I remember about twenty years ago, my family had to go to the post office of the largest city in Vietnam, across from the Nhà thờ Đức Bà Sài Gòn, in order to receive a long distance call from my dad in the U.S. It must have cost my dad a ton to make that short call.

As a child, I enjoyed playing the transmission game on one of the camping trip in which tin cans and strings were connected together to deliver the message.

Mapping the Unmappable: Visual Representations of the Internet as Social Constructions

My grandfather often makes this comment after making a call to Vietnam when he was living with us here in the U.S.: “How does the telephone know which hole to crawl out and transmit my voice to the other side of the world?”

Today, I was reading the responses of readers on DSLreports.com to an article about people ditching landlines , based on a new study by the Center for Disease Control. I came across a member who shared the experience of switching to a VoIP company call VOIPo. I did some research, and came across the post of their founder and CEO, Timothy Dick, communicating the status and progress of the company. I was surprised to see how well they are doing. They must be doing something well in this competitive market, competing against the giants like AT&T, Comcast, among others.

If you have service with them, or other VoIP company, what is your experience? Have you ditched your landlines to VoIP?

Here is a quick and easy solution. Use one of these easy service and add it to your email:

FileDropper
This service is easy, and allow you to upload up to 5GB. Yes, it is easy and is the only one I know which allows the large file size of this kind. The uploaded file is displayed on a bar showing the progress of the upload. Once your file is uploaded, a URL and an embed link is provided for you to share with others. Can’t get easier than this!
Sample of an embedded file:



Try also

http://loombo.com

Tell me your favorite.

Ramya Raghavan, a nonprofits & activism manager of YouTube, made that presentation with NTEN to show the recent developments of YouTube and how you can use YouTube to aid your organization.

Check out the article “A Billion YouTube Views Can Feed A Billion” on HuffingtonPost to learn how this tool has been used to serve nonprofits.

And another article at Mashable shows how you can further use YouTube: 5 Ways Non-Profits Can Increase Engagement With YouTube

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jSBW0BOPqM

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

The full text is available at Harvard Magazine’s website.

I first saw this talk at TED’s website. Follow what people have to say here also.

We have everything from AIM to Yahoo!Messenger, then Skype and MSN Messenger, to Facebook and MySpace, RSS, recently with Twitter and Google Wave, and now the Google Buzz!

Google Buzz is yet another tools that provide more ways for people to keep in touch and share with the whole world their thoughts and views. What I like most from this new technological tool is the ability to view photos (and video?) full screen. You can connect with your existing websites like Flickr, Picasa, or Twitter and those websites will “Buzz” your followers of additions or updates. You can also post interesting links just like you already do in Facebook.

So what’s your thought with all of these social media and communication tool? Is it really helping us to connect and form better relationships and stronger community? I hope these new developments serve to enhance rather than replace our human connections with one another, the deep bond with the planet we live on, and the intimacy with the Divine Artist and Creator who shared life and love with us.

Asides form popular websites like YouTube and Hulu, or Blip.tv, we now have websites like PBS (see Video.pbs.org) that provides their programs online.

This got me thinking:
How does the ability to access the videos, whether for entertainment or informational purposes, affect us? Are we better for having watched these videos or not?

How can we use these video contents to shape our world, our particular communities, and our own lives so that life is more meaningful and enriching?

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