learnandteachonline.com

It's a repository of speeches and other presentations that lets you embed video, and download audio, video or transcripts.

Check out the way you can follow along in the transcript while the video is playing, and skip to "chapters."

Here's a Commonwealth Club talk given last year by Paul Krugman.

It looks like just the video is embeddable, not the running transcript feature.

New York Times interactive features are getting better and better. Check out this Flashy way of displaying movie box office earnings and theatre run longevity.

It's beautiful.

Note that it's almost a year old. One thing I've struggled with in making web features for magazine I work for is: how much time can you afford to keep them updated? So far our answer has hinged on how many readers are still looking at them. In general it seems that certain features become unpredictably "pass-alongable." Things like quizzes, and if they contain timely info we update them.

Essence magazine did nice job in integrating the site look into Ning for its community site.

The community has about 2,500 members, and doesn't look very old.

Aspen Institute conferences attract heavy-hitter speakers and present some fascinating topics. Talks are nicely archived here.

I've been especially enjoying the NYTimes David Brooks' talk on Neuroscience and Socicology.

Here's another good one: Clay Shirky talking about the ideas behind his book, Here Comes Everybody.

Only two criticisms of the Aspen video offerings: how about RSS and sharing?

Providing the MP3s is a nice touch. I'm going to take advantage of them this morning. Watch a little more of the Brooks talk, then listen to more of it on my commute.

The notion of switching media to suit where you are -- or what sort of media mood you're in -- appeals to me. I've often wished I could do that with books: read the tactile product when I'm at home, and bookmark my leaving-off point so I can pick it up on audio. It seems like the Kindle theoretically could do something like that.

Kindle is sold out until after Dec. 24.

While all sorts of office applications are going online -- Google Docs, Zoho, and they're getting better all the time -- Web 2.0 hasn't come to more complicated applications.

Online stats packages are available, but visit a few of the apps listed on this page and you might come away with the same impression I have -- that have a sort of homemade feel, and a mission to discourage all but the geekiest stats geeks.

Maybe the market for it isn't large enough to bring the sector into the mainstream. Yet. Or it's entirely possible the largely academic audience for such tools actually likes the 1996 vibe. Don't laugh; there's something to that. It means to a user, "This is so not a commercial gig. We're not slicksters here; we're not pitching you."

Yes, the Hardball host started a fundraising phenomenon in the 6th congressional district in Minnesota with his Oct. 17 MSNBC interview with incumbent Michele Bachmann. She called for a media investigation into members of congress to see which of them might be anti-American.

But, Chris, come on. Be a little generous to the internet effect. You implied on Monday night's show that it was entirely the power of your show that drove outraged viewers to contribute hundreds of thousands to Bachmann's opponent.

You did good, but what you did was to start a viral effect. Check out the blogs that helped spread the influence of your interview in the first few days. Factor in the rabid use among politics junkies of microblogging tools like Twitter that have replaced our RSS readers to pass around these blog and video links, and there you go.

A single interview in isolation would not have caused the Democratic National Committee to take notice of Elwyn Tinklenberg's campaign. Thank you for getting the snowball rolling, but individual contributions flooded in from the combined influence of your interview and the net effect. The DNC recognized the resultant phenomenon. There was a team at work here, and as quarterback it would be gracious of you to acknowledge the whole squad.

See the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report for details.

Don't be fooled by John McCain's shell game. It's not plumbers that he and the Republicans are concerned about. All the railing against "spreading the wealth around" is focused on keeping the trend going just the way it's been headed.

The GOP always uses small business as a dodge to persuade ordinary folks they should favor policies benefiting the base that Republicans listen to when it's not election season -- big companies and the very rich. George Bush was fond of traveling to little machine shops or other blue-collar settings to talk about business taxes. Nice trick.

The heartland buys it, too, and that worries me a little. We're still living in the Cold War era in so many ways. The Red Scare still works.

Fact is a lot of economists, including Alan Greenspan, think the growing disparity in income in the U.S. is dangerous for the economy. The gulf hasn't been this wide (.pdf file) since that other depression.

Hasn't it been interesting to note how many of Barack Obama's newspaper endorsements mention Sarah Palin as a reason to distrust John McCain's judgment? Colin Powell featured the VP pick in his bill of particulars against McCain, too. You could almost pick up his thought waves saying "I'll be damned if I'll ever address her as 'Madame President.'"

You have to think McCain must wince each time an Obama endorser brings Palin into the equation, but maybe not. He's lacked that GOP adoration for so long, it could be he's seduced by the cheering throngs, and it blinds him.

But if I were McCain, here's the thing that would bother me: Palin contradicts his message of bi-partisan harmony -- just grinds it up and stomps on it. She's so polarizing that she erects a barbed wire fence in that aisle he says he likes to reach across.

I was about to get all huffy, but no.

Hulu offers embeddable video. If you're trying it out with a local file, as I did, and thought it wasn't resizable -- that it was clipped rather than scaled from the 512-pixel width -- just publish it anyway. It actually does scale like YouTube or most other embeds, once you get it online.

For example here is last night's SNL Weekend Update.

I've limited the width to 450 pixels because that's the space I have available for it in the main column of my blog.

These days, to figure the proportion for such things, I fire up Paint Shop Pro. (I don't want to pay for Photoshop at home, and though I remember how to solve for X, I've grown too lazy to haul out the pencil.)

I think I threw away my proportion wheel 35 years ago right after I took a newspaper editing class. You'd measure a photo, then slide the wheel to match up the photo width with the column width. The wheel calculated the column height, so you could draw a box of the correct number of column inches on your layout, and a percentage, so you could scribble it on the photo with a grease pencil.

Terri Ann Wintermute, running for Illinois State Senate, is all over the news shows with her TV ads. She's a Republican, though you'd never know it, since the fact isn't mentioned in audio or even on an end tag in her commercials.

The campaign must have calculated that Barack Obama's approach in tying John McCain to the president is paying off because Wintermute borrows the line and brings it down to the state level in stating that her opponent has voted with the governor 90% of the time.

Now a new ad rides on the faux coattails in another way, by charging that her opponent wants to give tax breaks to the wealthy. Come on!

Advice to the low-info voter:

• Wintermute is a Republican.
• Republicans always want to give tax breaks to the wealthy (they still want you to believe it will trickle down to you).
• Her opponent is Linda Holmes. She's the Democrat. Vote for her if you live in Illinois's 42nd District.

What a crazy mixed-up set of ideologies this financial and McCain meltdown has thrown us into. GOP candidates are likely to lay claim to any old position that sounds like it might be popular. Voters will have a hard time sorting it out since McCain -- who should serve as the party's leader -- is no compass for them. He's eager to play populist and to please the base at the same time. He's all over the place, and so is every other GOP candidate.

What's a voter to think?

Just vote a straight Democratic ticket. It's a much safer bet this time around.