Night at the improv with a telescope and a policy-bot [Penta-Link Drop]

A few good finds from the past few days that turned out to be worth spending extra time with:

1. Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope. Leave it to Microsoft to create something amazingly beautiful and full of potential, but screw it up with a clunky, hard-to-understand, and resource-hogging interface. But Worldwide Telescope gives you some idea of how they are thinking about organizing information, and they are headed in an interesting direction.
2. “Anonymous comments: Are they Good or Evil?” by Mathew Ingram. Thoughtful and provocative blog post on a topic I have thought a lot about.
3. Social Media Policy Generator. Answer a few questions about your organization and its approach to social media and the Policy Tool for Social Media will create a ready-made social media policy for you. I think it shortchanges the opportunity for using the process of developing a policy as a teachable moment, but otherwise it’s pretty darn good.
4. Tubepress is a PHP library and a WordPress plugin for easily creating YouTube video galleries on your blog or web site. Very easy and very cool.
5. Ever since had the good fortune to meet Thaler Pekar a few weeks ago and heard about how she’s learning to use improv techniques in her work applying story to corporate communications, I’ve been searching out interesting resources on improv. It’s a really rich vein to mine. The Improv Encyclopedia is a great one. It describes improv games, has a directory of books, blogs and web sites, and features a handy glossary.