The Web is a disruptive technology, and it is changing everything it touches. Old analog industries, like print media in all its manifestations – newspapers, magazines, and books – are being revamped (or maybe sideswiped) by Web innovation.

As people are migrating onto the Web they are spending less time watching television and reading print media. They are getting more of their media fix through Web services, or online publications: like blogs, and social networks. This is sort of a step back to an older pre-industrial model, where people’s sources of information about the world were most likely to be friends and members of the community. As McLuhan presaged, the Web has brought us into a global village. This is destabilizing established media. Consider the precipitous decline of TV Guide, which was just sold off at what the WSJ calculated was a $6B loss. Or the inroads on newspapers’ revenues that Craig’s List has caused. Or the changing face of media in the wake of blogging. The inclusion of web connection in Amazon’s Kindle makes it a dedicated Web device, just as much as an eBook. What will Web books do to literature if authors know that readers will be online? Will future books link to others? Will they become social (although the Kindle doesn’t support any sharing at the moment)?

LED’s are far superior to traditional light bulbs. They last longer, product next to no heat, and use very little energy. Why not build a flashlight that will last for quite a while?

Using a few tiny LED’s and a 9V battery you can put together a powerful light source that can easily last you over 300 hours per battery.

First we connect 3 3v white LEDs together in series. Next we connect the negative leads to a 9v battery and your done. It’s just that simple.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
http://digitalunderground.tv/projects/ledbattery.zip

How BlogHer started
In early 2005 there was a recurring theme in media: Where are the women? And that question was being asked about bloggers, even though women comprised nearly half the bloggers and more than half the internet users even at that time. My two business partners and I decided that instead of “talking” about it (via our blogs, we would do something: throw a conference for women bloggers and see who showed up. We blogged the idea, and the response was immediate, passionate and positive. 120 days later we had a sold-out conference that had gotten major media and blogosphere attention.

- Why do women bloggers matter?
Women are not only half the internet users and bloggers out there, they control the household dollar on purchases ranging form technology to cars to what we put on the table. We call blogging the “gateway drug” to technology, because it’s relatively easy for non-programmers and non-engineers to get started. Once people do get started, though, it opens a world of new opportunities for them. Blogging has cultivated a community of “self taught geeks” who become hooked on how easy it is to blog and thus become part of a community and dialogue. This phenomenon is helping to bridge the gap in the adoption digital divide (as opposed to an economic digital divide) which is beneficial as technology becomes more important to our society. Those who are more technically savvy have a definite edge over those who aren’t as quick to adopt it. Blogging is becoming an easy way for people to become involved in using technology and is opening up a wealth of learning and professional opportunities. Everyday people who start their own blogs are now even learning how to write code and build applications, something that only true geeks did only a few years ago.

-What kind of activities does BlogHer engage in today?
We continue to do conference. But we’ve branched out into a full-blown media hub for women bloggers, covering every issue under the sun, and supporting women to transform their personal, professional and political lives via blogging and other social media technologies. In addition, we are all about helping women make money doing something they are good at, and that they love. Hence we introduced the BlogHer Advertising Network, which now reaches nearly 8 million unique visitors a month across nearly 1200 network blogs.

How to be a part of the BlogHer community:

Join BlogHer: http://www.blogher.com/user/register
List your blogs in BlogHer’s blog directories: http://blogher.org/node/add/weblink
Blog on the site: http://www.blogher.com/all-posts
Attend a conference: http://blogher.com/conference
Subscribe to our newsletters: http://www.blogher.com/sign-bloghers-email-newsletters
Join our ad network…opening up again in February 2008: http://blogherads.com

Show Notes RELATED WEBSITE LINKS (to be used on web)
BlogHer’s ChangeThis Manifesto tells the story of our first conference and how women bloggers are changing their world using this technology: http://changethis.com/29.05.WomenBloggers

The New York Times story on BlogHer’s editorial guidelines: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/technology/09blog.html?ei=5124&en=0ac5...