Last month I discovered a great online photo editor called PXN8. A few days ago on TechCrunch I saw they too like PXN8 but say there’s an even better online photo editor available now called Picnik. I checked it out and have to say it’s very sweet. I asked my friend (and photoisseur) Ray to check Picnik out and he was quite impressed by some of the advanced editing tools provided in Picnik. The site strikes me as a better designed and slightly more intuitive version of PXN8. I haven’t done a comparison of the features between the two but I’m planning to use Picnik for my photo editing needs now.

Craig sent me another great story tonight. It turns out the world’s oldest newspaper has decided to go all digital, meaning you can’t get it on paper anymore unless you print it out for yourself. The article doesn’t go into details about why the decision was made but the publishing rights were recently sold to a Swedish government agency and I assume it was all about cutting back costs. The paper was founded in 1645 and was down to a circulation of 1000.

The article has a quote from the paper’s chief editor (Editor-in-Chief for us Americans I assume) for the last twenty years. He said, “We think it’s a cultural disaster.” Cultural disaster? Really? Considering this guy just lost his job, I can see why he thinks it’s a disaster, but culturally? I don’t think so. If he’s truly interested in the paper living on he would see that this is the only way it can actually happen. The fact of the matter is that the site will be read more online than it ever was as a printed document and how can that do anything but retain its cultural relevance? What the chief editor sees as the final blow is likely going to give rise to a new life for this old newspaper.

If this is a cultural disaster then let’s consider a few more under the same definition:

• Transportation: from horse to automobile
• Communication: from telegraphs to telephones
• Light: from candles to light bulbs
• Bathrooms: from outhouses to indoor plumbing

So here’s the big question, do you have some “cultural disasters” you need to create where you are?

I’m a big fan of what some creative companies are doing with viral video. Shout (yes the stain remover people) did this and it was very good. Thanks to David Pogue for finding this.

Link for feed readers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpMIRJLtMFM

One of the blogs I read daily is Micro Persuasion by Steve Rubel. He had an interesting post today about a little data mining he did with some web 2.0 terms like widgets, Second Life, podcasts, blogs, and RSS feeds. It was interesting to see that blogs are the clear front runner in popularity among these areas but the surge in Second Life interest was exciting as well.

What was noticeably absent from the list was any reference to online video. I did the same search as Steve did but dropped the RSS feeds and added YouTube. What I found was staggering. YouTube makes the other technologies look like nothing. I expected YouTube to be a contender with blogs but not trounce it the way it did. I was just telling someone today that there’s been a rise in online video interest over the last year. This data suggests that it’s not a mere rise, but rather a massive surge. So what’s the moral of the story? If you’re not thinking about online video right now you’re getting behind very quickly.