Vyew is an internet-based “meeting room” which offers all of the interaction you would have if you were sitting across a table from someone. The new program offers several ways to communicate.

1) Via webcam to webcam: up to 5 users can stream video at a time

2) Text: any meeting room member can text “message” the entire group or an individual user

3) Voice: participants can use their computer microphones or use their phone to call into a meeting and listen/participate

4) Interactive white board: Vyew offers a white board that users can draw on, type text on or upload documents to for everyone in the meeting room to see

But the best part is that all of the features can be used at the same time. No, wait, I forgot the other best part. IT’S ALL FREE

I’m not one to “plug” products to people, but when something this cool comes along, it has to be shared. Technology like this takes meetings to a new level, allowing multimedia interaction that takes everything great about online meetings and making it better.

I haven’t read any forums about KDP, but I did have a few conversations about it with people I know. My initial fear was that it is not a recognizable source for publishing therefore participants would look like they took the easy way out. I will choose to stick with the traditional way of doing things in order to build a stronger backbone: I’ve learned a lot from rejection letters. However, KDP seems like a grand induction ceremony to the world of literature and paid publishing, but anyone can self-publish now and the idea of quality work disappears. This process also distances writers from the complex process of publishing, and those submitting to KDP may only get that far. The problem is that Amazon gets a lot of traffic and the idea of money seems very exciting. Do writers choose instant publishing or work harder?

Though the program is still in its Beta phase, it seems promising that keyboards will soon be a thing of the past. The video below helps explain how this amazing technology works.

Google has taken a page out of the playbooks of major gaming-entertainment companies like the Nintendo Wii, XBox Kinect and PlayStation’s new motion controllers. Using simple gestures, Google has made the chore of opening, reading and sending emails a more engaging (and fun!) experience.

And in typical Google-fashion, if they’re going to do something, they’re going to do it right. Dennis Tooley, Ph.D, California Center for Kinesis and Paralanguage had this to say:

“It is commonly known that 80% of communication is non-verbal. Gmail Motion not only accepts this fact – it embraces it.”

So for those of us who feel like we could use this technology in other facets of our Google-lives, Google says that Motion technology will also be available in Google Docs in the near future.

For more information on new Google Technologies, check out their official blog

For more information on Google’s annual April Fools prank, check out this page.

Well, The New York Times just made my claim stronger. Their article published this week, “The Claim: To Cut Calories, Eat Slowly” sums up exactly what I’ve been trying to explain for years–and they even have a study to prove it.  Basically, as you eat, there are hormones that tell your brain that you are indeed “full.” For example, as I chew and eat my first sandwich slowly, most of people around me are already moving onto to seconds. When I find out I’m full and stop eating, I’ve had one sandwich, and everyone else has inhaled two. Thus, eating slower = less caloric intake.

Author Dani Shapiro, perhaps best known for the best-selling Slow Motion, her memoir of decadence and death, sits in as editor in the tenth entry in the Best New American Voices series: the 2010 edition.

How I am reading the best voices of 2010 while sitting a 2009 living room is beyond me. Perhaps the suggestion is that these time-traveling voices are the ones we ought to watch for in the new year. I was never much good at science.

At any rate, a leisurely 8-hour bus trek from Massachusetts to Philadelphia (including the obligatory breakdown at the side of the highway, but the extent of literature I could make out in the darkness were terse text messages) provided me with plenty of time to chisel my way through Shapiro’s selections, gleaned from writing programs and summer conferences such as Bread Loaf and Sewanee. So far the memorably named Boomer Pinches has underwhelmed, David James Poissant writes of broken father-son relationships with the same exterior grit and interior sentimentality of a Bruce Willis character, Claire O’Connor tackles cancer and great white sharks, and Christian Moody of the University of Cincinatti outdoes his peers with the truly original “Horusville,” a place where trees have eyes and record the lurid private lives of the town residents.

The Best New American Voices series first came on the scene in that dastardly year 2000 (remember stocking up on water and canned green beans? I know you do) and has since been edited by, in addition to the changing yearly guest editors, executive editor John Kulka and writer and critic Natalie Danford.

Of course, the Philadelphia Examiner is likely to be of particular interest to anyone reading this post.

If you’re looking for recipes, cooking tips, or general foodie info, my column is here to help!

Furthermore, while you’re at the Examiner, take a look around at their many literature- and writing-based columns. Go ahead, dig into the Philadelphia literary scene!

