Via del.icio.us / popular:

Animated Atlas: Growth of a Nation. The animated timeline of the U.S. history is such a vivid and impressive instructional applicaiton that I wish I had watched it ten years earlier. Anyway, not too late for those who want to learn about how the country expanded in the past 200 years.

Also, I found a special program on NPR: Storycrops: recording Ameica. StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire Americans to record one another's stories in sound. Average persons are encouraged to interview those they love and preserve their own stories. The organization is working to build soundproof recording booths across the country. People can stop by the StoryBooths to record down their conversations. MobileBooth, a traveling recording studio, tours around the country as complement to the StoryBooths. For those who participate, what they need to do is to make a reservation, come up with a list of questions to ask during the intervivew with the aid of Question Generator, stopy by a StoryBooth or MobileBooth to have a sincere talk with the interviewees, and finally obtain a copy of the interview on CD. The recording process costs $150 while only $10 donation is asked for. The interviews will be added into the StoryCorps Archive, housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, which will become nothing less than an oral history of America.

This is a fabulous idea to produce a folk history. Actually I think that's what we can obtain from blogs and podcasts. People are writing history--both in text and voice. Historians in the future will learn a lot about us from the history we are recording.