Blog: Caught In The Filter

Today I came across metrofreefi.com and found a bunch of cafes and restaurants in Washington, DC, that have free wi-fi. The website lets you search by region and city to find the places near you that offer free wi-fi. This isn't a comprehensive list - DC only had 26 listed - but it asks for submissions. I added the new coffee shop in my neighborhood and sent it in about 2 minutes...

Recently, sometime in the last week, I noticed what the Gmail login box says: "Sign in to Gmail with your Google Account." I do not know if it previously just said 'login to Gmail' before and the archive.org record is blocked by their robots.txt. What I'm interested in is if it was always called my "google account." It is nice how the integration with my Google News alerts works via my Gmail...

Yesterday's Washington Post ran an article on how to Create Your Own Podcasts. It immediately made me think that the Post is catching on to tech trends a little quicker, since their how to blog article ran in the same section after the presidential elections, and after blogs had been pretty well hyped up on CNN and other major news networks. But today this article is featured on the front page of Google News in the Science/Technology section. I guess that shows that the Post is getting quicker, and that podcasting is becoming more popular, or at least more understood. Maybe in a few months CNN will even start a podcaster roundup to compliment the one they currently have on bloggers.

Yep, John Edwards came out with his first podcast this week, joining the few other politicians who have tried out the medium. Something that makes his podcast a little different is that his website encourages people to send in their questions and says that Edwards will answer the questions in his podcast, as well as talk about the issues he wants to talk about--this week being partly NCAA basketball. The podcast is available at his website, www.oneamericacommittee.com.

On Friday, the Washington Post ran two articles on podcasting:

This article in the NYT today talks about VoIP's like Skype and the communities they arecreating. I can believe it. Although I don't have my account set to Skype Me, some of my friends do and people skype them. Most so far have been from abroad and have wanted to practice their English, but some just wanted to talk. It will be interesting to see how this changes and evolves over the next few years.

I haven't watched TV for 6 months. 35 minutes ago I made a ham and cheese sandwich and thought I would sit on the couch and watch CNN to take a break from the computer. Just thinking about turning on CNN made me feel bad. I get over to the sofa and Eric beams me a message "this site died when 250,000 people hit it at once when it went online today: http://www.ourmedia.org." Well, it...