I love the smell of books and the feel of the pages as I flip through them in the local Barnes and Noble. But I feel as though that these days of paper and bindings may be slowly coming to an end. With the internet and computers in general now being necessary in our lives and the creation of Amazon’s Kindle, I feel as though books may be a thing of the past.

I have nothing against the Kindle: quick downloads at your fingertips (you don’t even have to go to the bookstore to get a book!), you can still read the screen, not only can you read leisurely but you can also download textbooks, all of the downloads are much cheaper because the cost of paper, shipping, and paying a middleman is out of the way, etc. However, not only can you download books and have a thin piece of technology to hold, but it can also read the book to you; and not in that monotoned voice that often mispronounces words. There is also a Kindle 2 which can browse the web but it requires that documents be converted to specific files that can be done through Amazon at an additional cost. I feel as though this takes away from the reading experience. Granted, you can follow along as it reads to you; however, young people often try to “get out” of reading as much as they can or college students listen as they do the dishes or clean up their rooms.

The Kindle runs from battery life that gives about 2 hours (give or take) of reading time. For some people, this is more than enough time while for others this is nothing; especially if at the beach or curled up next to a fire during the Christmas season.

So, is this creation for the better, or worse? Will it lead to the destruction of books? Or will it simply be a trend that will die down? I’m hoping that this trend is just that because the leather covers and off-white pages of classics are my best friends when it comes to a warm blanket and hot cocoa next to the Christmas tree or the soft covers that bend back and large print of light reading while basking in the sun.

But for me, Twitter had to go.

I parted ways with my account some 3 days ago. The obituary should be appearing soon in newspapers around the globe, spinning in black and white toward the camera with melodramatic trombone tones announcing the end.

Why delete my Twitter account?

A waste of time, yes. Inherently stupid, sure. Flamboyantly meaningless, absolutely. But what really bothered me about my Twitter usage was that it was sucking blood from my writing. My writing.

Free to constantly rattle off any fragment, any snatch of a sentence that sounded good, what was at first liberating was quick to become tiresome. The phrases I found myself constantly splashing up were pointlessly cryptic, not intriguing. They were lazy, not profound. It’s not as though you can edit “tweets.”

I realize of course that Twitter doesn’t claim to be, or want to be, some powerhouse writer’s tool. It’s a fun, silly little outlet for all the run-over Facebook can’t contain. But I have to be a writer first — I can’t trade off instant gratification for dilution.

So, I say tweeting is for the birds.

I’ve browsed the gamut, fooling myself. Receptionist? Baby-sitter? Sure, I’ve got tons of HTML experience and I just LOVE those drooling, crying little babies!

Nah. I target most of my half-hearted searches toward the “writing gigs” and the “writing/editing jobs.”

And my findings?

Well.

For the most part, the jobs are legitimate. They just happen to frequently require experience with grant-writing, knowledge of finance, being fluent in Arabic, or, for good measure, owning a car. Now, the gigs tend be closer to home and closer to my admitted range of skill.

Unfortunately they also tend to be ridiculous.

For example and I quote.

“The problem is that I am asking if you can do this out the kindness of your heart and if i get it published you will have the satifaction of knowing that you have helped someone off the unemployment rolls.”

“ In addition I do sing so I can reference the song and make it hot!!! ”

Here’s my personal favorite:

“I need somebody to write my resume from scratch”

No compensation. No reason. Nay, not even a period at the end of the sentence.

Oh, Craigslist. I thought you were better than that.

In case you aren’t quite as hip and with it as everyone else in the WORLD, Twitter is essentially the ultimate ego trip. The purpose is to post quick blurbs, always in 140 characters or fewer, known as “tweets,” which update your “followers” constantly as to your every minute shift in mood and activity. “Leaving for work in 25 minutes. Bored.” “Leaving for work in 20 minutes. Money!!” “Leaving for work in 12 minutes. Stomach hurts. Ugh.”

But what interests me most is the 140 characters or less stipulation. I’m not one of those anti-texting extremists who push the idea that modern communications are going to destroy the English language as we know it, but I have to wonder if there will be changes to the mass thinking process, and in turn the writing process, as every kid with a computer learns to think in hyperspeed blips. Will this improve economy of language? Destroy the ability to form a complete, coherent thought?

Neither? Nothing remotely so dramatic at all?

Only time will tell, but in the meantime, I wonder.