Original Article: For being nothing more than a "labs" project for Google, Fast Flip has received an overwhelming amount of attention as well as criticism. In case you have been under a rock, Fast Flip is a lab Google launched, that has been talked about before under its codename, "Flipper."

What it does is let you "flip" through news articles on the web, as you would do with a magazine. In Google’s words, "Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers."

Google partnered with the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Salon, Fast Company, ProPublica, and Newsweek to launch the lab. According to Google, partners will share revenue earned from contextual ads shown with articles. Google says that encouraging readers to read more news is "part of the solution" to the woes of the publishing industry, though the company does acknowledge that there is "no magic bullet."

It would appear that many certainly agree that Fast Flip isn’t a magic bullet either way. Here are a few sample critiques of Fast Flip from around the web:

"It doesn’t seem very fast and also doesn’t flip pages, but slides them across the screen," says David Coursey at PC World. "I want to like anything Google does that makes life easier for readers, but Fast Flip can make news harder to access, not easier."

"Overall, Fast Flip just seems like a disappointing product," says Frederic Lardinois at Read Write Web. "The cooperation with content producers is interesting, though we wonder if a single AdSense unit on the site will really make newspapers any money."

Dan Frommer at Silicon Alley Insider has some particularly harsh words for the iPhone version of Fast Flip, which he deems useless. "Unlike on the desktop, you can’t actually read anything. The text is far too small," he says. "And when you click ‘zoom,’ it doesn’t zoom into a version of FastFlip where the text is larger, fitted to the iPhone’s screen size, and actually readable. Instead, it expects you to pan around the page to read the text..No thanks!"

And like in the Blogosphere, there are of course varied opinions of Fast Flip floating around Twitter:

The important thing to remember here is that Fast Flip is just a Google Labs feature. That means it’s not a proper release or a final product, though it is interesting that there are partners making money (allegedly) from the release. Google’s own description of Google Labs:

Google Labs is a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas and offer feedback directly to the engineers who developed them. Please note that Labs is the first phase in a lengthy product development process and none of this stuff is guaranteed to make it onto Google.com. While some of our crazy ideas might grow into the next Gmail or iGoogle, others might turn out to be, well, just plain crazy.

Most Google labs releases never make it out of labs status, though there have been exceptions. The fact that partnerships are involved could make the transition to actual release, and maybe a full-fledged feature of Google News, but as long as it’s a lab, it’s not going to be perfect.

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A MySpace representative explained in an email to WebProNews, "With this launch, MySpace Music brings to the UK all of the functionality currently available to U.S., Australian and Kiwi based users including an ever-growing catalogue of fully licensed audio and video content from both Major and Indie artists, user-friendly e-commerce solutions, personal music players and user and artist playlisting, in addition to monetization opportunities and access to comprehensive analytics and charts tools for all artists."

MySpace Music

MySpace Today Trailers | MySpace Video

All in all, it’s something for people on every side of the equation to get excited about.

Artists including Alicia Keys, 50 Cent, Florence & the Machine, Kasabian, and Nelly Furtado are providing videos and playlists.  Other interesting entities, including the Vatican and Katie Price, have also contributed.  This, in turn, should give users a lot of fun stuff to play with.  (Side note: the Vatican has great taste, endorsing both Muse and Mozart.)

And this an important moment for MySpace, too, of course.  Launching a product in a new market isn’t something that’s done lightly, and since MySpace did so where Facebook is especially dominant (Hitwise estimated that Facebook received one-seventh of all UK page views in September), a lot may be riding on MySpace Music.

Related Articles:

> MySpace Reaches Deal With Another Music Label

> MySpace Picks Up Imeem

> MySpace Launches New Music Charts

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On the third floor of the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown Manhattan rests a tribute to Esquire’s glory years — a collection of 92 covers from the 1960s and early 1970s that have become, in the museum’s words, “essential to the iconography of American culture.^‘

Today, Esquire is recognizable by its “wall of type covers”—which have inspired similar design in such magazines as New York, Maxim, and the Atlantic. The magazine has also continued its leading role in cutting edge design with its recent electronic ink (October 2008) and lift-the-flap (February 2009) covers.

