Are you hip to Really Simple Syndication? If you’re still behind on the adoption curve, May 1st is RSS Awareness Day.

Daniel Socco of DailyBlogTips offers a detailed explanation of where the idea for RSS Awareness Day came from and what it was intended to accomplish. Check out RSSDay.org for more information.

In honor of the occasion, we’ve made RSS our Word of the Day to help get out the word, so to speak.

For more information, check out:

• Dan Bricklin’s article, What is RSS?
• our RSS glossary
• our podcast explaining what you can do with RSS
• our definition for RSS reader
• Google Reader
• WhatIs.com’s RSS feeds, including the Word of the Day, the feed for this blog, the enterprise IT tips feed and the enterprise IT newsfeed
• The video embedded below from Common Cause, RSS in plain English

UPDATE: Dave Winer wished everyone Happy RSS Awareness Day. I’m glad I tweeted him about it, as he hadn’t heard the news.

UPDATE II: Marshall Kirkpatrick blogged up a storm over at ReadWriteWeb, writing an epic Ode to RSS to honor the day and the technology itself. It’s the best blog post on the subject that I’ve read and will, I suspect, a canonical post about RSS for some time to come. As Marshall points out, blogging and podcasting as we know it simply wouldn’t be possible without RSS.

A hearty thanks to the pioneers and early adopters whose dedication, hard work and dogged advocacy have brought the technology to its present state!

In the first video, Liz Murphy, marketing VP of InPhase Technologies, describes the world’s first commercial holographic storage system at NAB.

We define a holographic disk drive, the practical implementation of the technology, as “a holographic storage device that uses a laser to store data to optical media in three dimensions, maximizing storage capacity by using the media’s depth. Most optical media, such as CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray only offer bit-at-a-time surface or dual-layer writing capacity. A holographic versatile disk is just slightly larger than a DVD and can store 30 times as much data.”

If you want a blast from the past, watch the video below to see Liz Murphy in June of 2007 explaining how HD holographic storage (will) work. She’s interviewed by Scott Jacobs for Futurepeak. (Click ahead to :30 to avoid some shaky handheld camera work.)  There’s a good explanation for how the technology works and some historical perspective on its development later in the video.

Heather Johnson is guest blogging at WhatIs.com this week. Heather is a freelance writer, as well as a monthly contributor for OEDb, a site that helps students select among accredited online schools. She invites comments and freelancing job inquiries at heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

There has been a lot of talk about open source hardware lately and its potential effects on research and education. ETech 2008 showcased many examples of open hardware and offered an insightful presentation [PDF] to those who are new to the emerging technology. Likewise, popular sites like Slashdot and bloggers like Scobleizer have been discussing the growing movement.

The increasing popularity of open source software has already had a tremendous influence on education and the world as a whole. Not only are many schools now making the switch to open source programs, leading universities like UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon are involved with developing large open source software projects.

However, we have yet to see open hardware really take off. Ryan Singel of Wired feels that 2008 could be the year and I second that opinion. Leading the pack seems to be open source robotics, which has been embraced by several major universities.

Just last month, Willow Garage’s Steve Cousins gave a keynote speech at ETech 2008 about open source personal robots, which has brought more attention to the subject. Willow Garage is a privately funded lab that experiments with various robotics platforms.

This open source robotics movement can be felt on many college campuses as well. Carnegie Mellon, which I previously stated is involved with open source software, is also building OS personal robots. The university has recently formed a joint project called the Institute for Personal Robots in Education (IPRE).

The IPRE is a joint project between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College, with sponsorship provided by Microsoft Research. Its purpose is to help advance robotics research and computer science education. The IPRE is currently selling open source robot kits, which are geared toward educators and can be integrated with computer education curricula.

Instructions can be found RobotEducation.org if you are interested in building your own educational robot.

[Image credit: RobotEducation.org]

Often the title of a video alone raises an eyebrow. Today’s video selection certainly does — it’s a presentation from two tele-immersion labs, one at UC Berkeley’s Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the other within the University of Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department. According to the IEEE Computer Society, tele-immersion is when “collaborators at remote sites share the details of a virtual world that can autonomously control computation, query databases, and gather results.” It might be a stretch but I see tele-immersion used in that was as an advanced version of presence technology, in which an application make it possible to locate and identify a computing device wherever it might be, as soon as the user connects to the network.

As it’s a dance performance, both labs worked in close collaboration with the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, and the Dance Department and Intermedia Program at Mills College. The video quality admittedly isn’t great — and you may want to skip ahead to 11:30, when the actual performance begins, or to 20:00, when the dancing starts — but the concept itself is noteworthy for its aspiration to bridge the gap between real and virtual environments.

The Resonance Project Dance Group performed for a very large crowd in the Hearst Memorial Mining Building at UC Berkeley. The performance was a blend of live, modern dance with live tele-immersed dancers from University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Using a large network of cameras and computers the dancers were able to span the geographic distance and mingle in cyberspace. The computers merged three-dimensional video images of the dancers onto a single projection, which was broadcast alongside live dancers.

The Resonance Project is a team of choreographers, dancers, computer engineers, and visual and sound artists who are investigating concepts of presence/remote presence and corporeal and code interactivity within live and media based performance. Unique to the project is the use of a “performance as research” model, within which scientists and artists collaborate to explore a re-visioning of cyber culture and corporeal presence.

The nature of the performance has a close conceptual relationship with CAVE, a tele-immersive environment used for learning in a wide variety of disciplines, and the CAVEman, the first 4-D human atlas.

There are certainly programmers, mathematicians and assorted savants out there who can write and translate directly to and from binary code.

I am not one of them.

If you, too, need to occasionally convert binary to ASCII text or, alternately, amuse yourself by converting especially colorful jokes into safe-for-works form… well, you too might just find this binary to text translation tool useful.

