Coccinella - Instant Messaging w/ Whiteboarding and VOIP

I just tripped across an instant messaging application called Coccinella that allows you to do whiteboarding as well as voice chat with your conversations partners. It supports AIM, ICQ, Jabber, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk.

As long as the person on the other end is using Coccinella, you can take advantage of it's advanced whiteboarding and voice chat features.

Coccinella works for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Dipity - A Timeline Tool

I stumbled upon a new web tool called Dipity the other day. It's an easy to use timeline creator. The nice thing about it is that you can share editing rights to any timeline with anyone you want (e.g., a class full of students). I can see this as a great way for students to collaboratively cobble together an understanding of a particular time period.

Here is a Dipity timeline that someone created about the Iraq War:



The last event on this timeline occurred four months ago. The creator of this timeline could add more events if she wanted to, or invite collaborators instead to have them do the work for her.

This timeline makes reasonably good use of Dipity's functionality. For each timeline item, you can add a video, an image, web links, and as much text as you see fit.

Another cool piece of functionality: you can have other web services like Flickr or YouTube feed a timeline. Pictures or videos will automatically filter onto the timeline in the order that they were uploaded to those services. RSS feeds work here too!

Google Earth & More

If you haven't seen Google Earth yet, now is a good time to take a look. Google Earth lets you zoom in on any place in the world, viewing satellite images, maps, terrains, and 3D buildings. That's just the standard package. Individuals can now also create their own maps and make them available for others to use in Google Earth. Here are a few examples:

• Real-time Earthquake Data shows recent earthquakes on the map with links to data about the earthquakes. View by time line, severity, etc.
• Natural Hazards shows significant earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. The real neat part about this is that you can view known events all the way to 2000 BC.
• Drilling in Alaska gives a visual story on the current political/environmental struggle in Alaska oil drilling. The map shows where current oil wells are, the protected territory, and the habitats of various herds of animals.

Google Earth also now includes a Sky view which lets you view the night sky from the Hubble Space Telescope. This lets you see star locations and information, planetary orbits, constellations, etc. Just click the "sky" icon in the top menu to switch views.

Online Scientific Calculator

It's been a few years since I've had a math class, so I cannot attest to just how comprehensive this "eCalc" calculator is. But to the casual observer who knows at least that sin, log, and e^x buttons are handy, this looks pretty cool. It might serve at least for those days when you forgot your own scientific calculator at home. The unit conversion part on the right is something I could definitely use.