Wired is featuring a story on Nicholas Reville of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a nonprofit organization “with a mission to build tools and services that give people more ways to engage in their culture.“ One of the PCF’s main projects is Miro, a free and Open Source video player for digital files. The Wired article notes, “Ultimately, the foundation’s goal is to promote and build an entirely new, open mass medium of online television.“ The nonprofit group has 12 full-time employees and is supported by grants from a variety of supporters, including Skyline Public Works and the Mitch Kapor, Surdna, Mozilla and Knight foundations.

ThinkGeek is now selling ($30) a T-shirt with a visible wireless network detector on the front of the shirt. A patch on the shirt (removable for washing) glows when it is in the presence of a WiFi signal, and shows the signal strength too. The patch runs on three AAA batteries that are stored in a small pouch inside the shirt.

Anne Zelenka has posted an interesting article on GigaOm, with the title “From the Information Age to the Connected Age.“

“Today’s version of the web, whatever you want to call it,“ she writes, “is notable because people and hardware and information and software and conversation are all mixed together into a hyperconnected network. Maybe instead of getting tangled up in discussions of what’s web 1.0 vs. web 2.0 vs. web 3.0, we might look instead at another shift: how the web enables us to move from one era into another, from the Information Age to the Connected Age. You can see this shift both in the practices of individual workers and in the strategies of technology companies.“

Zelenka speculates that the old paradigm of the Information Age was one of the “knowledge worker,“ and the new paradigm of the Connected Age is ruled by the “web worker,“ yet another sort of Microsoft-Google comparison represented in this chart:

Zelenka acknowledges that most web workers will pursue a “hybrid” model, and that these categories are not meant to be descriptive but suggestive of new ways of thinking about trends.

Jayne Cravens, the globe-trotting maven of online volunteerism, has updated her list of volunteer management software, with some additional useful links for nonprofit managers who want to learn about databases and “specialized software,“ meaning software for very specific, nonprofit-relevant tasks. The list is at this link.

NYC TV, the official television station of the City of New York, has gone online, with an “on demand” video channel. Clips can be e-mailed to others, or users can grab a link that calls up a video clip, like YouTube.

NYC TV is mostly a channel for promoting New York City, and features interviews, performances, short documentary clips and other features about New York City’s attractions, entertainment, food and cultural events.

Intel has been promoting a Web site about using Linux to save power, LessWatts.org.

The Web site says, “LessWatts is about creating a community around saving power on Linux, bringing developers, users, and sysadmins together to share software, optimizations, and tips and tricks.“

There are downloads available for Linux power management programs, tips for different kinds of platforms—servers, laptops and desktops—and ways to get involved in the Open Source power-saving community.

As expected, a presentation tool (like Microsoft’s PowerPoint) has now joined the suite of applications available through Google Apps, the free online applications that also include a word processor, calendar, spreadsheet, e-mail and photo gallery. Google’s blog says the presentations created using this tool “can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it’s time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they’re watching. Not wanting anyone to feel left out, we’ve made the presentation feature available in 25 languages; Google Apps customers can also access it as part of Google Docs.“

Google has prepared a YouTube video about how to use the presentation tool, which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRqUE6IHTEA.

IBM today released a free suite of software applications including a word processor, a spreadsheet and a presentation tool, with the resurrected name “Lotus Symphony.“ The IBM news release notes that “Lotus Symphony supports multiple file formats including Microsoft Office and Open Document Format (ODF), and also can output content in PDF format.“

More on the software and free downloads can be found here. Lotus Symphony currently works with Windows and Linux and a Macintosh version is planned for the near future.

Last week IBM announced participation in OpenOffice.org, an Open Source project that offers a Microsoft Office-like package of common desktop office applications. This is yet another challenge to Microsoft’s near monopoly in desktop office applications, via Microsoft Office. Google Apps and now Yahoo’s purchase of Zimbra, yesterday, will heat up this long-dormant segment of the software market.