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Tonight, I’m sitting at the tea lounge, a favourite Park Slope hangout with wifi. I should be paying more attention to a text I need to finish. Instead I am playing with the super cool Odeo tool, which lets me record the live band here through my browser and post it straight to the blog. (Also see the “send me an Odeo” button in the sidebar.) Hey, the music is loud.

You know those annoying machines they employ instead of real people to answer the phones? I’ll confess: in my voiceover days, I supplied voices for both answer-services and talking elevators. But seriously, sometimes they don’t even put you through to an operator when you press zero. Get Human is a new user updated database of secret customer service numbers that take you straight to a human. Reminds me of Bug me not and Do not call, both also born of consumer frustration.

Here is a map of everywhere there has been a Danish-cartoon related demonstration in the world. The United States is remarkably quiet compared to Europe (10,000 protesters in London, 6000 in Paris).

It’s pretty easy to make those maps. Check out Google Maps Mania for the lastest inventions.

Yesterday I saw a film at the MoMA (Tailenders) about evangelical Christian missionaries’ use of technology to spread ‘the word’. They travel to isolated villages on all continents handing out cardboard record players, cassettes and cassette players from a company, who have recorded bible stories in an astonishing 5500 languages. They call it “audio evangelism”. The film was pretty critical of the missionaries, and concluded that people were probably more attracted to the technology and the sound of their own language, than the actual content of the tapes.

Type in your US zip code and Podbop will give you MP3s of all the bands that are playing in your neighbourhood. Sign up for their podcast and always have a free sample of what is playing around town in your ipod. Bite to eat before the show? Zipmenu lets you view New York restaurant menus and order food online. No more spelling out your name and address on the phone. Google SMS lets you find places to eat on the road. Text your zip code + “pizza” and get a list of the nearest pizza places. Also good for movielistings, directions and weather reports. Who could feel helpless in this city?

Anybody who’s thinking about clever and inexpensive ways to get video online, should take a look at this article from Personal Democracy Forum. It reviews some cool new tools from the Participatory Culture Foundation. This is all new free, open source, software, and you can stream via Bit Torrent – the video player is called Get Democracy (catchy name?). Hello video RSS, community television, vlogs, video podcasting, or constant broadcast on any website.

I made a tagcloud for openDemocracy this morning – and another for this blog. It’ll take a while before the words start changing. Basically it’s a visual representation of the keywords that exist in your RSS feed. The bigger the word, the more frequently it occurs. It’s a free service, and it takes about 2 minutes to set up. Tagcloud gives you a bit of code you can copy and paste into any website. Some people use this technology very cleverly, like Flickr. And Global Voices. This is referred to as folksonomy.

It’s only launched in the beta version so far, but Newsvine is a new online news community you’ll be hearing more about in the near future. Users create their own “columns” which are published on a central site alongside global newswire reports. Everything is linked, tagged, and chatted about. It’s like slashdot for news-news. Or wikinews without the wiki. This is citizen journalism gone big. I’ve played around with it, but none of the homemade news looks very interesting so far. Watch how different sites and activists will begin to use it to promote their own work. And how many people will confuse their columns with their private blogs. Even so, it’s got real potential to help people redefine news for themselves. Which is good, if we are supposed to care and be critical about what’s going on and how things are reported.

NYU/oD pal Siva Vaidhyanathan (aka “Dr. Small Beard”) was interviewed on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show about social networking. It’s funny, and it also gives me a chance to play with Google Video’s new “put on site” feature. Putting this nifty video in my blog is as simple as clicking a link and pasting some instant code. Way to go Google! NY Times had a good review of it a while back (“Google Video: Trash Mixed with Treasure”).

Was just looking at the website for Blogads. They’ve sorted the blogs they sell ads on into different categories like liberal blogs, or foodies and let you buy ads on them by checking boxes, uploading your ad, and paying online. One week on DailyKos will set you back $1500. Other ads go for at little as $15. This list of categories is pretty interesting, as is looking at everyone’s pageview numbers. Gun blog ads are pretty cheap. So are the ads on Christian mom blogs. Blogads give 70% to the blogger and only allow invitees from Blogad bloggers to their list. And of course they have their own blog too.