What My Friends Are Doing

A great song by Jarabe de Palo to kick off the weekend.

I meet some interesting people while doing this blog. They keep doing interesting things. Thought I'd round up a few of their recent projects:

Jon Bischke and company have rolled out some great new features at Learn Out Loud. First of all, Learn Out Loud introduced a new recommendations system that examines how you've rated materials on their page in order to suggest new materials. I tried this out and was very impressed by the results. In addition to audiobooks, the Loomia-powered engine also recommends podcasts. Another great new features at Learn Out Loud is the "Free Item of the Day" sent to you by email. This is a great way to highlight the gems in their free library. They're also summarizing these resources right now on their podcast.

Remember Good Sh#$, the site that combines high quality education materials with high quality porn? Well, Fred has started a second site, Good Stuff. Unlike Good Sh#$, you can read this site at work - no porn, only great educational links. I have to admit, I didn't think Fred would be able to find enough stuff to run two sites. But he has. Good Stuff is also adorned with lots of nice art and pictures...but the sort that won't get you fired. By the way, this pic is from Dirty Pictures Cleaned-up.

Freeload Press is a new textbook publisher that offers free textbooks, complete with supplemental materials. How do they do it? Tasteful ads in the books. These guys are presenting a viable model to create affordable textbooks while paying fair wages to authors. The company is composed of honest, straightforward guys with many years of experience in publishing. I wouldn't be surprised to see some big corporate players sign-up with them soon.

You may have already seen the news on Textbook Revolution, but Jason is going to Sri Lanka to install these experimental UV water purification systems. Textbook Revolution is also helping Nuwan Karunaratne at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura to gather used textbooks for their physics department. If you can help, please email Nuwan. Textbook Revolution has been discussed in a number of recent articles including this great profile from Northeastern University. TBR was even mentioned in the Philadelphia Inquirer (thanks Joyce).