Now you, too, can tell ask your friends to
01110011011101000110111101110000001000
00011100110110010101101110011001000110
10010110111001100111001000000110110101
10010100100000011100110110100101101100
01101100011110010010000001000110011000
010110001101100101011000100110111101101
111011010110010000001110001011101010110
10010111101001111010011001010111001100101110.

[Image source: ThinkGeek]

This clip demonstrates a prototype of Sony’s flexible OLED display. The color screen is only 0.3mm thick and fully flexible, even while content is being player upon it.

HowStuffWorks has posted a helpful explanation for how OLEDs work.

While the above video shows Sony’s prototype, the technology is actually licensed from Kodak. The Eastman Kodak Company, in fact, has been busy signing licensing deals with a number of electronics manufacturers, including an agreement with LG this past week.

GE’s announcement of a successful demonstration of the world’s first roll-to-roll manufactured OLEDs lighting devices (press release) spurred the normal engaging commentary on a Slashdot thread.

Kyoto Prize winner Hiroo Inokuchi, whose organic chemistry work led to the development of OLEDs, is bullish on the techology. In this interview with Wired, he forsees applications in photovoltaics and improved energy conversion.

Will these thin, cheap and green color displays be embedded in surfaces around us within the next ten years? Maybe. Toshiba engineers are reporting problems with high OLED power requirements. In other words, cereal box cartoons may take a bit longer than that to play at a breakfast table near you.

Two weeks and less than 10,000 lines of code result in this demonstration of a starfighter action game on an iPhone that takes advantage of the device’s accelerometer, touch screen and high contrast display. This is a great use of the interface and should inspire some creative thinking the software development community.

My immediate thought upon seeing Steve Forstall’s demo is that there could be a lot of flying iPhones, similar to the stories we’ve heard about the Wiimote. Remember those videos of plasma screens when the Wii debuted?

Now just imagine it’s a device that costs more than $500 direct from Apple in the U.S. and often much more than that in Europe.

That being said, I’m excited to see how software designers take advantage of that new Apple iPhone SDK.

That and Spore. Given more than two weeks to work on this game, I think this could be a killer gaming app for the device.

This video from a 15 year old UK student demonstrates a successful installation of gOS on a laptop nearing a decade of service.

He installed some snark in his YouTube video notes as well, noting that:

I managed to install gOS on a 9 year old IBM ThinkPad 600E laptop. This video shows just how well Linux will run on pretty much any hardware. Vista doesn’t look much better than gOS and would never even boot on old hardware like this, let alone run demanding applications such as GIMP.

You can download and try gOS from ThinkgOS.com.

This canine version of access control combines radio transmitters with a high pitched warning signal to keep each dog away from the other’s bowl. The scenario is similar to many that role-based access control (RBAC) solves in an enterprise.

Unfortunately, programmers would still have to eat their own dogfood.

I wonder if this would help keep my roommate out of my beer.

In this Google TechTalk, Ted Nelson discusses implementing the original hypertext concept and how transclusion should be used now to fulfill its original potential.

While Nelson is credited with coining the term “hypertext, Vannevar Bush is responsible for inventing the concept, which he described as “instant cross referencing.”

As usual, we tread in the path of giants.

One of our newest definitions explains OpenID:

“OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on authentication system for the Internet. The goal of the OpenID initiative is to allow users to log in at websites around the Internet with one ID instead of having to create multiple unique accounts. OpenID was developed using the open source software model to be an interoperable protocol independent from any single organization. (Continued…)”

Activating and using an OpenID is quite easy — I was able to sign up for TravelWiki, for instance, using one from Yahoo!. Activation and setup took about a minute. I’ve embedded three videos below that explain more about how OpenID works and how to use it. Enjoy!

The video below explains more about how to use an OpenID to login, in this case to votay.com:

Here’s another one that explains how to use OpenID with WordPress:

Dave provides a short, clear explanation of OpenID using a whiteboard here:

And finally, in a Google TechTalk, Simon Willison  (co-creator of the Django Web framework) discusses the implications of OpenID and explores the best practices required to take advantage of the new technology while avoiding the potential security pitfalls. This one’s a bit long but excellent. 

CommonCraft.com is already well known in the blogosphere and social media world for creating brilliant, lucid short videos that explain tricky concepts.

The two-person team that make up CommonCraft (Sachi and Lee LeFever) put it simply: they solve explanation problems.

I love that tagline. It’s rather similar sort of thing we try to do here at WhatIs.com. To that point, I’ve embedded three of CommonCraft’s previously released videos on our site, each of which explore and explain a different social media technology:

• RSS in Plain English
• Wikis in Plain English
• Social Networking in Plain English

The newest addition to the mix is a video explaining what Twitter is and how it works.

As you may know, Twitter is a popular microblogging service that launched almost exactly one year ago at the SXSW Music Festival in Austin, Texas. While we’ve blogged about it right afterwards. Due in no small part to the high percentage of geeks and “digerati” at the festival who had the opportunity to try it out and start networking with each other, Twitter really took off. Twitter is now a leader in the “social messaging” category that includes Pownce and Jaiku, spanning the gap between our online and offline worlds. Each allows users to update a microblogging service using SMS messages, a Web interface or a desktop application. (Twitter relies on third party apps for the last based upon its APIs. Try Snitter if you have Adobe Air installed.)

CommonCraft’s video sheds worthwhile additional insight. Watch it below:

There’s plenty of interesting activity going on out there, too. Just check out this mashup of Twitter, Google Maps and live election results for intriguing insights into the 2008 presidential primary season.

And if you’d like to find/follow me on Twitter, head over to http://twitter.com/digiphile.

There’s no question that living in Cambridge and writing about technology has its benefits. The city is swimming in startups, geeky events