An orga­ni­za­tion called Col­lege Schol­ar­ships is offer­ing a $10,000 schol­ar­ship this year for a col­lege stu­dent who blogs about “unique and inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion about you and/or things you are pas­sion­ate about.” We’re not shilling for a nom­i­na­tion here, but per­haps you know an aspir­ing blog­ger some­where who could use the extra cash.

This con­test rais­es an inter­est­ing ques­tion: are there any col­lege stu­dents out there who sup­port their edu­ca­tion through blog­ging? It’s not a far stretch from work­ing part-time (or full-time) to help pay the bills, but blog­ging seems like an unlike­ly way to earn enough mon­ey to buy books, let alone pay tuition.

Steven Berlin John­son, of Every­thing Bad Is Good For You fame, has been at work recent­ly crunch­ing num­bers to come up with Amer­i­ca’s most blog-tas­tic locales. The results may sur­prise you–based on “place­blogs,” Boston leads the cities chart and Clin­ton Hill, Brook­lyn tops neigh­bor­hoods.

One aspect of Web 2.0 that seems to be just tak­ing off now is geo­t­ag­ging. Yes, we have Google Earth and the ancien regime of Mapquest. But more and more peo­ple are upload­ing geo­t­agged pho­tos, blog posts, et cetera, mak­ing all sorts of new projects pos­si­ble from the 9/11 Archive to HousingMaps.com. How long before geo­t­ag­ging becomes as ubiq­ui­tous as blog­ging is today?

By now, mil­lions of web users have watched Miss Teen South Car­oli­na explain in mor­ti­fy­ing fash­ion (see below) why many Amer­i­cans can’t find the Unit­ed States on a map. And, in their own unin­tend­ed way, her com­ments effec­tive­ly answered the ques­tion posed to her. Edu­ca­tion sim­ply isn’t what it should be in Amer­i­ca. And that holds true for many oth­er nations.

All of this sets the stage for explain­ing Open Cul­ture’s rea­son for being. Put sim­ply, we try to put peo­ple, no mat­ter what their age or where they live, in a posi­tion to con­tin­ue learn­ing and improv­ing them­selves. With the help of our pod­cast col­lec­tions, you can now start learn­ing over 25 for­eign lan­guages, lis­ten to over 100 audio­books, includ­ing clas­sic works in lit­er­a­ture, poet­ry and phi­los­o­phy, and take over 75 com­plete cours­es from some of the world’s lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties (MIT, Stan­ford, UC Berke­ley, Oxford, etc.). Our pod­cast library includes many more edu­ca­tion­al resources as well, and the best part is that they’re com­plete­ly free. Hours of free edu­ca­tion are at your dis­pos­al when­ev­er you want it. To ben­e­fit, you sim­ply need the desire and the will, and the abil­i­ty to use pod­casts. (If you don’t know how, sim­ply read our Pod­cast Primer. We’ll get you up to speed.) We hope that you prof­it from these pod­cast col­lec­tions and our dai­ly posts (sub­scribe to our feed), and, if they can ben­e­fit a friend, please let them know about us at www.oculture.com.

P.S. For those who want to bone up on geog­ra­phy, check out Geog­ra­phy of World Cul­tures on iTunes. This infor­ma­tive course was taught by Mar­tin Lewis at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.

Over the past week, we’ve been sound­ing out our read­ers on what books have made a dif­fer­ence in their lives. We have about 35 replies so far (and prob­a­bly 75–100 list­ed books), and we’ll keep col­lect­ing replies until tomor­row (Sat­ur­day). Feel free to make your book choic­es known. The basic guide­lines for par­tic­i­pat­ing can be found here. We’ll post a hope­ful­ly use­ful sum­ma­ry of your book picks next week. And, as men­tioned, we’ll give a $50 gift cer­tifi­cate from Amazon.com to one ran­dom­ly select­ed con­trib­u­tor. Thanks for tak­ing part and have a good week­end.

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Down­load 75+ free cours­es as pod­casts from lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties, or check out our Uni­ver­si­ty Video Col­lec­tion.

A quick heads up: Steven Levitt and Stephen Dub­n­er, authors of the major best­seller Freako­nom­ics, have moved the relat­ed Freako­nom­ics blogs to the New York Times. You can now catch it here, and you’ll need to cre­ate a free user account with the Times if you (inex­plic­a­bly) don’t already have one. It looks like the Freako­nom­ics guys are off to a good provoca­tive start. Today’s post asks If You Were a Ter­ror­ist, How Would You Attack?

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We’re now in prime vaca­tion sea­son, and so we fig­ured that we’d high­light sev­er­al ways in which Open Cul­ture can enrich your sum­mer trav­els — all for free.

• First and fore­most, if you’re trav­el­ing to anoth­er coun­try, and if you want to speak the moth­er tongue, then spend some time with our col­lec­tion of for­eign lan­guage les­son pod­casts. The col­lec­tion cur­rent­ly cov­ers over 25 lan­guages, so there is a very good chance that we can meet your trav­el needs.

• Next, if you plan to do a good long road trip, you should sort through our col­lec­tion of audio­book pod­casts. Our list, which gives you access to 90 mas­ter­pieces in lit­er­a­ture and clas­sics, can help the long trav­el hours effort­less­ly slide by.

• A vaca­tion is always a good time to learn some­thing new and worth­while. Here are five cours­es from Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, avail­able as free pod­casts, that were cre­at­ed with the life­long learn­er in mind. So they were essen­tial­ly cus­tom-made for you. (You can also find here a long list of free cours­es from oth­er major uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing MIT, Berke­ley, Har­vard, Oxford, and Johns Hop­kins.)

• Look­ing for some free Mozart, Beethoven, or Miles Davis to enrich your expe­ri­ence? Find free pod­casts in our Music sec­tion. See our com­plete col­lec­tion of pod­casts here.

Sub­scribe to Our Feed - Tell a Friend About Open Cul­ture — ma**@******re.com”>Rec­om­mend a New Pod­cast

As we cov­er the world of enlight­ened pod­casts, we inevitably uncov­er ones that become our per­son­al favorites, and this was the case with Radio Open Source (iTunes Feed Web Site). Host­ed by Christo­pher Lydon, the show had a great knack for mak­ing heady issues engag­ing and acces­si­ble to a wider audi­ence, and that was main­ly because the show took its lead from the Radio Open Source blog and its active online com­mu­ni­ty. Rather unique­ly, Lydon and his crew let the online com­mu­ni­ty help pro­duce the show, which meant let­ting the audi­ence sug­gest top­ics and guests for future pro­grams. It was a nov­el con­cept that yield­ed some very good results.

Any­way, as you can tell, we’re talk­ing about things in the past tense, and that’s because the show announced last week that they’ve run out of fund­ing and gone on a sum­mer hia­tus. They’re sort­ing things out and hop­ing to return this fall with new mon­ey and per­haps a new broadcasting/podcasting approach. We hope to see them back in action soon. In mean­time, we’d encour­age you look back through their media archive — iTunes Feed Web Site — to get a feel for what the fall may bring.