I brought my camera to the Baltimore music festival, and I was allowed in the press pit for Rodrigo y Gabriela and Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. I took a ton of pictures - you can find a selection of the ones I deemed the best below, and find more after the jump.

Sharon Jones

Guitar picks portrait

Rodrigo Sanchez

Gabriela Quintero

Rodrigo y Gabriela

Bindlestiff Family Cirkus

Art wall

Bindlestiff Family Cirkus

Hulahoops at Gogol Bordello

Hi. I disappeared for a while, but now I’m back.

I spent the last three months shuttling between northern Virginia and southern New Jersey - working as an editorial intern at USAToday.com’s Life section by day and a barista at my sister’s coffee shop by night - as well as finishing a few neglected projects, procrastinating a few new ones (master’s capstone, what?) and listening to Kanye West’s Graduation one too many times.

A few highlights of my time at USA Today: I covered the Virgin Mobile Festival in Baltimore with Korina Lopez, sussed out the fashion of the Jonas Brothers with Arienne Thompson and worked with Whitney Matheson on her Pop Candy blog (my self-granted title: mistress of all things RSS, Wikipedia and social networking).

This friday marks the end of my internship and my time south of the Mason Dixon line. I return to New York at the end of August, when and where I will start my final semester at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism – you can find me there, or, as always, waiting for the G train.

I am continuing to update this project, but if you are antsy for some more Flash action from yours truly, check out this website (and check back often, because it too is a work in progress).

I have been dishing up more celebrity news on USA Today’s Lifeline Live today. Check out my posts below:

Electra complains about wedding pressure

Sheen vows to never utter ‘what’s-her-face’s’ name again

‘Vanity Fair’ stands firm on Clinton/Gershon item

Bravo’s Housewives bear claws

Doherty misses Paris concert

I wrote a story about missed connections on the L train that amNY published in March. As I previously wrote, the chicagotribune.com picked up the story, but today I found out (thanks to the Google searching techniques of my dear friend Benjamin) that the OrlandoSentinel.com also ran the story.

Adding further excitement to my day, I also found out that Topix.com and nyctransitforums.com both posted the story for discussion.

Check out the raw data I gathered, which fueled my story.

I blogged for USA Today’s Lifeline Live today, and even though my name isn’t attached to any of my posts I am still pumped that my coworkers trusted me enough to ask me to write for the website during the second week of my internship. If you can trust me too, check out the posts that I am telling you I wrote below:

Ashanti calls it a comeback

Rosie will wait to re-tie knot

Lopez and Smirnoff split … again

Fame and Foreclosure

D-list star hosts A-list awards

Check out my latest story on the Brooklyn blogging community published in the New York Daily News.

A world seethes beneath New York where love-seeking straphangers interact with stolen glances between jostling bodies.

Those who enter that world at the L train’s Bedford Avenue stop in Brooklyn take to the Internet more often than riders on any other line to turn furtive eye contact into trysts.

In romance fever’s high-season — the two weeks before and after Valentine’s Day — 421 men and women posted to the “missed connections” thread on craigslist.org hoping to connect with a stranger they chatted with or made eye contact with underground.

Read the rest of my story, also published by chicagotribune.com here.

You can also check out the missed connections mapped out by gender here.

Two of my classmates, Eliot Caroom and Lakshmi Gandhi, produced a multimedia package for Newsweek on the Quaker vote in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. You can find the video and story here.

or other ways to avoid Times Square.

By Erin O’Neill

Buried beneath our streets and seas lie the fiber optic cables that allow entire continents of people to communicate and trade in the economic phenomenon known as globalization. That same spidery web of cable connecting people in different countries has also spawned a new trend taking place in the cafes and bars of south Brooklyn.

At noon on a Thursday a health care consultant, graphic designer, architect and accountant sit in a French bistro on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens talking about the Spitzer scandal and things to do in Brooklyn – and not one of them took the day off. It is the office break room evolved – fitted for the needs of the growing population of Brooklynites that work from home.

“When you’re home all day it’s nice to find people to meet up for lunch,” said Ginger Smith Carls, a healthcare consultant who works from her home in Park Slope.

Technology has laid the foundation for this whole new breed of American workers – people who work from home and commute online. An estimated 45 million Americans telecommuted in 2006 – up from 4 million in 2003 – according to the International Labour Organization’s World of Work. They come largely from the professional class – investment bankers, fashion designers, account managers – and make up a growing number of employees who spend their working hours behind brownstone walls.

But this new mode of working has one problem – many employees fear a lack of personal contact that cannot be satisfied while dressed in sweatpants working on your laptop from home. In Brooklyn, this growing group of telecommuters have found ways to replace water cooler banter by spending their lunch hour with other telecommuters at local restaurants in the area, instead of at their kitchen table – alone.

Allison Make, an account manager for a Boston-based pharmaceutical company, started telecommuting from her Kensington apartment a year and a half ago when she decided she wanted to move from Boston to New York without leaving her job behind. But she worried that she would miss the human interaction.

“I’m very social,” said Make. “I do talk to people throughout the day on conference calls and email, but it’s when I have down time that I can go a little crazy.”

So Make joined the Park Slope Lunch Meetup Group – a social network formed online that meets for lunch every two weeks in a different restaurant in Park Slope and adjoining neighborhoods. “It gets me out of the house,” said Make.

Jeffrey Drexler, a 57-year-old architect who works from home at Park Slope, worked in office buildings as an architect from 1978 to June of 2007. When Drexler started spending his days behind his desk at home and not at the office he realized he missed the personal contact and group lunches that are the staples of an office environment. “I miss meeting up for after work drinks,” said Drexler. To assuage this growing loneliness Drexler joined the Park Slope Lunch Meetup Group nine months ago to meet new people and expose himself to new opportunities.

Peter Karp, a software developer from Park Slope, started the meetup group over a year ago to fulfill what he saw as a growing need in his neighborhood. “There is a sacrifice of socialization when you are working at home, and this was one place where people could come out and have that social interaction,” said Karp, who has telecommuted in some form or another for the past 20 years. The group currently has 83 members – a typical lunch caters from five to ten of those members. “People come for a break,” said Smith Carls, who now organizes the lunches. “The people that end up staying really enjoy meeting new people.”

Those same people – people who work from home – produce more, have better morale and less stress, according to a 2006 study by the Telework Coalition, a non-profit organization that advocates working from home.

This increase in productivity stems from decreased distractions in a work at home environment, according to Chuck Wilsker, President and CEO of the Telework Coalition. “People look at work as a social opportunity,” he said. “At home you have fewer distractions and people put in more hours.”
The only downside to the telecommute is occasional feelings of isolation, said Wilsker.

“There are so many good reasons to do it [telecommute] that I don’t know why people don’t do it more” said Wilsker, who has worked from home for the last six years.

The lack of time hanging around water coolers chatting about the latest sports scores or presidential candidate gaffe does not phase Peter Karp’s regard for the telecommute. “A lot of people ask me if working from home is distracting,” said Karp. “I find it less distracting than working in a office, where a lot of time is spent standing around the coffee pot.”

email me.