Thanks to new technologies like camera phones, digital cameras, blogging tools, and RSS standards the news is now public. NowPublic combines the functionality of these new mobile tools with emerging web standards to let people investigate, produce, and publish news that they care about.

With NowPublic bloggers and citizen journalists can automatically dispatch reporters and photographers to the site of a news story anywhere in the world. At the same time photographers can safely distribute, manage, license and sell their work through the site.

NowPublic wants to display the best photographic work from citizen journalists and photobloggers and we are issuing an open invitation to photographers to submit newsworthy images to our first Citizen Photojournalism Awards.

To learn more, please continue reading.

The monumental Diane Arbus retrospective at the Met, as it draws to a close, has spawned a sort of "Where Are They Now" moment for some of her subjects, most of whom remained blissfully anonymous for decades. The New Yorker interviews Lorna Anton, a.k.a. "A Young Woman at a Nudist Camp, N.J., 1963" in this week's issue, and suggests that the legendary "Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967" have "taken to haunting the galleries, answering questions and posing in front of the photograph that Arbus made when they were children." The Washington Post picks it up from there, with full twin coverage, manic grenade boy (who seems far more lucid now), and the scandalous outing of CNN's Anderson Cooper as Arbus' archetypal drooling baby.

Twins or not, there's about two weeks left before this exhibition closes, and it's well worth a visit (or two).

From Extreme NY/Nonsense NYC:

Down Hill Derby

Boxcar race. Strap on your racing goggles. And get ready for a crazy race down Brooklyn's steepest hill. Build anything with three or more wheels. Everything else goes, from box cars equipped with cream pie launchers, to four wheeled extinct animals. Be creative.

Trophies will be awarded to the winners of the race, the best box car, and the complete failures. Sabotage teams are more then welcomed to participate.

Race starts on Columbia Heights and Cranberry and ends at Old Fulton street, Brooklyn 3p; $free

Map

First Warm Night is a semi-spontaneous street party/carnival that looks like it might go off this weekend.

Sign up at the website with your cellphone # and/or email address to be warned in time to stock up on high speed film.

A planning meeting is thursday night at Subtonic starting at 7.

Congrats to SD for your blindingly speedy return of the correct answer last week. And being that today is still before the upcoming NYCPB meetup, I'll buy this week's winner a beer, (or other tasty beverage), as well.

To earn that tasty beverage though, you'll have to determine what, who or where the above image is. Now, if you can do all three, its still only one beer, but I will be triply impressed.

With the subway photo ban metastasizing again, (it seems there's a chance it will show up on the MTA meeting agenda this month) now might be a fine time to dash off a letter, or two, to the editors of several Local, and National, papers. It's about time this issue is addressed and you can do your part to help!

Doing so is even easier than it sounds. Below are a links to the editorial feedback section of several Local and National papers:

NY Times

NY Daily News

NY Post

NY Sun

USA Today: (click "Contact Us" on the left)

The Wall Street Journal: ("Contact Us" halfway down the left)

If you decide to write a letter to any or all papers listed above, let us know what you had to say by adding part or all of your letter to a comment.

Not quite about photoblogging, but pertinent: Wake Up. Wash Face. Do Routine. Now Paint. — artists and their daily routines [Michael Kimmelman for the New York Times]