KeepVid is pretty much a middle finger in the air to all those media dinosaurs who thought streaming was the way to maintain control over their video properties. Basic concept: give KeepVid a URL to a video and it’ll give you a download button. Let’s see how long this lasts.
Tour Of The Devastation To Be
The US Geological Survey has released a “virtual helicopter tour” of the Hayward fault. When the Hayward goes it’ll be bad news for my beloved Bay Area, as the scripted Google Earth tour amply demonstrates.
“Whole Wide World”
by Paul McAuley
Topical, entertaining near-future thriller about ubiquitous surveillance in the UK.
“Nothing Human”
by Nancy Kress
Excellent, unjustly overlooked novel of humanity’s use of genetic engineering to adapt to a post-ecodisaster world.
Google Goes Off-Planet
Not content with dominating the mother-planet and its barren satellite, those lovable geeks at Google have now launched Google Mars, enabling the man-about-the-web to check out potential Martian real estate if he’s bored with terran and lunar landscapes. And if that’s not enough for you, PhysOrg.com are pointing to a page on the NASA site where you can watch a virtual flythrough of the Red Planet’s Valles Marineris canyon.