Fotocomparatore.it : an italian way to compares and choose your photo lab.

Here's a little good site that compares for you a dozen of photo development site's prices and let you choose the one that best fits to your needs. You can quickly find the cheaper service and you could see as well the kind of photographic paper that it uses and the way they're gonna send you your photos (UPS or mail).
In the member area I've found two interesting functions: every member can check all the newsletters from all the labs without any subscription to those mails: very useful when you don't want your mail becomes a trash. The second function members have is that they can chat and talk with Skype with all the members of this little community, share information about photo labs and create their own list of labs.
A Netvibes module for this service is available here and let you check from your Netvibes page the best prices to develop your photos.

The Venice Project

The Venice Project finally get me the opportunity to test as beta tester their client and I should say I'm really happy with it. The interface is easy to use and the "superman's cristal-like" animation is something different.
As they asked to be discreet about the fonctionnalities I would not talk too much; I just want to say that if someone remember about an italian early 90's television program called "Mai dire TV" I'm sure he can imagine how funny and powerful would be a tool as TVP that will let users browse amongst hundreds of channels and tag, and share their favorite programs.
In my opinion once all those TV channels would be avaible on the net, we'll be soon submerged by tons of little videos caught here and there from TV and probabily we will see new services and new contents based on the mix of all this material as Youtube today shows how people are addicted to video contents and how they like re edit and merged films and images.

Hanged Information: Saddam Hussein's last show.

Saddam Hussein was killed at the very end of 2006 and his death was captured on a cell phone and immediately shared on the internet. As we can see, the diffusion of this kind of videos takes now only days (and in some cases hours) to pop up in Google results and to smash the Youtube hit and Technorati’s tag lists.

Almost a million of viewers assisted to the death of the farmer Iraqi dictator. More than that, searched the Internet looking for the video that someone put online. But do those people care about who was hanged? Do those people want really witness the death of an evil icon of our times because they feel it was the right punishment for his crimes or they just watched the video because it's something that everybody’s talking about?

This video is the news and this video ends the news. Once you’ve seen (and shared) the video, that’s all about you want to know about Saddam and the far and mostly unknown Iraqi stuff. Institutional media try to balance this trend, writing on how’s death penalty must be abolished and how Saddam’s death would help the stabilization of the middle-east area. But institutional media are not in the best position to do that: we all remember about the never ending 50 sec sequence about Twin Towers plane crash or the few frames showing the destructive wave of south Asian Tsunami. Repetition without moderation is the easiest way to deprive a fact of its meaning and TV information channels as well as generalist channels had massively used repetition as a tool to keep attention of people on high levels. But this has contributed to get the people rid of this kind of unidirectional communication. That's way Internet is today so important. Because let the people do whatever they want with information. But Internet wide freedom has some dark sides: the day after the video of Saddam Hussein's death was put online, someone edited a hip-hop remixed version of it. Video is so considered just as rough material to use to create something new, and if this is normally something good, because it gives to the users the opportunity to do whatever they want with contents, is very dangerous too. Not everyone will be able to select and understand the real meaning of rough informations, and the importance that they may have and the death of someone (even a dictator) will be just another funny video that teenagers will share without giving any importance to it.