Liberal Education Today

The much anticipated WorldWideTelescope application launched this week. This Microsoft Research tool sets up a basic viewing interface, beyond which lies large amounts of astronomical imagery from several major sources. Users can quickly search collections, zoom in and out, pan across the sky, and switch between different types of information (infrared, visible light, low-frequency radio, etc).

Two other products are already in this field. Google launched Google Sky last year, part of Google Earth (and now viewable in a Web browser). There is also an open source project, Stellarium.

The amount of video viewed through Web platforms like YouTube continues to increase, according to ComScore.

U.S. Internet users viewed 11.5 billion online videos during the month, representing a 13-percent gain versus February and a 64-percent gain versus March 2007.

Google continues to own this market:

YouTube.com accounted for 98 percent of all videos viewed at Google Sites. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 477 million videos (4.2 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 328 million (2.9 percent) and Viacom Digital with 249 million (2.2 percent).

(via Podcasting News)

Two alternate reality games (ARGs) were held at Worcester Polytech WPI for a media studies class. One focused on a hypothetical student club website, which had been targeted by a mysterious group of hackers. A second involved the mythical Havet Research firm. Both were projects for an interactive storytelling class.

Previous blog posts on educational ARGs.

A blogging application for Facebook has been released. BlogIt lets users post blog content from within Facebook.

This application, one of many created since Facebook opened itself up as a development platform last year, is published by blog hosting and software development firm SixApart.

(via Lafayette ITS Coffee Break podcast)

The Connecticut Literary Collective is a wiki-based community resource for writers in that state. Run by an academic advisory board, the site offers a series of resources, including reviews of literary journals as potential publication venues.

URL: http://ctliterarycollective.wetpaint.com/

(thanks to Sarah Hutton)