Digital Life

Mark Malkoff makes a Skype call to Belgium.

Call Me, Haiti? One Man's Quest To Skype Around The World

11:59am August 31, 2013

by NPR Staff

Mark Malkoff has lived inside of an IKEA store, consumed beverages at 171 Starbucks in Manhattan in less than 24 hours and proved that his kid's Big Wheel bike could beat a New York City bus. Now, the comedian has video chatted with people in 162 different countries — including North Korea.

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One Historic March, Countless Striking Moments

7:26pm August 28, 2013

by Kat Chow

What if Twitter existed 50 years ago, on this monumental anniversary of the March on Washington? Our answer: @TodayIn1963. We've been reporting events of the summer of '63 as if they were happening now, in real-time, through this Twitter account.

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Civil rights leader Martin Luther King waves to supporters from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963, in Washington.

National

Why It's Difficult To Find Full Video Of King's Historic Speech

12:11pm August 24, 2013

by Eyder Peralta

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech is copyrighted, limiting its presence online. One organization, however, has decided to provide ready access to the video.

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Trading Domain Names For A Day With The Candidates

11:39am August 24, 2013

Michael Deutsch loves politics so much so that he systematically purchases Internet domain names that political campaigns might want. But it's not a get-rich-quick scheme. When the campaigns come knocking, asking to take over the domains, he bargains for face time with the candidates.

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About a year since launching, Vine says it has more than 40 million registered users.

National

How Vine Settled On 6 Seconds

8:53pm August 20, 2013

by Laura Sydell

According to numbers released Tuesday, Twitter's one-year-old video-sharing app Vine now has about 40 million registered users. The app lets users shoot a maximum of six seconds per Vine, so we wanted to know why the limit's set at six seconds and not a second longer.

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Teenagers turn to their phones and social media to find rides.

Teens Use Twitter To Thumb Rides

5:25pm August 20, 2013

by Bianca Brooks

Need a ride to the party or the concert? Instead of making endless phone calls, these days teens turn to social media to arrange transportation. It's called ridesharing, a form of cyber-hitchhiking used by a generation that isn't rushing to get a driver's license or dream car.

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Nate Anderson is a senior editor at Ars Technica. His work has also been published in The Economist and Foreign Policy.

Books
Arts

Wild, Wild Web: Policing An Early, Lawless Internet

2:36pm August 20, 2013

There was a time when many thought the Internet was beyond government regulation, its very chaos a source of creativity and strength. Nate Anderson's The Internet Police looks at how law enforcement went about changing that.

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BlackBerry smartphones on a table during a "BlackBerry Brunch" in June in Berlin.

The End Of Buttons: The New Gesture-Control Era

6:58pm August 19, 2013

by Elise Hu

The newest smartphones are abandoning both physical and on-screen buttons in favor of gestures. As with so much behavior change ushered in by technology, the change happens before we take wider notice.

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The San Francisco Public Library has been digitizing its historical document collections for years, including the scrapbooks of famed homicide detective Theodore Kytka. The SFPL is among scores of libraries and archives adding their digital collections to

Education

Combining The Nation's Digitized Libraries, All In One Place

6:58pm August 19, 2013

by Laura Sydell

Libraries have been digitizing their collections for years, but the materials can be hard to find. Enter the Digital Public Library of America. Worried that Google has an outsized hand in digitizing books, the DPLA is combining, on one site, the digital collections of libraries nationwide — free.

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Happy International Geocaching Day!

7:35am August 18, 2013

If you're scratching your head wondering what the heck geocaching is, Dave Prebeck fills us in. The president of the Northern Virginia Geocaching Organization tells host Scott Simon that geocaching is essentially "a high-tech scavenger hunt."

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