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.

If you’re online for more than 30 hours of non-work surfing every week, experience withdrawal symptoms and find your relationships with friends, family and coworkers suffering, you might be an Internet addict. This video, hosted by Kimberly S. Young, introduces netaddiction.com. Young is the  founder of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery. Take their Internet addiction test to see where your own usage rates.

Today’s Word of the Day, K-scale, or “Korean scale,” is a checklist used for diagnosing and evaluating Internet addiction.

In 2008, April Fools’ Day Jokes are everywhere. Here’s a roundup list of some of the best/worst of the lot.

Gday, MATE, from Google Australia. Future search! A great follow-up from the company that has brought us Google MentalPlex and PigeonRank technologies, along with openings for Googlelunaplex on the moon and a smart-drink called GoogleGulp! MATE™ stands for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

Google’s prank in the US, Google Custom Time, involves messing about with time as well, utilizing “an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality (see Grandfather Paradox).” Send your emails back in time! Amaze your friends!

YouTube links will RickRoll you. All of the featured videos for YouTube UK and YouTube Australia link to aRick Astley video. If you aren’t familiar with RickRolling - it’s when someone puts a link on website to something, but it actually takes you to a music video of Rick Astley’s ‘ Never Gonna Give You Up.’

TechCrunch sues Facebook for $25 million in Statutory Damages. You have to get to the end before the jokiness shows up. Can you tell Michael is a lawyer?

Shakespeare Ghost Writer. Because everyone needs the bard.

Pay Per Tweet from Problogger. This one spawned some pretty funny reactions on Twitter when it was announc

Even our friends over at CNET are getting into the fun, reporting that TechCrunch has acquired TigerBeat and renamed it CrunchKids.

Watch out, however, as there’s a major backlash brewing in the blogosphere. ValleyWag’s Paul Boutin captured the zeitgeist quite succintly in Your April Fools’ Prank Sucks:

April Fools’ Day in tech has devolved over the past two decades into lazy online hoaxes… Worse, the goal is no longer in-house camaraderie, but Internet publicity. Some companies notify the press of their hoaxes a week early, in hopes of securing coverage. We thought about running their emails as they came in, just to pop their bubbles. But there’s no laugh in giving away an unfunny joke. Look, if you want attention, why not ship a real product? That seems easier.

Anil Dash elaborated further, stating that Your April Fools’ Day Joke Continues to Suck.

Ouch. Ok, guys. We get it. But I’m still laughing. I’ve even posted a prank played upon me from last year on the right, a well-implemented foiling of my desk and everything on it.

If you’re hungry for more, there are some hoary classics out there, like John C. Dvorak’s Drunk Modeming and April Fools’ Phone from Penn & Teller. WhatIs.com’s joke for the day was Electricity over IP , if you missed it. Michael Morisey had some fun at Cisco’s expense over at SearchNetworking.com, too. Make sure to read Cisco re-thinks Layer 8 networking with green components to learn about The Human-Like Network.

Slashdot is having a merry time with an April Fools’ Day Prank Roundup thread that includes a five pranks you can build in the office, Wired’s top 10 practical jokes for nerds, Lifehacker’s Top 10 harmless geek pranks and Jack Shafer’s guide over at Slate.com on how to protect yourself from the media’s prankish habits. Jack linked to the Top 100 April Fools’ Day Hoaxes Of All Time, which shouldn’t be missed.

The folks over at /. did miss a few, however.

• ReadWriteWeb posted 10 Places to Get Fooled on April 1st
• Ask Metafilter is collecting suggestions for great office pranks
• PCWorld has a list of the 10 Ten April Fools’ Day websites, many of which you’ll see above

Unfortunately, I have work to do (a host of new definitions, naturally) but Patrick Altoft is liveblogging April Fools’ Day 2008. Just check in with him to see what’s new. April Fools’ Day on the Web is doing a great job of cataloging new pranks as well.

***
UPDATE: I couldn’t resist. Thanks to a tweet from Dan Sandler, I learned about the announcement of a Legend of Zelda movie.

UPDATE: I think this one takes the cake for most chutzpah, given that both parties are publicly traded: Infoworld announces that Microsoft and Yahoo! have agreed on a buyout price.

UPDATE: And as the day comes to a close, Wikipedia’s entry for April 1, 2008 has over 158 different hoaxes and jokes that were made in the news media, in sports, in video games, on websites, on television, in podcasts, and on the radio.

I bet my friend Brian’s favorite is the report from Chicago Public Radio that “Major League Baseball has retroactively awarded the 1945 World Series title to the Chicago Cubs, due to an alleged ineligible playere appearing on the roster of the Detroit Tigers.”

