EchoDitto

Cross posted on our EchoSxSw blog

I just went to a panel called, "The female takeover of casual gaming." Not sure what I was expecting, but I did learn some interesting statistics. I'm wondering, though, if the panelists really analyzed the statistics in an accurate way. A few notes from the panel, and then I'll make my arguments:

- Statistically, females don't like the first person shooter games, or "core" games (as the panelists called them) as much as they like games like "Diner Dash" (which I had never heard of until today). So basically, female gamers are generally more attracted to casual games than they are to core games like Counter Strike, Halo, World of Warcraft, etc. The panelists argued that this was because of the nature of the game - females are generally not attracted to virtual killing sprees or violence in general

This early (early) morning, Matt, Chris, Brian, Phil and I are all flying South to Austin, TX for another unpredictable and most likely unforgettable SxSwi EchoDitto experience! Chris, Matt and I are here at National Airport, departing early – wheels up at 6am on the dot – we’re just dedicated like that. Brian and Phil are coming later, but it’s not for lack of dedication, rather, more flight options going from NYC and Boston to Austin (it’s insanity what it takes to get a direct flight from DC to Austin).

I’m particularly excited because before joining EchoDitto I lived in Austin for a year but never actually got the chance to experience any aspect of SxSw, not to mention an intense conference with all-day panels, people, and I’m sure some parties. Though we’ll surely be tired after a long morning of travel, we’ve been planning for weeks and are ready to leave the unmistakable Ditto mark on Austin.

Family is, and always has been, very important to me. If I say anything in this post that seems a bit harsh, well, it’s just the kind of humor my family is used to. None of us take offense, and neither should you.

That said, the other day I drove to my grandparents house with a mission: teach my grandmother how to use a computer. My 80-some year old grandparents just got a nice, new Mac laptop. Before last Thursday, neither of them had ever used a computer before. So, being the one grandchild in a computer/technology-related job (but I like to think it’s because I’m the favorite grandchild), I immediately received a phone call Thursday morning from my mother asking if I could go over to my grandparents house “just for a little bit” to teach them the ins and outs of computer use.

If it seems like there are more college students in the DC and Maryland area today than you are used to, don’t worry. If you’re in your car, or at home, and are puzzled at the sight of about 5,500 young people at the Capital, just hit up your wireless and type in www.powershift07.org.

Power Shift began on Friday and is going on right now as you read this post -- it's the first national youth summit focused on solving our climate crisis and is happening right here in our area. Power Shift 2007, a project of Energy Action Coalition, has organized this event to give these young leaders the tools to make great change back at home or on their college campuses.

I didn’t truly appreciate Facebook applications until a few weeks ago. With the first applications I was interested but skeptical. I installed a few and ended up deleting most after discovering they were either pointless, or just didn’t work.

That is, until I found Scrabulous.

To give this some background, a few months ago Atari games sold the digital rights for Scrabble, Monopoly, Battleship, Boggle and Yahtzee back to Hasbro for 19.5 Million dollars. Most users of the site and games didn’t care about the money – all we cared about was that we could no longer play the games online. Many players were just like me – we only played Scrabble. Yes, I am a nerd. After work, I thoroughly enjoy watching the news, eating dinner, and playing a game of Scrabble.

I was watching The Daily Show the other night as I hadn’t seen an episode in a while, and heard about a recent book called “The World Without Us.” The book is exactly as the title describes – it is a narrative revealing what might happen to the earth were human beings to simply disappear. What would happen to our buildings? Our sewers? What animals might die as a result of our absence?

I haven’t read the book yet but it does sound interesting. So this morning I checked out the books website and much to my surprise it was a fairly informative site. On the homepage is a video that shows what might happen to your house without you – I was surprised that the house lasted until about year 120, though in the grand scheme of things I suppose this is a very short time.

My mother works at a large university as an administrator and professor, and has recently joined the ever-growing population of professors using blogs as teaching aids. She has created a Wordpress blog (hosted by the university) for her class on banned art and after much persuading allowed me to login and check out her dashboard. Much to my surprise, it was different, and better, than my own Wordpress dashboard. She could choose from over 80 themes, plugins, widgets, and so on. When I asked how she had access to these additional features, she forwarded an email from her colleague who is helping her with the design of the site. He pointed me to www.edublogs.org (the edublogs site isn’t very pretty, and is slow but well worth the wait), a site that not only allows you to create your own Wordpress blog for free (with an edublogs.org url) but gives you access to over 80 themes and over 5,000 widgets via www.widgetbox.com. Edublogs even contributed their themes to the university. I’m not the most tech-savvy person, my own Wordpress blog is very simple, but working at EchoDitto has increased my interest for new and cool things on the internet, and since creating my own blog on Wordpress I’ve been on the prowl for ways to make it better.

Many of us were up late last night watching the CNN YouTube debates, excited at the prospect of a different debate format. Finally, the voters, people like you and me, had the chance to ask a question directly to a potential presidential candidate.

While most of us were watching the debates, quietly judging the merit of each question and wondering what would come next, AP was calling our colleague Michael Silberman to ask his opinion on the effectiveness of the debates:

"The greatest innovation of this debate is that we're seeing candidates respond to real voters instead of polished TV personalities," said Michael … "It's a win for the candidates who are at their best when addressing voters. It's a win for democracy, since average Americans outside of the early primary states now have the opportunity to ask direct questions of candidates."

On June 18 RevolutionHealth.com, a free online health and medical website that combines expert content and online tools with the power of social networking, launched its first online health fair.

This is an amazing project: Revolution Health has partnered with ten national non-profit organizations, each of which has an online “booth” at the health fair. For each visitor to a booth, Revolution Health will make a donation to that partner for a total of up to $10,000.

As much as I love computers, and the internet, and our ever-impressive technologies (as you may have deduced from my last post), I’m actually more of a nature-loving hippie than you’d think (and no, the two are definitely not incompatible). A few years ago I spent two consecutive summers at Tanager Lodge Summer Camp – a wilderness camp for children ages 5-15 – where your living quarters are tents, your shower is the lake, and your entertainment revolves around the natural surroundings. We canoed, hiked, went fishing, cooked outdoors, chased after chipmunks, and so on. Now of course it wasn’t all fun and games. As a counselor I was in charge of certain activities as well as taking charge of my tent group -- 4 twelve-year-old girls. But the essence of the camp, the reason we were all there, was to learn more about nature, to learn to live with it, and to gain an even greater respect for our environment.