IMG is nothing?

I just finished watching the first 2 episodes of ‘Hometown Baghdad’, a web-documentary that follows the lives of 20-somethings trying to make it in Baghdad. The show is a co-production between Chat The Planet and a group of Iraqi film-makers.
Adel & Saif (I haven’t watched the episode introducing Ausauma yet) are students in engineering and dentistry, respectfully. They are educated, middle-class guys who have remained in their hometown despite its deterioration. They are pursuing their educations and aspirations (Adel wants to be a rock musician).
As you watch the video, its easy to forget where these guys are: they sound like guys I knew in high school and college. Slight accents, but perfectly understandable. They talk about their bands and girlfriends. Only when they start talking about brain splatters and the loss of professors to extremist do you get a feeling that their world is so different.

Below is the 1st episode.

Web 2.0 isn’t a new topic, but its what’s happening now and its principles will be seen in everything still standing after the next tech explosion. Yet business still doesn’t get it.

I was catching up on my NussbaumOnDesign reading. If you haven’t checked him out, Bruce Nussbaum is the guy who talks about design and innovation for BusinessWeek. Bruce regularly talks about products you’ll love someday. Cool job.
His post about Davos and Web 2.0, lines up pretty well with my earlier post on the topic.

I’ll be writing more on 2.0 real soon.

Read about DVD Flick over on LifeHacker. Downloaded and tried it. Now am burning all the movies I’ve picked up onto DVD. I’d tried a few other programs (including DVD Shrink which is pretty good), but always found that some stuff just wouldn’t play.

It seems like LifeHacker is always there for me. Schooling me to the cool stuff before the other kids know about it. Or, making sure I don’t blow my fingers off on the 4th of July . I’ll add DVD Flick to the list of Life Lessons that my Big Bro’ LifeHacker has passed on. Thanks Bro.

Here’s the article:
Hack Attack: Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD - Lifehacker

Just got done reading a blurb about Web 2.0 from the BBC Davos blog. If you don’t know, Davos is the the site of the World Economic Forum : the place where the bigshots of Finance and Business come together and discuss whats going on in the world and what is going to happen.

The blog post is about how user input (read: your input) is changing the web and business. The panel that discussed this topic at Davos was pretty impressive:

YouTube’s Chad Hurley;
Microsoft founder Bill Gates;
Caterina Fake, founder of Flickr;
Nike chief executive Mark Parker;
and EU commissioner Viviane Reding

but I’d say only 2 out of 5 speakers have really been on the ball (YouTube, Flickr). Nike is letting people design their own shoes online, but the choices are limited (its really a redesign of a few overpriced styles) and Microsoft only listens to corporate customers, so I can’t get too excited when Gates talks about the potential.

Still, 2.0 is Now. This it the idea thats driving the new sites to come on the scene. Hopefully, the big boys will embrace it a little faster —Before 3.0 comes around