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on some Spazztroids to munch on while I queue up my Betamax to HD-DVD Converter to watch old episodes of the Muppet Show. (Thanks, Thinkgeek!) I hope they can distract me from the USB Pregnancy Test I’m giving my PC.

Yes, today is March 14, 2008, abbreviated as 3.14. Mathematicians everywhere celebrate today as Pi Day.

You can join the fun over at PiDay.org.

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.

Many people derisively refer to Valentine’s Day as a “Hallmark” holiday, invented and popularized by commercialized interests in the greeting card, floral and chocolate industries.

Not so!

Valentine’s Day was named after two Christian martyrs named (wait for it) “Valentine.” According to Wikipedia, Valentine’s Day became associated with romantic love in the circle of Geoffrey Chaucer in the Middle Ages. Lovers have been expressing their love for one another on that day ever since.

Geeks can have special challenges, of course. Bonding with your laptop or server cluster can be a little lonely. Your iTouch is sexy… just not in that way. What to do? If you’re feeling lonely, stressed out over expressing your love or have an unrequited geeky crush, fear not! The interwebs are your friend! [Tetris Heart from Mitch at 4colorrebellion.com]

If the target of your affections has a sense of humor, fill out this “Declaration of Romantic Intent.”

If you have a crush on a fellow photographer, follow this helpful howto from Wired and turn your flickr crush into real romance.

The Road to Know Where has a ton of templates you can use to put together an electronic Valentine Day card, including a Silverlight “Share the Love” ecard builder.

Your Mom’s Basement gets pretty specific about how to meet a girl and navigate the pitfalls of romance. If you’re spending time in your mom’s basement, can we assume you need the advice?

If you’re trying to decide what to get a geek for Valentine’s Day, there’s a Slashdot thread to help you with a last-minute purchase, along with a gazillion other shopping guides.

Finally, if you just need a laugh, Josh Frolinger put together a hilarious list of geek Valentine’s Day videos. My favorites?

Computer Camp Love:

Internet Love Song:

Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)

(This last betrays my own geeky love for collegiate acappella, bringing me back to the glory days of singing under the arches and then networking some PCs together to play Marathon. Nothing says loving like a good fragging. )

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

Last month, I was lucky enough to score an invitation to a Q&A session with two distinguished MIT physicists focused upon the theoretical underpinnings of teleportation , followed by a roundtable discussion that brought in with “Jumper” director Doug Liman and Anakin Skywalker himself, Hayden Christiansen. The movie will be in wide release tomorrow, so I thought it would be timely to offer a comment or two concerning this confluence of fact and fiction.

You know you’re in a special place when professors receive enthusiastic applause comparable to the reception given to a Hollywood director and bonafide heart throb movie star. That being said, Hayden was clearly the focus of considerable adoration, expressed at his entrance and in more than one invitation to dates and afterparties.

Serious students of quantum physics are going have to employ the classic “willing suspension of disbelief” to fully embrace this picture. In other words, when questioned, both Dr. Edward Farhi and Dr. Max Tegmark kindly but firmly ruled out the possibility of human teleportation any time in the near future. The current state of this branch of science is exciting, however, given that experiments have successfully teleported the properties of photons over a distance. This sort of quantum teleportation relies on “quantum entanglement“, whereby the properties of two particles can be tied together even when they are far apart, a phenomenon Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.”

I managed to capture the presentations of Professor Tegmark and Farhi on the physics of teleportation on my webcam and stream it on uStream. My apologies: The quality of both the audio and video is regrettably poor. Still, I’m happy to share. Jumper’s plot relies on a staple of science fiction, however, not fact: genetic mutation. In other words, some evolved version of CERN’s large hadron collider or a hitherto undiscovered means of stabilizing worm holes powered by cold fusion is not at at the heart of the film. Some people are born with the ability to teleport from one place to another. Off to the races.

Mr. Liman’s direction of Swingers, Go and the Bourne Identity , however, recommends taking a chance on his vision of the moral and ethical challenges presented to someone with the power to teleport at will. I found his willingness to research what the event would actually look and sound like was impressive, particularly the collapse of air into the vacuum left by the removal of a body. He said he fell in love with the script when he read that the first action of the character upon discovering his power was to rob a bank.

For more coverage of the event, check out:

• Doug Overbye’s “Quantum Teleporting, Yes; The Rest is Movie Magic” in the New York Times
• Jess K’s hilarious blog post, Hayden Christensen Comes to MIT, Looks Pretty, for some perspective from a current MIT student
• Sharon Gaudin’s “Teleportation: The leap from fact to fiction in new movie Jumper“
• Jim Rapoza’s “Hollywood Jumps to MIT” at Emerging Tech

Following is the trailer, if you’ve somehow missed it theaters, on TV or elsewhere on the Web.

