Internet Moments

Since 2007 you’ve been able to go online at JamStudio.com and create your own authentic sounding music for free.  With an easy to follow tutorial and simple controls on the screen, this internet based Adobe flash website could definitely capture the imagination of even the most amateur musician.  Think of it as a music sandbox.

JamStudio.com was created by Dave Edwards and here is a 10 minute interview with him.  The online music mixer includes over 40,000 musical phrases played and recorded by real musicians that you can mix to create your own songs.  JamStudio.com is free, but you can create an account so you can save and further develop your creations later.  For a monthly fee of about $10 you can become an All Access Pass Member and you’ll be able to download all your musical creations royalty free.

For educators there is a special grant program that gives students an All Access Pass to JamStudio.com at no cost.  Here’s some more information about the grant program at Philly-Teacher.blogspot.com.

So find your musical talent and experiment with JamStudio.com today.

JamStudio.com on Fox 4 in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX:

Bored?  Looking for something to do?  How about taking some time to patrol the Texas border?  The Texas Border Sherif’s Coalition would love to have your help as a “Virtual Texas Deputy”.  Using a $2 million dollar grant from the Governor of Texas they contracted a private company called Blue Servo to create a website where ordinary people can log on and watch the border using strategically placed webcams.  Once you set-up an account and log in you can choose the camera(s) you’d like to watch and begin your “patrol”.  Each camera comes with instructions on what to look for and how to report anything suspicious  annonymously.  Here are some examples of what they’ve seen.

Give it a try!  Live the dream of being a Virtual Texas Deputy:
TexasBorderWatch.com

Composed and Conducted by
ERIC WHITACRE
“Lux Aurumque”

This original composition went live on YouTube on March 21st, 2010.   You can read about previous projects and the development of this virtual choir at Eric Whitacre’s Offical Blog.

TED stands for “Technology Entertainment Design” and was started in 1984 as a conference that brought people from those three fields together.  Originally held annually in Long Beach, California, “TED Talks” are also held in Oxford, England (TEDGlobal) and in Mysore, India (TEDIndia) for the first time in 2009. 

At their website: TED.com “the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free.” (AboutTED).   It’ well worth a few minutes of your day to check out he talks at TED.com sometime today.

A Random Sampling of TED Talks to consider:  Gary Lauder’s New Traffic Sign, Pattie Maes Demonstrates the Sixth Sense, Hans Rosling’s New Insights on Poverty, Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight, and Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos Augmented-Reality Maps.

Newseum.org was created by the Freedom Forum (a nonpartisan foundation dedicated to free press, free speech and free spirit for all people).  The actual museum is located at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC and is open to the public.  The website, Newseum.org, offers today’s frontpages from all over the world, online current events games and activities,  and information about actual exhibits at the museum.

Its worth a vsit online or in person.  Check out http://www.newseum.org/ today!

The folks who created CharityNavigator.org know that not all charities are created equal. They launched their website in 2002 to help Americans make more informed decisions when they make donations. CharityNavigator.org is an independent organization that “works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of over 5,400 of America’s largest charities.”   As you are making decisions on how to portion out your next donation you might want to consider spending some time looking at the Top Ten Lists at CharityNavigator.org for some assistance.

BankRate.com is a publically traded company (Nasdaq: RATE) that went online in 1996.  The site is sort of like “consumer reports” for banking.  BankRate.com monitors almost 5,000 financial institutions and provides users with a quick comparison of them all.  They track mortgage rates, CD rates, credit cards, financing college, all kinds of loans and insurance.  It’s a great resource for anyone who needs to research their financial options and it can provide information to anyone no matter how money savy they are.

Some features to check out:  Comparing CD Rates, Comparing Mortgage Rates, Comparing Credit Cards, Comparing Auto Loans, and various Financial Calculators.

Internet radio usually consists of going to a radio station’s website and clicking to access the streaming version of their broadcast.  Pandora.com is a little different than that.  It offers internet radio also but it’s customized to each individual user’s taste. Pandora.com has been developed as part of the Music Genome Project which was founded in 2000 by Will Glaser, Jon Kraft, and Tim Westergren.  The goal of the project is to identify the fundamental attributes of music and so far they have developed a list of approximately 400 of these music attributes.  Below is a video where Tim Westergren attempts to explain the Music Genome Project and Pandora.

No matter what you might think of the project, the website is definitely worth checking our.  Apologies to those outside the United States, for various licensing reasons, Pandora.com‘s  free music service is not available world-wide.

RealClearPolitics.com is based in Chicago and was founded in 2000 by John McIntyre and Tom Bevan.  If you follow politics in the U.S. at all you might want to take a moment to check out this website.  Every day RealClearPolitics aggregates top news stories from all across the internet, as well as poll data and videos into one easy to read homepage.  It offers one-stop-shopping for all the top political stories of the day.

Local.Alkemis.com is a website that offers lots of local information, including access to traffic cameras in cities all around North America and even a few cities around the world.  Alkemis.com has several projects underway with this mapping system that combines Google Maps, live traffic cams as well as Yahoo Traffic, Weather, Local News, Fandango Movies, even local subway maps where possible.  An amazing experiment in combining multiple forms of data into an integrated and functional website.  Keep checking back as they develop more and more information for cities like:  New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Toronto, Los Angeles, Dallas, Boston, London, and Dublin.  Here’s a link to all the cities they cover.