Your Internet Sherpa

You can find yourself out of the loop pretty easily in the Internet age. New websites and quirky videos circulate so quickly, and reach critical mass so fast, that Paris Hilton’s retort to John McCain feels dated just one week later.

Thank goodness for the Brady Carlson’s of the world. Brady is director of new media and the web guru here at NHPR, and he makes it his business to scour the Web and sign up for all the RSS feeds and newsgroups to keep him ahead of the game - for these five minutes at least. Brady joins Word of Mouth to fill us in on some interesting new things to check out online.

Brady's links:

People are still talking about the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics on Friday. But other things went on that day as well. The photo-sharing and social networking site Flickr encouraged its users to post photos they took on August 8, 2008. The images offer a slice-of-life look at the experiences of amateur photographers around the world on that day. You can view the results by clicking here.

Simon’s Cat is a series of cartoons by British animator Simon Tofield that has YouTube viewers flocking. It’s very bare-bones animation and sound, but very clever and has been making its way from cat-owner to cat-owner on the Web for some months now.

On a much more serious topic, a few biggies in the Internet world are trying to negotiate how to operate in restrictive environments like China. Journalists and officials there for the Beijing Olympics are having to work around restrictions. How will they manage? These questions are all under the pall of the case of journalist Shi Tao in 2006. Yahoo gave his account information to Chinese officials, who then identified him and later sentenced him to 10 years in prison.

And finally, imeem. It's a music-streaming site created by music industry giants that has quitely taken off. And it's now the third largest social networking site online.

(Photo by Weston Alan)