Education and reference

WiserEarth, which launched in May, is an open-source database of more than 107,000 do-good organizations, with 5,400 users around the world.

The site incorporates Google Maps, wikis, and discussion groups, as well as listings of events, resources, and jobs. Users can create and maintain profile pages, and chat with members of other groups. Areas of focus range from agriculture to health to media to work, and popular forum discussions involve poverty, gender, and "planetary development." More calendars and regionally focused content hubs are being created.

Participants in the Bioneers sustainability conference this weekend were using WiserEarth … Read more

BadBuster gives a quick glimpse of "green" ratings of businesses you run across while reading searching, or shopping online.

BadBuster took a few quick minutes for me to download and set up, although it stalled on one of two Windows XP machines. Once installed, BadBuster underlines on Web pages the names of brands and goods it has ranked, with colors indicating the level or lack of "greenness." For example, green underscores the BP oil company, known for its "Beyond Petroleum" campaign, while glaring red marks notorious polluter Exxon. Yellow is the middle rating.

Roll … Read more

Tomorrow the Weather Channel is officially launching a new Interactive Local Maps service. If you live in a city where the weather tends to vary by several degrees while just a short distance away, this new tool lets you to scope out the lay of the land--literally. The tool uses The Weather Channel's HiRAD (High Resolution Aggregated Data) technology which pulls in its weather information from several different integrated tracking services.

Like any other mapping tool, you can search for a specific location or just browse around. You can also turn on and off various layers, similar to Google Earth, … Read more

While the WebClips function of Leopard is a handy way to turn various bits of Web content into insta-widgets, there's a more exciting feature in Apple's new operating system that I'm looking forward to: a desktop version of Wikipedia.

It comes in the form of an added resource for the Dictionary app--Apple's in-house solution for word lookup. In Leopard you'll be able to look up a word in Wikipedia without actually visiting the site, or relying on the awesome Wikipedia Dashboard widget. Even better, using the on-the-fly lookup shortcut that was introduced in the … Read more

Wetpaint is officially launching their whiteboard wiki app for Facebook tomorrow morning, although it's been alive and kicking in Facebook's apps directory for the past two weeks. The idea behind it is about as simple as it gets--just stick an entire Wetpaint wiki inside of Facebook, and edit things with your Facebook friends. In addition to a blank canvas to do whatever you want with, the service has also included student-geared templates to get you going, including a notes tool, party planner, and dorm hall wiki. The real draw here is that you'll be able to start … Read more

Discovery Communications, parent company of the Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet, has made plans to acquire HowStuffWorks, which calls itself "the leading source of credible, unbiased, and easy-to-understand explanations of how the world actually works."

The news was originally reported in The Wall Street Journal, which named a price of $250 million.

Atlanta-based HowStuffWorks, which was founded in 1998 by North Carolina State University professor Marshall Brain (yes, that's his real name), pulls in about 3.8 million unique U.S. visitors per month, according to ComScore. Instead of issuing a press release to announce the … Read more

OK, so this is not strictly tech-related, but it is a cool way to count down the remaining minutes to the weekend. Look at the dancer and decide which way she's spinning.

Got it?

If you think she's going clockwise, you're apparently right-brain dominant (imaginative, philosophical, touchy-feely, impetuous); if you see her going counter-clockwise, you're left-brain dominant (logical, practical, detail-oriented, safe).

If, like us, you are able to alternate views to see her going in both directions, then you're just a plain old genius.

Source: Australia Herald Sun

Whether or not you're one of the few global warming skeptics left, there's no denying that the northeast has been experiencing an unseasonably--up to 85 degrees--warm October.

Now, even when you're playing escapist video games, you'll have to deal with the guilt that your habits have made it too warm to wear autumn tweed.

SimCity Societies (review from CNET Networks' GameSpot), the next generation of the SimCity computer game series that releases November 15, is going to simulate the environmental impact of different types of building and energy choices.

Players who choose inexpensive and "readily-available&… Read more

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that brought forth wiki-based sites like Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikisource, the Wikimedia Commons, and of course the iconic Wikipedia, is packing up and moving.

The organization announced on Tuesday that at the end of January it will relocate from its longtime home of St. Petersburg, Fla., to the tech hub of San Francisco after choosing from six candidate cities in a search to find a headquarters close to major media, research universities and a thriving technology scene. "(San Francisco's) proximity to Asia in particular is expected to enable the Foundation to … Read more