To date they came up with their AR (Augmented Reality Edition) where one can   download the software to make Robert Downey Jr. pop to life and see other things in the magazine start talking and moving.  No one had taken advantage of the technology on any kind of editorial scale, until they  got to thinking…   Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/feature/augmented-reality-technology-110909#ixzz0XmzYuqR8

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Subscription music services have been around for some time, but have never taken off in a way that eclipsed the success of the a la carte iTunes model. Napster and Rhapsody are two of the bigger names that remain, offering services between $7 and $15 per month for various flavors of streaming, MP3 downloads, and DRM-tethered mobile support.

Now a new entrant will be breaking onto the scene at a $5 price point for all-you-can-stream playback and what looks to be a very nice interface for managing your music and playlists. The MOG Music Network has existed previously as an aggregated collection of MP3 blogs along with editorial curated content focused on identifying hot new trends in the music world. On December 2, they’ll be launching their ambitious new subscription service that hopes to find the sweet spot in the music subscription space.

Tracks will stream at a high-quality 256Kbps in the for now browser-based service, which has plans to launch a mobile music component by as early as the end of 2009. The MOG service will be neck and neck with Spotify, another subscription-based music service that will offer some advertising supported and some paid levels of use when it crosses the Atlantic to launch in the U.S.

Check out an introductory video about the MOG service below and let us know what you think. Many folks prefer to own their music collections, while some prefer the buffet-style approach and are eagerly awaiting both Spotify and MOG as new alternatives to Napster and Rhapsody. Would you consider spending a monthly subscription fee for unlimited access to a large on-demand music library?

Tags: itunes, MOG, music, napster, rhapsody, spotify, subscription

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Lets first take a look at the XML file we are going to Parse. The XML document is saved as cd_catalog.xml.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<CATALOG>
  <CD type="physcial">
    <TITLE>Maggie May</TITLE>
    <ARTIST>Rod Stewart</ARTIST>
    <COUNTRY>UK</COUNTRY>
    <COMPANY>Pickwick</COMPANY>
    <PRICE>8.50</PRICE>
    <YEAR>1990</YEAR>
  </CD>
  <CD type="physical">
    <TITLE>When a man loves a woman</TITLE>
    <ARTIST>Percy Sledge</ARTIST>
    <COUNTRY>USA</COUNTRY>
    <COMPANY>Atlantic</COMPANY>
    <PRICE>8.70</PRICE>
    <YEAR>1987</YEAR>
  </CD>
  <CD type="digital">
    <TITLE>Big Willie style</TITLE>
    <ARTIST>Will Smith</ARTIST>
    <COUNTRY>USA</COUNTRY>
    <COMPANY>Columbia</COMPANY>
    <PRICE>9.90</PRICE>
    <YEAR>1997</YEAR>
  </CD>
</CATALOG>

As you see this is a simple XML document of a CD Catalog. If you have never seen an XML document before I suggest you read up on it. Now lets look at the jQuery Code we will use to extract the data. I am going to post the full code and then explain what each line does. If you don’t care what each line does then feel free to copy and paste and augment the code. Anyway here is the code.

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$(document).ready(function(){
  $.ajax({
    type: "GET",
    url: "cd_catalog.xml",
    dataType: "xml",
    success: function(xml){
                  $(xml).find("CD").each(function(){
                        $("#CD").append($(this).find("ARTIST").text() + "<br />");
                  });
               }
  });
});

The output of the jQuery code would look something like this:

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Rod Stewart<br />
Percy Sledge<br />
Will Smith<br />

