It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.

The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/03/steam-mac/#ixzz0hdku4P76

the best resource for citizens of the Earth to learn about the environment and how to live a more sustainable life.

In light of our intro discussion of the memex, how might this be another example of knowledge collection and search? Here’s from the identity page:

Green Wikia strives to become a trusted central place to share our growing and evolving body of knowledge about environmental topics and issues with people who want to inform themselves and live in a more sustainable way.

The Green Wikia community also believes that the threats to our environment are real and that they require action. However, the wiki also strives to foster a community where respectful debate and informed viewpoints can be heard.

No matter which department you’re in, Web 2.0 technologies have had an impact. If you’ve been ignoring their prevalence and adoption, you’re at risk of falling behind in your career and your business is at risk of losing ground to its competitors who are tuned into this trend.

What follows is a summary roundup of apps. How does all this connect to a possible field for which you have interest as a student?

Blogger Wars: How the New Media are Changing the Presidential Contest
Panel Discussion and Debate: What’s Hot and What’s Not!
Host: Ned Lamont, adjunct professor of political science and philosophy, CCSU
Panelists:
Dan Gerstein – political communication consultant and communication director for Joe Lieberman
Colin McEnroe – talk show host on WTIC and columnist for the Hartford Courant
Mark Pazniokas – reporter for the Hartford Courant
Tim Tagaris – internet campaign manager for Chris Dodd and Ned Lamont
Wednesday, Feb. 13, 2008, 11:00 AM
Philbrick-Camp Room, Student Center

“Orality is the base of all human experience,” says Lance Strate, a communications professor at Fordham University and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric patterns of human communication. “We evolved with speech,” he says. “We didn’t evolve with writing.”

The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like “talking” than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and, lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving Gertrude Stein’s maxim that “literature is not remarks”).

“If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can’t help but see it everywhere,” says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture online. “Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on the present. The Web is all of these things.”

The team behind Your Truman Show is aiming to extend life-on-camera into a network of “tomorrow’s online reality stars, migrating user-generated content from single videos to multi-episode series”. I have absolutely no idea whether they are actually going to achieve this, but it’s a well crafted, niche video hosting site that certainly won’t fail due to a lack of good presentation and coding.

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In a paper published today in Science, Soljajic and colleagues describe their lighting of a 60-watt light bulb with energy sent across a seven-foot gap, proving that such a system is indeed possible.

Soljacic began his search for wireless transmission several years ago after being awakened by the beeping of his uncharged cell phone. “It occurred to me that it would be so great if the thing took care of its own charging,” he said.

The system, dubbed WiTricity, takes advantage of the tendency of objects that resonate at the same frequency to pick up each other’s vibes. Just as the strings on an acoustic guitar vibrate in the presence of notes played on another guitar, so energy can be sent between a transmitter and a receiver with the same electromagnetic resonance.

Soljacic contrasts WiTricity with a radio station’s transmitter, which “emits energy omnidirectionally. Your receiver gets a billionth of that — the sound information is encoded in energy — but that isn’t good for energy transmission.”

Citizens could leave text, video and photos on the site of emergencies, natural disasters and terror attacks.

A pilot could start later this year based at the University of Maryland, driven by 40,000 students and staff.

The idea of a nationwide network of 911.gov websites has been proposed by Maryland university lecturers Ben Shneiderman and Jennifer Preece in this month’s edition of Science magazine.

“The 911 telephone system functions effectively when there are traffic accidents, health emergencies or small fires, but when large numbers of people are involved it does not handle the capacity,” said Professor Shneiderman.

He added: “The evolution of the internet and its maturity at this point and the great success of social networking sites like MySpace, Craig’s List and Amber Alert, suggests there is an opportunity to do something for emergency response and recovery.”

There are deeper questions here about neighborhood information, such as the use of feeds to inform people about school closings. What use, however, without electrical power?