For decades, scholars have debated the validity and inspiration behind what many consider the biggest archeological discovery of the 20th century. To see the Dead Sea Scrolls, one had to travel to Israel. Now, they’re available to everyone through the internet thanks to Google in a project managed by The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The 2000-year-old collection of 972 Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts were discovered in bits and pieces between 1947 and 1956. They were put together over the decades and preserved in Israel, but digital records have been limited until now. Google technology took…

The TED2011 Conference unveiled new technologies, encouraged imagination, and highlighted innovation as some of the most brilliant minds in the world converged to discuss everything from the seemingly mundane to the biggest problems plaguing the globe today. On the last day, emotions were touched by film critic Roger Ebert as he, his wife, his friends, and his Macbook moved the audience in ways they did not expect. For months I’ve been combing through various TED Talks from this year’s conference. The best was the very last one. “These are my words but this is not my voice,” the computer voice…

Leave it to Taiwanese video company Next Media Animation to visualize the best/worst of any news story. This time, they took on the Facebook changes that are being met with scorn by many users. The result was humorous, but there’s enough reality in it to feel a little creepier than usual. Facebook’s changes may have people up in arms, but as we noted yesterday, if you’re not going to stop using it, don’t complain. It’s not that we want to defend Facebook’s desire to have every ounce of our personal data publicly available on their site, but if we’re not going to respond by deleting our accounts, the noise…

The buzz and obsession that once was Twitter has leveled off in the last year to a level that is nearly sane. It’s being used more now as a communication tool, a news aggregator, and an opinion-expression machine. The days of “the more mundane, the better” are behind us. Well, most of us. Yet, when I mentioned to a friend that they were the “Twouble with Twitters” she didn’t know what I was talking about. I had to hunt down this old video (yes, 2 and a half years is old on the internet) and show her. She nearly cried laughing, not simply because it was hilarious but because it still holds a degree of truth even…

If there’s only one certainty in life, it’s change. If there’s only one certainty in social media, it’s that people will hate Facebook changes for a little while, but will get used to them and adapt. It happens every time. This will be no different. There has been outrage over the recent changes and more keep rolling in from f8. We will moan. We will gripe. We will swear off the site, but that won’t last. Eventually (within days, even hours) we’ll be back on Facebook figuring out where they moved everything and realizing that, once again, the change wasn’t as bad as we thought. Here’s Timeline. It’s a…

The trends are heading in different directions. As devices become more mobile-data capable and applications push towards a mobile internet, service providers are shrinking, throttling, and increasing the prices of data plans. In  three minutes, AT&T and Verizon user UrgoClips encapsulates the frustration of the nation. Call it #firstworldproblems, but it’s still frustrating to many to have access to these wonderful new toys but to not have the service infrastructure to truly take advantage of them affordably. Listen to this video editorial and ask yourself if you’re “mad as hell…

When they launched Digg Newsrooms Beta yesterday, much of the buzz within the community was both positive and hopeful. There was skepticism to be sure as Digg made disastrous moves on their last major launch last year with v4, but the overall sentiment was strong. Shortly after the launch, Digg CEO Matt Williams appeared on Bloomberg with Emily Chang on Bloomberg West.  The piece, called “Digg-Ing Out of a Hole,” met Williams with tough questions and an honest “no holds barred” batch of questions from Chang. Williams answered the questions with a mixture of passion and factual statements. “Who…

Humans take fire for granted. The reality behind the science of fire is actually pretty interesting. Whether looking at the chemistry behind it, the quantum mechanics that drive it, or the simple but amazing concept of lighting a candle in space, fire can be a very stimulating subject. That’s the thought in this physics-minute (and a half) about fire. Amazing stuff. …

There is a lot of passion surrounding social games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. People either love them or hate them. There is no gray area. Zynga is banking on as many people as possible loving it as they prepare to release Mafia Wars 2. According to Zynga, it’s the “most bad-ass game to date.” Here’s the trailer: According to Zynga, “Mafia Wars 2 takes one of our longest running and most successful franchises to a whole new universe, introducing a vast 3D world where being bad never felt so good.” There are currently 25k fans of the new Facebook page for the game, a far cry from the 17 million likes and…

We’ve always known in the social media age that babies can be instant hits on YouTube. Now, thanks to Bruce and Esther Huffman from McMinnville, Oregon, we know that the other end of the age spectrum can be just as adorable. While playing around with their new computer in their retirement community, the couple were trying to figure out how to do screen captures. They could see the video of themselves but did not realize until the end that they were recording it. Their granddaughter found and posted the video to YouTube with their blessing, ABC picked it up and made millions of people laugh. The self-proclaimed…