So now that you see the code let me explain. First you must call the $.Ajax Get Request in order to actually get the XML file. (On a side note you may also use jQuery’s $.get function to retrieve the XML document.) Click here if you don’t understand the $.Ajax Get Request. When you successfully get the cd_catalog.xml file you must call a function to process the XML. Then on Line 7 in the jQuery code $(xml).find(”CD”).each(function() is how you actually process the XML data. First you must use the .find to search all “CD” tags in the XML document then use the .each to loop through every “CD” tag that is in the XML document. Now that we are looping through the all “CD” tags, we can output the Artist Name by using the following code on line 8 $(”#CD”).append($(this).find(”ARTIST”).text() + “br/”);. We must first Append data to the div with the ID CD in the HTML document. The data that we will append to the div is as follows: $(this).find(”ARTIST”).text(). What we do here is find the tag “ARTIST” within the “CD” Node and get the text within the “ARTIST” tag. As you see its pretty simple to Parse an XML document with jQuery. But there is one more topic I want to cover and that is XML tag Attributes.

In the XML document above you can see that in the “CD” tag we have an attribute called “type”. To access an attribute you can use the code below after line 7 in the above jQuery code.

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        $(this).attr("type")

And that is it for this tutorial. I hope it will help you on your quest to become a jQuery guru. If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to comment below.

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Rebel Music Volume 01 by Bit Rebels

Track List

01. Torsion  – Sundrops on the Ocean (original piano mix) | [PS003 REdrops]

02. Emile Lund – Getting Late | [aaahh.007 Emile Lund EP]

03. Azeda Booth – First Little Britches (morgan greenwood rmx) | [sec.031 Tubtrek]

04. Emily in Love – Everything’s OK | [corpidex029 Let's Pretend We're In Love]

05. Nic Bommarito – Better then Way Post-Rock |  [12rec.058  Harp Fragments]

06. dusmotes – annica | [PS012 Beats for the Subverted]

07. Clark|KENT – Sundrops (Fabrice’s dream rmx) | [PS003 REdrops]

08. The Black Atlantic – Madagascar | [Beep007 Reverence for Fallen Trees]

09. The Underscore Orkestra – Blue Draggish | [ No Money No Honey All We Got Is Us]

10. Pandoras.Box – Arrows and Bows | [ca270 Barriers]

Cover Art: Andrea La Valleur

Zip file with all tracks + Cover art: [BRM0001]

Please feel free to explore the full EPs from all of these wonderful and talented artists that share with us their amazing music. Since music is not a one day thing, and if you are interested in exploring more, I recommend a visit to noumenon :: and :: phenomenon a website maintained by Thomas L. Raukamp, editor of Beat magazine, that has 2  #ccmusic proposals every day. I also would like to thank Thomas for all the help he gave me to put this first compilation together.

Do you have tracks you want us to feature? Do you know that really cool music project you think is a shame no one heard about yet? Let us know on the comments!

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I know the feeling all too well: the airplane starts to lift off, and you suddenly get overwhelmed with the feeling that something isn’t right. Is it going too fast? Should it make this much noise? And then, as it rises off the ground, you get that uneasy feeling in your stomach and you’d most definitely rather be somewhere else.

And I’m not even scared of flying; I can only imagine what it’s like to someone who has a genuine phobia. But Virgin Atlantic Airways aims to alleviate the issue – with an iPhone app!

The app is based on Virgin Atlantic Airways’ Flying Without Fear course, which supposedly has a 98% success rate. The idea is not bad: anything that can make your mind busy during those awkward moments of liftoff would probably be helpful, and an iPhone app seems like a perfect way to do just that. Richard Branson, president of Virgin Atlantic, claims “the app will put many travellers at ease and enable them to prepare for their first Virgin Atlantic flight.”

Flying Without Fear was developed with Mental Workout, a company specialized in software that helps people resolve stress issues. The app is available for 4.99 in the Apple App store.

Tags: iphone, Virgin Atlantic Airways

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Writing is telepathy, Stephen King wrote. The author sends a message; we receive it. Preferably, in our favorite reading spot, where the signal is strong and the transmission from author to reader unimpeded. It might be a sofa, a park bench, the john, whatever.

For me, it’s airplanes.