UPDATE: I’ve gotten some anecdotal feedback that “Jumper” isn’t exactly Citizen Kane. RottenTomatoes.com has delivered a dire rating of 15% while imdb.com users are being considerably kinder with a rating of 6.4/10.  That being said, the film raking in $27.2 million at the box office this past weekend, so tastes may be for forgiving out and about.

Last night, Bill Gates gave his swan song keynote at CES 2008. Before his speech, which as always enjoyed blanket coverage from the tech press, the outgoing chairman of Microsoft played a hilarious video.

Gates was able to pull in celebrities from all walks of life to participate: Speilberg, Clooney, Bono, Hillary, Al Gore, Obama, Jay-Z and a particularly hilarious bit with Matthew McConaughey. Even you didn’t make it to CES, this one’s worth adding to your lunchtime video snacking. It turns out that Bill balances funny with brilliant, though not so much on a fitness ball.

Aside from the humor, Gates orated at length about the next “digital decade,” where we can expect vast improvements in hardware and software to drive media to places it’s never been, though he painted in broad strokes rather than introducing many specific products or services. He outlined three major themes : high definition displays with 3D, multiple devices always connected to Web-enabled services ( so-called “cloud computing,” a trend we and others are documenting) and the power of vastly improved natural interfaces. To that end, Gates managed to get through a successful demonstration of snowboard design software using the Surface I/O platform without a single crash, an improvement on past experiences. Gadget geeks, epitomized by the Engadget and Gizmodo crowd, took note of the Windows Mobile 7 (Photon) image that snuck into the presentation, promptly linking to leaked interface designs for the OS that might show up on an upcoming Palm/Treo handset.
It looks like the iPhone’s multitouch interface spurred Redmond to improve on the feature-laden but complex interface of Windows Mobile 6.

The nascent Silverlight platform also scored a big win, as Gates announced that MSN would be NBC’s exclusive online provider for the 2008 Olympics in Bejing. That means that if you want to watch the Olympics online, you’ll need to download the player and install it on your browser. Well, legally, anyway. I’d be shocked if NBC wasn’t chasing .torrent files around the Net or YouTube mashups. I had to install Silverlight to watch the slive last night, actually, with a few bumps along the way. Version 1.0 of anything always worries me. You can watch the entire Gates CES keynote here.

Ah, December. The first real snow has fallen here in Boston, the malls are full of holiday shoppers and the blogosphere and pages of industry mags are full of annual summaries of the best and worst of the year in technology. We’ll be coming out with our own most notable word of the year, as you’d expect from an IT encyclopedia, so stay tuned. In the meantime, read on for a summary of some of the best (and worst) tech of 2007.

Around this time year, I laid out the top 20 IT buzzwords of 2006. To be fair, calling some of these technologies “buzzwords” now looks like a bit of a stretch, in terms of the strict definition for buzzword. Virtualization is everywhere now, in the network, server, desktop PC, storage hardware and data center. Web 2.0 may have been massively overhyped, but blogs, RSS, Ajax, wikis, podcasting and social bookmarking have all made an impact this year too, in a wave of adoption that many have now settled down to term “Enterprise 2.0.”

“2.0″ itself could be the word of the year, were it not for the discussions of Web 3.0 that led to some buzz fatigue and gentle reminders of the Semantic Web. (See this list of semantic apps for some insight into how this space is evolving).

SaaS applications from industry giants continue to be important for CRM. And at the end of every year, IT admins and CFOs alike can’t help but think of SOX compliance. Mash-ups, VoIP, BPM, 3G SOA, XML and data mining all continued to be relevant too, with nary a buzzword to be seen.

Anyone who creates, markets or sells content or services online know the value and importance of search engine optimization (SEO) by now as well.

While they didn’t make the number one spot (you’ll have to wait for that one) there’s no question that IT became greener, as tracked by the surge in spending, research — and hype. Green data centers , green computing, LEED certification, and, unfortunately, greenwashing all make the trend list.

Dealing with Vista is also right at the top of any trend list. Microsoft’s new OS has met with slow adoption and a slew of backwards compatibility headaches, and, as SearchWinIT’s Christina Torode reports, “Few Windows shops had plans for Windows Vista migrations in 2007, and it appears that there may also be little interest well into next year. Of more than 800 responses from IT managers to an online survey conducted by SearchWinIT.com, 37% said they had no plans whatsoever in place to install Vista, while 8% said they would begin adding the new desktop OS in the first quarter of 2008, and 9% expect to begin the upgrade in Q2 2008.”

So what else is new? What else mattered? If I just pulled from the words on WhatIs.com that received the most attention from you, our audience, you’d think it was dialectric materials, FUBAR , chaos theory, IEEE, heuristics, nanometers and compilers — but there’s more to the year that that!

