Allyson Kapin wrote a fabulous piece for Fast Company about Andy Carvin’s new project: The Hurricane Information Center which includes that hurricanes08.org and the wiki hurricanewiki.org. Combined, they  houses the latest information on hurricanes threatening the US and what you can do to help.

Carvin is the social media strategist at NPR and some of his friends that helped build the site include Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark who promoted the site and Deanna Zandt, a media technologist for progressive and grassroots activist organizations was instrumental in developing the wiki.

“Essentially, we’ve got the wiki as our reference desk, our social network as our operations center and our Twitter feeds as our news wire service,” Carvin told Kapin.

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The Creative Commons and intellectual property movement just got a new face - or rather they just got a place to put their faces, a new book from Joi Ito that features his freesoul portraits. The concept of “freesoul” comes from Lawrence Lessig and Ito’s group of portraits of people came about so that his friends pictures could be have CC licenses and be used on sites like wikipedia and in articles. Ito’s book is called FREESOULS and beyond the creative commons portraits of people (you can see one above), there are also essays from the likes of Lessig, Howard Rheingold, Yochai Benkler, Isaac Mao, Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Liang and Marko Ahtisaari.

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We over at the blog section here have mentioned before our appreciation of flickr, the photo-hosting site.  Now, at it again for a good cause, flickr has teamed up with World Environment day (happening June 5, in case you hadn’t marked your calendar), and is asking you (yes, YOU) to upload your pictures that have to do with the event.  From the flickr website:

World Environment Day is June 5 and we invite you to share photos that celebrate environmental awareness. This year’s World Environment Day focuses on climate change and low carbon economies and the host for this year’s UN event is Wellington, New Zealand.

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I’m a big fan of Flickr.com. I discovered the awesomely user-friendly site when I was first blogging and needed a place to upload photos. Since then, Flickr has become a place for me and my community of photo snapping pals to share images and create cool photo projects. And now I love Flickr even more because they are giving away free Flickr Pro accounts to nonprofit and other good causes.

As explained on the Flickr site: A photo gives us the ability to see what goes on in the world, but can also move us to care, or motivate us to help. Many individuals and organizations use Flickr to share their mission to make the world better, and this is just a sample of what’s going on on Flickr.We’ve partnered with TechSoup, a US-based non-profit technology resource, to donate 10,000 1-year Flickr pro accounts for good causes. TechSoup and its international partners will distribute these to qualifying non-profit organizations.

One such powerful shot is the one above taken by Jakob Dall of the Danish Red Cross. The International

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Social networking, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Youtube… Did you ever stop to think how our interaction on these sites would transfer to the real world? Are the ways we keep in touch actually normal? The answer might lie below:

Perhaps when we left high school, we were really supposed to leave high school….

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If you’re anything like me, you’re pretty overwhelmed with what seems like an infinite amount of social networking sites. I mean wouldn’t it be much nicer to see all these “friends” rather than clicking through the profiles of all these “friends?” Well in the meantime social networking sites offer a way to stay connected with old friend while also providing opportunity for artists, activists and entrepreneurs to mingle. Social network sites allow users to promote their work, find people to work with, and create communities that share interests, goals, and ideas.

Different social networking sites are geared toward different goals, from sharing good books to sharing plans to save the world to simply just making new friends. Here are just 10 of the hundreds of social networking sites available:

1) MySpace: Probably the most popular of the networking sites, MySpace offers an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos for teenagers and adults internationally. MySpace has greatly helped promote new bands, comedians, and social issues. The site is so popular it’s even become a verb aka “hey totally MySpace me!”

2) Facebook: Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and

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After months of being on strike, the WGA (Writers Guild of America) has voted to lift the strike and will begin writing again. After unofficial talks and scheduled votes today, the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) and the WGA have come to terms officially, with some writers returning to work as soon as tomorrow:

The vote on whether to lift the strike was held three days after the Writers Guild of America cinched its contract agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. The strike vote was held over a 48-hour frame, with members able to vote in person at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills and Gotham’s Crowne Plaza Hotel, or via fax.

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The internet is an amazing place for people to join up and “takepart” in a cause. There are so many resources available to us when it comes to connecting with folks and sharing media. One of my favorite resources is the photo sharing site Flickr. I’ve written about Flickr before but want to focus here on how it can help spread the word about an issue.

A great example looks at an amazing event that was put on in New York City almost a year ago called Sea of People, in which a group a people all wore blue and went to stand on the coast of the city to illustrate what will happen if we don’t work together to combat Global Warming. It’s an amazing project, but for those folks not in NYC, it automatically loses some of it’s potency since they weren’t able to see it in action.

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When I have a 9-5 job, the most exciting part of my working day is without a doubt deciding where to get my lunch. Often times to help me make the decision, I head on over to Flickr and do a search for restaurants and for food. My favortie food to look at is Pizza - there are great pizza pictures on Flickr.But now I have another reason to use the photosite (when I’m not uploading my own pics) as the Library of Congress has decided to start an account and use Flickr to help make their photos more accessible to folks. The goals for the project are

Right now they only have two “sets” up : News in 1910 and 1930’s-40’s in Color but both are amazing and you should def check them out. Also, and learn more about the project and how you can participate.