This is probably the best speech I've ever seen Sen. Clinton give.

The folks at Mozilla Labs are up to some very cool stuff. (via TechCrunch)


Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

more details here.

(Don't miss the moment with their daughters at the end.)

Now that information has become so easily accessible, our ability to pick out the most relevant bits, to interpret what we find, and to gain insight from that information is more important than ever before.

In all the breathless discussion about the emergence of the blogosphere—the threat it poses to main stream media, and the imminent demise of journalism and literacy that it was bringing about—one of the most basic aspects of the change it represents often goes over looked. The online universe of blogs thrives on the initial assumption that there’s more value in what we do with information than there is in acquiring it. Bloggers rarely break news. What most bloggers do is provide commentary on publicly reported facts and events. The blogosphere has flourished by cultivating audiences of readers around the activity of uncovering the most interesting aspects of a story, by explaining those elements, and by seeing something that no one else noticed.

Remember Twistori? This simple, yet profound, website created by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs helps us to make sense of all the random thoughts on Twitter. Twistori searches Twitter’s public timeline of messages for a few words related to feelings: love, hate, think, believe, feel, wish. Twitter messages that include one of these words are collected and displayed on the site in a global stream of consciousness. Hoy and Fuchs took information that was freely available to everyone, and created a new lens for us to see it through.

These innovative ways to communicate with an audience online do not take advantage of unique proprietary information. Their success, whether the small single site Twistori or the huge network of blogs, is not derived from knowing something that no one else knows; their success is the result of what they do with something that everyone knows. Twistori’s service is so simple and effective that it’s hard to believe that every major brand hasn’t commissioned Hoy and Fuchs to build an iteration of the site for their own purposes, aggregating a continuous stream of feedback about their own brand and their competitors.

We live in a universe with an endless sky full of stars. Some people are still worrying about trying to claim individual stars for themselves. The rest of us are creating new constellations.