught my eye too. I thought it would be a perfect buy for our current economic situation.

So I just discovered a really clever tool for people who still like to collect scraps of information- on a website, scribbled on paper, on a printed flyer- but want a way to store or index them digitally. It is called Evernote. In their own words "Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere." Best of all it's free. This video below will surely make you want to download one ASAP. It's like google notebook on roids.



I actually took it for a test drive last night. When I got home from Digital LA's networking event, I had collected a stack of business cards that were waiting to be filed. I'm telling you Evernote was just so easy to use. It had a snapshot option in it's drop down menu and in less than 15 minutes all my business cards were stored in my computer and synced to my online account (40mb allowance). I was also able to type down keywords to help me index or search for which note I want at any given time. Since everyone's brain works differently you may or may not associate a give name of an object to the object itself. I still have to explore the mobile application but I'm sure it will come in handy when I take photos of let's say a brand of a nice bottle of red wine that's in French and very difficult to remember. So far it rates high in my grache-o-meter.

Technology meets Hollywood. That's all I can say. I just came from Digital LA's event over at Area Night Club and it was definitely interesting. The crowd was a mixture of people from the digital media industry mostly online entrepreneurs and employees from the big entertainment companies. They had the place set-up like a movie premiere complete with a paparazzi over at the front door and a photo booth inside the club. The fact that this is a night club frequented by celebrities like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and, yes, Lauren Conrad should be enough of a statement. I must admit that I surprisingly had fun. Not the usual run of the mill networking event since it brands itself as an informal one. A lot of gen x and gen y demographic defining their own way of networking with a lot of the dynamics reminiscent of online social networking. I wouldn't mind going to another one of these events. Since the organizer (who currently works for Myspace) is trying to hit up different segments of entertainment a Digital LA Music Band Jam is in the line up. That I am looking forward too since I love music! I will be posting links to tonight's photos soon. For those interested to know more about this group click on this.

Last night's entry got me thinking about how the web has changed the way we record our personal history. Just think about it. Every day some person or some company creates something that controls data. As the web evolves there seems to be no limit to what you can do with all the content that is online. For example, you can apply, innovate, search, save, share, transform, network, archive, track, aggregate, browse, mash up, socialize and - my most favorite- customize information on just about anything in the known universe most especially about yourself. It is exactly because of this power that future generations would have a better understanding of how we lived- as individuals and as a society.

I remember having to go through photo albums, scrapbooks, journals and cardboard filled boxes just to get a glimpse of my family history. How was my grandfather like when he was young? What music did grandma listen to or what books did mom read? I also remember repeating the process except this time I was adding into them. Now I just flip open my macbook and everything is there. My photos, documents, music, movies, games, books, etc either in my hard drive or stashed somewhere in cyberspace. I just have to click something and there goes everything about me on the glossy screen.

I guess somebody out there is already thinking about making an application or tool that would allow everybody else to create their own interactive history. I imagine my grandkids logging online to see what my facebook status was during my 30th birthday and then looking at the pictures I had posted or my friends had posted on my flickr account (Geez, I hope they disable comments). I'm sure they would love to see my various tweets, rss feed subscriptions, blogs, online reviews and recommendations. Then, like any typical kid, they would eventually loose interest and jump on to the next subject: their President elect's playlist during the first day he or she fell in love at 18.

I'm calling that microhistory on the web. The possibilities are quite exciting to imagine. Doesn't it make you wonder? What do YOU imagine?

*Note: For the unaware, an online library was formed in the late 90's that houses an internet archive called Wayback Machine not to be confused with The Rocky and Bullwinkle show one. Check it out.

After a long hiatus I am finally writing again. Once a blogger always a blogger. So what happened? I turned 30 and realized that I have outgrown my old blog. One I have kept for about 6 years. Wow. SIX YEARS. Well I guess that was relatively an easy feat compared to the years before blogs became the most common form of documenting ones life. Come to think about it for the first five years before the six years I was writing on almost anything...leatherbound journals, scraps of paper and a series of travel entries I made on- get this- Starbucks napkins. Jeesh, I feel like bits and pieces of my life is scattered all over the place. I do eventually plan to create an archive on my new blog. First, I need a new title.