“Dar­ren sez, “A dis­arm­ing video of an 86-year-old WWII vet­eran from a pub­lic meet­ing on Maines mar­riage equal­ity bill on April 22, 2009.”” — via Stephen Francoeur

“My over­all expe­ri­ence with the vir­tual venue was quite pos­i­tive. I thought the team did an incred­i­ble job on cre­at­ing an expe­ri­ence that was visu­ally beau­ti­ful, easy to nav­i­gate, rich in con­tent, engag­ing and inter­ac­tive. The games, espe­cially “The Thresh­old”, were over the top cool and forced you to learn and col­lab­o­rate in a fun and excit­ing way.

Yes, I did miss my friends and col­leagues but at 10% the cost of an in-person event, the increase in pro­duc­tiv­ity by elim­i­nat­ing the time loss due to travel, and the pos­i­tive impact on the envi­ron­ment, I have a feel­ing we’ll be see­ing a lot more of these kinds of events in the future. If you go back to one of our key goals of edu­cat­ing the team, I think this for­mat yields bet­ter results than an in-person event. As a mat­ter of fact, the event has opened my eyes and I believe that gam­ing and ARGs will play a sig­nif­i­cant role in the way we learn in the future. Why can’t learn­ing be fun and inter­ac­tive and …a game.” — via jowyang

“Sound a lot like Face­book Pages? In terms of func­tion­al­ity, they are, though Face­book attempts to explain the difference:

“Keep in mind that while Groups and Pages now look the same, they still serve dif­fer­ent pur­poses. Groups are for fos­ter­ing member-to-member col­lab­o­ra­tion, while Pages remain the best way to broad­cast mes­sages to your fans if you are a busi­ness, orga­ni­za­tion, pub­lic fig­ure or other entity.””

“Theres a lot more to set­ting it up than just plug­ging it in and turn­ing it on. The setup guide that comes with the server runs you through some of that, but theres def­i­nitely some “fol­low the on-screen instruc­tions” detail-free action in that guide and its nice to know up-front what youre look­ing at. I found a really nice online descrip­tion of the ini­tial setup steps for the server that youll want to check out.”

“The goal is to ensure that from any TV or com­puter in my house, that I can access music, pho­tos, videos, movies and TV shows (live or recorded). For exam­ple, if my wife has friends com­ing over, I should be able to pause a DVD movie I am watch­ing, move upstairs, and con­tinue watch­ing it with­out hav­ing to fum­ble with discs and other phys­i­cal media.

Addi­tion­ally, if I want to show pho­tos of my fam­ily to vis­i­tors, I should be able to pull up the most recent pho­tos quickly, by month and year and tag on any device in the house. For exam­ple, I should be able to have photo gad­gets in Vista, on mul­ti­ple machines, pulling from the same loca­tion for updated pho­tos that are auto­mat­i­cally cat­e­go­rized, tagged and stored right from my dig­i­tal cam­era when I do an upload.”