Facebook Lifestreams, Creative Commons, the Rise of the Netbook, Social Lending replacing UK banks, and Legal Torrents

 Listen to Chelfyn & Helen Baxter on Virtual World, Afternoons with Jim Mora, for Radio New Zealand, National.

 With a philosophy of the The Social Graph and The Stream, the new Facebook Design Takes on Twitter.

Creative Commons is a new system designed to allow creatives to clearly show their intentions with some rights reserved not all right reserved. Kiwis can visit Creative Commons Aotearoa from Te Whāinga Aronui, The Council for the Humanities.

Innovation from the design of the One Laptop Per Child Project has created the rise of the netbook machine, a simple, small, portable, cheap device such as the Asus eeePC. Even phone giant Nokia is said to be launching a netbook machine, reversing the trend in making phone devices smaller. Other new tools include jawbone noise cancelling headsets for people on the nove and + pico projectors which can turn your phone into a movie playing device.

Zopa, the social lending website in the UK that cuts out banks, lent a record £2.5m in February. The Independent reports that "in January 2009, new lenders were up by more than 700 per cent and the amount of money lent rose 109 per cent. Each month since July has seen about double the lending of a year ago." Keep an eye out on the Nexx blog for developments from Nexx, the Kiwi Social Lending service.

Site of the week: http://legaltorrents.com

Legal torrents is a totally legitimate resource for creative commons licensed music, games, tv, animation, e-books, sounds, samples & loops for creatives to remix & mashup etc. Used by big names Barack Obama, Make Magazine, TED talks to distribute their content as widely and cheaply as possible.