There’s something about the pressurized cabin, the altitude, the journey. Planes are not only where I do my best reading, they’re also the place where – as a direct consequence of the reading – I do my best thinking.

I’m a journalist, so while I love fiction, I devote my plane-time to nonfiction, mostly magazines, especially American ones. Let me explain. Romanian magazines, save one or two, are awful. The approach is superficial, the writing is sloppy and the editing is nonexistent. Magazines are a special breed and I wish we’d treat them better.

The purpose of a good magazine is to give you a snapshot of the world, show you what people are thinking, liking, dreaming, and buying. They should be windows into communities of thought and interest, carefully put together by people who want to cultivate these communities and give readers the promise of a better life. That’s not a lie, and it’s not PR blah blah. We live to become better. Good magazines know that. The main reason you are reading this online magazine is its promise to inspire you. Others want to help you fix your home, reach your fitness goals or decrypt intricate government policies. The best ones do it sincerely. Those are the mags I take on a plane.

Here’s how it happens. Flying is an eternal human aspiration – the once impossible journey, now a crammed aisle seat reality. Because we’re unable to control the journey, we let go of the reigns. We relax. Me, I become susceptible to stories and get an empathy-high. (There are endless discussions online about emotional overload on airplanes, where a dumb romantic comedy suddenly becomes deep drama; even 300 is a more profound flick at that altitude.)

So I binge on stories. Short bits on polishing your shoes or matching plaid with stripes. Essays on memory enhancement, race, or the effect of Wagner on war-movies. Agonizingly long features on poverty in India or the business of self-actualization. I binge on Wired, Esquire, The Atlantic, Intelligent Life, Pop, GQ, Harper’s, The New Yorker, newspapers’ Sunday magazines, The Economist, Vanity Fair, Mental Floss, Monocle, whatever the newsstand is selling.

On a plane, suspended in time and space, I’m fueling up for the next few months. I’m spotting trends, digesting storylines, picking up references, polishing ideas, and making connections. On a plane, with my mags, I’m being inspired. A gluttonous orgiastic binge, but inspiration nonetheless.

As the plane begins its descent and real-life looms, I go over the things I’ve learned: Dan Brown is going to make masons a hot trend, New Moon will keep vampires in the headlines, double-breasted suits are back, placebos are cutting into the pharmaceutical business, women freedivers are battling to surpass the 100 meter mark.

Not to mention the various editorial takes on happiness: France wants to be a second Bhutan and start taking a measure of national happiness; positive psychology is turning 10; Alain De Botton wrote a book on the pleasures and sorrows of work; the recession is making us re-evaluate the meaning of a fulfilling life. I could pull those threads together, find a good local angle and do a magazine story that says something about the way we live now.

All because of the mags I brought onto the plane.

The Author

Cristian Lupsa lives in Bucharest, Romania. A graduate of the master’s program at the Missouri School of Journalism, he is currently a contributing writer to Esquire Romania, an editor, and a trainer at the Center for Independent Journalism. You can read some of his stories – in Romanian – on his blog. He also tweets about journalism, magazines and storytelling at @cristianlupsa

aisle image copyrighted by CodenameShaider

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One of the best ways to enhance your Photoshop skills is by creating wallpapers in Photoshop. Giving a shot to the below tutorials will help you to learn new Photoshop techniques. Creating wallpaper in Photoshop is always fun and best way to learn new techniques. Most of these wallpaper tutorials have PSD source file which can be very helpful with your designs.

These are some of the awesome tutorials in creating wallpapers using Photoshop on the Web.

Here are 55 tutorials that can help you to learn new photoshop tricks with these wallpaper tutorials.

