One more day left in the O’Reilly blogger review program. This time I have been looking at The Art of Community by Jono Bacon. Overall it’s a great book for a foundation in community building and growing social websites. It’s filled with lots of good advice and common sense. My main complaint is I wish there were more stories. You can’t always expect the author to be authoritative on every topic, as a reader you want more anecdotes and support for why you should take the authors advice.

I’ve been reviewing O’Reilly publications all week. I got ahold of Make Magazine: DIY Music (Technology on Your Time Volume #15) this time. It was fun reading about the various music hacks, brought me back to my hardware hacking days of undergrad and more recently Dartmouth Digital Musics. There is a particular project that seems very worthwhile to build. It’s a solenoid powered drummer. Basically it’s a midi decoder coupled with a big stick powered by the solenoid.

I just recently took this video for a spin and posted my review on the O’Reilly site, Native Video in HTML5 Overall I gave it 4 stars. Check out the review: HTML5 is becoming more of a standard and reality, but what does it mean to a web designer or programmer? This set of videos goes through the video tag of html5 and answers these questions. How do you embe

I was looking at various ways to create a lookbook or flip book online and ran across some different solutions including page-flip.com, flashpageflip.com, andfreshcatalog.com</a. After doing some more searching, even looking at Drupal integration, I ran across a very cool service available online. It’s called Issuu. I actually started this post just to have somewhere to embed the issuu code, but ended up like it so much I created a “real” blog post.

A few days ago an apple employee gets drunk and forgets his phone at the bar. It’s not just any phone though, it’s the next generation iPhone not to be out for months. Given how secretive Apple is, I’m sure this person is in a world of hurt right now. I was kind of surprised when I saw the story on Gizmodo a few days ago, but was even more surprised when I saw it in the NY Times this morning.

As google seeks to dominate all things digital, it gets one step closer. This time with language translation. It’s actually quite impressive to see the results. I read this article from the NY Times and was pleasantly surprised. Check out the translation tests that the NY Times performed, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/03/09/technology/20100309-translate.html Human Translation of a passage from the Le Petit Prince On the first night, I fell asleep on the sand, a thousand miles from any human habitation.