The recent short trail starts with "Technology for Social Change" — The Grassroots Use of Technology Conference X, October 16 and 17 at Northeastern University in Boston. It ends seven weeks later, on Saturday, December 5 with "Organizing 2.0 — Online Organizing in the Era of Hope" at the Murphy Institute for Worker Education in midtown Manhattan.

IBM announced last week that it was adding a virtual world collaboration service it's calling Virtual Collaboration to its Lotus Sametime communications and collaboration software, which is aimed primarily at enterprises. Virtual Collaboration allows users to collectively view and create documents in a virtual environment similar to Second Life, in essence creating virtual work and meeting spaces. It's pretty cool, but does this kind of immersive technology actually make collaboration via virtual presence a realistic option?

Amongst a plethora of web based file sharing services, Dropbox stands out with its slick operating system integration, automatic version control & backups, secure & easy sharing, and drag & drop web photo galleries. Read on for an overview of Dropbox features and a comparison to other similar services.

Note: this piece originally ran earlier this week at the Community or Die labor technology blog - for an audience of union leaders and union technology staff people.

ArsTechnica, one of my favorite tech news sites, has been reporting for some months now that the much-hyped One Laptop Per Child project has fallen on hard times. This is interesting news for labor techies ... although a little background is in order to explain why.

BOSTON - The following fragmentary communique reaches Open Media Boston from three of our key operatives who risked their lives yesterday evening to penetrate the so-called "Apple Store" on Boylston S