1. The ‘Creativity’ Wallpaper

2. Beautiful Rainbow Island Wallpaper

3. Typography Wallpaper in Photoshop

4. Stylish Minimalistic Wallpaper

5. Create A Glowing Extreme Wallpaper

6. Abstract Watercolor Wallpaper

7. Fire Dragon

8. Abstract Color Wallpaper

9. Water drops on a spider web

10. Distant Desert City Scene

11. Arctic Monkeys

12. Large sprite piece

13. Screamusic Wallpaper

14. ‘Colour’ Wallpaper Tutorial

15. Floral Text Wallpaper

16. HD Color Lines Wallpaper

17. Typographic Wallpaper

18. Music Wallpaper Montage

19. Abstract Retro-Pop Wallpaper

20. Passing of Spring

21. Awesome Music Wallpaper

22. Transformers Movie Wallpaper

23. Retro Wallpaper

24. Texas Rangers desktop wallpaper

25. Retro Apple Wallpaper

26. Sunflower Wallpaper

27. Summer breeze wallpaper

28. Intensely Grungy Wallpaper

29. March 2009 Calendar Wallpaper

30. Watchmen Movie Wallpaper

31. Japanese Style Wallpaper

32. Michael Jackson Wallpaper

33. Diablo III styled wallpaper

34. Picture Vintage

35. Color Variations

36. Urban Koenigsegg CCX wallpaper

37. Luminescent Lines

38. Theatrical Scene Wallpaper

39. Dark Knight Grunge Wallpaper

40. Diving

41. Night Before Christmas

42. Beautiful Christmas Vision

43. Grunge Car Wallpaper

44. Atlantic Snowfall Wallpaper

45. Valentines Wallpaper

46. Chroma Wallpapers

47. Ford Mustang GT500 – Abstract design

48. Extreme Grunge Wallpaper

49. Decorating Text

50. Iron Man movie wallpaper

51. Fantastic Sunset Wallpapers Effects

52. Animated Rainbow Wallpaper

53. Impressive Photo’s Background

54. Abstract 3D Design Wallpaper

55. Floral Abstract Wallpaper

Which one of these tutorials you like the most? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments!

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt

(Credit: James Martin/CNET)

Schmidt would agree that technological change has happened so fast over the past few decades that it’s almost impossible to appreciate the long-term effects of that change, he told attendees at The Atlantic’s First Draft of History Conference Friday in Washington, D.C. But he said he feels that while it’s true that such change can be used against the world, it’s important to remember that the combination of access to knowledge and cheap powerful computers can also spur people to new heights.

“If you live in a little group of terrorists, you can decide that the whole world agrees with you. (But) the same is also true of optimists and people who want to change the world,” he said.

Schmidt touched on a variety of topics during his 30-minute interview, which was streamed live online, with James Fallows of The Atlantic:

• Governments could improve their ability to make “gray-zone decisions” by opening up information and debate to a wider circle of voices, Schmidt said. It’s so easy in the current world to create “disinformation” that the best way to tackle a complex subject is to have a wide circle of people discussing the possible effects of a decision as to minimize the impact of that disinformation.

• The print-based news industry is doomed, Schmidt said, but the silver lining is that an emerging Internet-based news industry could have a bright future because of its ability to sell “products that are highly targetable, and products that are highly targetable are highly advertisable.”

• “I start everyday by assuming that people don’t appreciate how fundamental the Internet is,” Schmidt said, when asked about his and Google’s efforts to support investment in broadband Internet connections, which is currently being debated in Washington. Fast Internet connections should be a national priority but complicating the matter is the fact that opening up fast connection to the home will negatively impact a lot of existing businesses, such as the cable industry.

• Schmidt expressed his hope that the settlement in the Google Books case is approved, but the settlement he referred to will likely be different from the one that will emerge as the parties involved revise the terms of that deal ahead of a status conference next week with a federal judge in New York.

• He also expressed support for Arthur Levinson, a Google board member who is also a board member at Apple. Schmidt stepped down from his role on Apple’s board earlier this year amid concerns the companies had grown into competitors as well as scrutiny from the FTC. The FTC is still looking at whether Levinson’s service on both boards in an issue, but when asked if Levinson would have to step down from Google’s board, he said, “I would hope not.”

Originally posted at Relevant Results

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