I won’t aggregate every 2007 list here (after all, Fimoculous.com has, yet again, done a great job of pulling together 2007 lists) but following are some of the best that cover IT. You’ll find great new Websites, tools and services — exactly what we promise to provide you in this space from week to week.

Enjoy the lists — and, of course, don’t forget to subscribe to to our newsfeed for the best enterprise IT news or subscribe to our tipsfeed for the best enterprise IT tools and expert advice to help you work better and faster.

Jason Hiner takes aim at hardware and software in The 10 most important business technology products of 2007, noting the i-Mate, Sprint Xohm, Salesforce.com, Vista/Leopard, LinkedIn, Zoho Office, Cisco Telepresence, Microsoft Office 2007, OQO and the Apple iPhone.Personally, I agree with the commenters that the XO of the OLPC project should be in the conversation, though perhaps not on this list, as Jason says. I’d add OpenOffice, personally.

PCWorld misses that one too — though not many others — in this immense roundup of the Top 100 Products of 2007.

This list is a grab bag of hardware, software, Web sites and services. Techies will find plenty to quibble with — can you really compare the Intel Core 2 Duo with Pandora.com, Guitar Hero 2 and Netflix without segmenting them out — but if you’re looking for a good list of what mattered to techies and netizens alike to discover the best of the best, you could do much worse.

PCWorld also featured a terrific list of the top 100 undiscovered Web sites in August, if you missed it, along with their top 100 classic Web sites.

Some of my favorites (and now bookmarks) include Wink, Footnote, Wikisky, DZone, Programmable Web, VideoJug and Zoho and Meebo. Happy surfing!Time Magazine, in much the same vein, offers up their 50 Best Websites of 2007.

My favorites here have to be CellSwapper.com, Last.fm, Newsvine.com, Tumblr, Twitter, GrandCentral and, for some of the best laughs of the year, the outrageous FunnyOrDie.com.

If you didn’t see Will Ferrell’s “The Landlord,” you missed out. StumbleUpon is, for my money, the breakout Web site of the year, though YouTube and Facebook fans may disagree.

(Stumble this blog and find out what I mean).

I liked Mozy.com for online backup, too.

It isn’t quite a 2007 roundup but Esquire’s six ideas that will change the world offered such intriguing suggestions that I couldn’t help but mention them:

• a low energy method for getting rust nanoparticles to bind to arsenic for water purification in the developing world
• Internet “hacktivists” who use Psiphon to provide uncensored Net access to netizens stranded in regimes hostile to the free flow of information and ideas
• flexible circuits embedded in silicone skin that can be used for prostheses and wearable computers
• self-modeling robots who use the principles of natural selection found in evolutionary theory to arrive at the optimal model for a structure or mechanism
• CO2 sequestering in the deepest water of the oceans to force it to become a liquid heavier than water
• biodegradable plastic produced in an environmentally friendly way

For more in that vein, make sure to consult the pages of MIT’s Technology Review, where they list the following exciting emerging technologies:

• optical antennas and meta­materials
• peer-to-peer video,
• personalized medical monitors
• compressive sensing
• nanohealing and quantum-dot solar power
• single-cell analysis
• mobile augmented reality

On the other side of the coin, eWeek’s Brian Moore illustrated a list of technologies and services that flopped, floundered or aren’t quite ready for prime time in 2007’s Biggest Emerging Technology Disappointments. You’ll find virtual worlds, in the form of Second Life, ultramobile micro-PCs, home-based VoIP, mobile security for smartphones, IPv6, ebook reader (Hello, Kindle!), WiMax, BlueRay/HD DVD and MuniWiFi.

It’s hard to argue with the selections, though I do think that Kindle’s eInk technology offers the closest thing to a pleasant electronic reading experience yet.

Wired is calling for nominees for its 10th anniversary vaporware awards, too, if you want to get in on voting for what didn’t materialize this year.

Personally, and I know I’m burying the lede here, 2007 was the year that the network took a huge step towards being the computer, a trend acknowledged by Amazon, IBM and Microsoft in one form or another. (And yes, I’m talking about our word of the year again here.) Sun talked about that phenomenon ten years ago, though it missed an opportunity by not open sourcing Java. This model of Internet-based supercomputing, where vast stores of information and processing resources can be tapped into remotely by a laptop, PC, smartphone or other connected device is still building momentum..

2007 saw the introduction of more devices than ever before, including the gPC, iPhone and XO, that all move the user into this browser-based, Web application world, enabled and enobled by Ajax. Between open source operating systems, browsers, office productivity applications and inexpensive hardware, users and organizations can do more and create more than ever before, albeit in increasingly insecure environments.

We may take a stab at some predictions for the year ahead some time soon, once we finish digesting the year that was. Feel free to let me know what YOU think the most important trends and technologies for 2008 will be through email or in the comments.