Askalo: Do You Know Your City?

Image via Wikipediahttp://www.askalo.com

Over 1,000 cities, 38 countries, 5 languages. Askalo is a web community. It is a platform. It is local. Ask questions. Share tips about your city. The Q&A format - Quora comes to mind - seems to be the latest craze in social. And Askalo brings that to city discovery.

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it..... TechCrunch: Quora Has The Magic: Benchmark Invests at $86 Million Valuation ...... GigaOm: Former Facebook CTO Launches Quora, Competes with Yahoo Answers, Aardvark, Hunch

James Blake: Limit To Your Love

(Via David Noel)

Google, Please Don't Be Evil

Image via Wikipedia“[A] Nicaraguan military commander, using Google Maps as his guide, brought his troops into Costa Rica. He insists that he was just following what Google Maps said, and that he never intended to go into the neighboring country. Yet… the report also notes that there was a Costa Rican flag there, which the Nicaraguans took down and replaced with their own flag. You would think, at that point, that everyone involved might double check to make sure they were on the right side of the border. After raising their own flag, the Nicaraguans apparently set up camp, cleaned up a nearby river (nice of them) and then dumped sediment into Costa Rican territory (not so nice of them).”

— Nicaragua Accidentally Invades Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps (Via Matt Lehrer)

Ben Horowitz: Hip Hop Mogul

Ben: As Kanye says, hip hop is 1/2 what you say and 1/2 how you say it, so I put the tracks up on the blog http://bhorowitz.com
Me: @bhorowitz The hip hop quotes make your blog stand out and gets me to keep coming back. Although the posts are also good.

MapCrunch: Random Places

Image via Wikipediahttp://www.mapcrunch.com

This site is so cool. It taps into the Google Street View database to show you random pictures from all over the world - I just saw one from Antarctica - and it is quite a feeling. In some ways this feels better than Google Earth, although Google Earth is an experience of its own.

You hit the N key on your keyboard and the next picture shows up, and next, and next.

You can view pictures by continent or country. Not all countries are available yet, but that's okay. I will wait.

And there is the obligatory slideshow option. And, of course, full screen mode.

Bon Voyage.

The Video Format And Web Intelligence

Image via CrunchBaseIt is not that people are saying, oh no, the internet got us addicted to the text, we have no more love for the video format, or that we are cutting down on both French fries and video content.

The demand for TV shows and movies is bigger than ever and growing. So what gives? Why are people in the TV/video/movies business worried? Why are the cable people scared? They are scared because the times, they are a changing. And they are refusing to change with the times.

Google's Foreign Policy

(Source: Mashable)