Check out the terrific timeline visualization of protests in the Middle East. The navigation and elements surfaced simultaneously is informative and makes exploring fun.
The NYTimes engineering blog “Open” shares novel uses of its API, some of which are physical!
Like many, I’ve been sending my thoughts, prayers, and donations to resources related to Japan this week. The scale of the devastation is hard to comprehend. While CNN and other stations seem to have woken up and the NYTimes has been fantastic, these days you can get local news when an event occurs from anywhere in the world, translated to English. The following two sources of news I’ve been following all week long:
On Twitter:
In addition, the following Metafilter conversations have been powerful reminders that simple software, with strong community participation and active, thoughtful guidance, is the secret sauce to grow a discourse online:
Here are some additional links to check out:
Google’s Crisis Response
Rafe Colburn has additional links
CrisisWiki: 2011 Sendai Japan Earthquake and Tsunami
There have been numerous efforts at building services focused on local communities, and almost all of them, that have not had a community element to them, have failed to one degree or another.
Just being an aggregator is not enough. You need to curate. Moderate. Collate. Summarize. Connect. Most of all – communicate! Sure software helps. But it requires hands on work by people too. And it takes time. Like forming any relationship does.
GigaOm: Mathew Ingram: “Hyper-Local News: It’s About the Community or It Fails”
ReadWriteWeb: Marshall Kirkpatrick: “Hyperlocal Heartbreak: Why Haven’t Neighborhood News Technologies Worked Out?”
It is a fascinating question that led to some awesome lunchtime conversation the other day at work. Some more food for thought was recently written by Freeman Dyson in The New York Review of Books, who was reviewing James Gleick’s newest, “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood”, which I’m gonna just have to read. Metafilter, as usual, had an interesting discussion to follow.
Other related links:
Nicholas Carr at The Daily Beast
Wired: Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energy—It’s Data
Philadelphia Inquirer: Tirdad Derakhshani: Information Please
A good thought provoker I’d thought I’d pass along: Personal Democracy Forum: “Talk Notes: The Invention That Is American Democracy”:
I’d argue that much of what has passed for participatory democracy in these early stages of its reinvention has been obsessed with re-engineering a system — while largely ignoring the role of real-live flesh and blood people in that system. Tools like Twitter, and Facebook, and mobile, and the good old World Wide Web are potentially incredibly powerful. But they are the how of participatory democracy; they’re not the what. The hopeful side is that the what consists of exactly what I’ve talked about social media being very good at – sharing ideas and shaping our engagements with other people. Once we figure out how to apply the same new power we have over our personal lives to our political lives, that’s when I suspect we might see democracy’s real re-invention.
I think there is a challenge there to take up and that she succinctly outlines it for everyone.
The Inquirer recently wrapped up a series about the struggles faced in Kensington and Philadelphia’s First Congressional District – the 2nd hungriest in the nation: “Hunger in the First”:
Following this series, no doubt brought on by the horror of the Kensington strangler, was a greater spotlight cast by the papers on the neighborhood that included a great set of independent articles:
All are worth reading.
An article that introduces us to a new news effort coming *from* Kensington deserves a special shout out because it is efforts like this that point us towards the future or news and maybe the neighborhood itself: “Philadelphia duo bring Internet attention to Kensington’s woes”. That duo is Richie Antipuna and Heather Barton and their video series can be found on Blip.tv.
I just had to round up these articles and post them to one page since the subject matter was so related. Now if there was a place to discuss these stories collectively. Reddit’s Philadelphia sub-reddit perhaps? That feels wrong. The stories need an official home someplace where people from the neighborhood and outside the neighborhood can discuss them collectively. Why do I care about that? Because when people connect over subject matter that is when ideas can take shape and action can take place.
Combine mapping, with participation, and a subject matter that needs attention, and you can create some powerful, useful tools. Google Maps APIs and various mashup techniques made it easy for technologists to build services that pulled together these concepts, but now hosted services like Ushahidi’s CrowdMap and SeeClickFix are opening up the possibilities to more.
NYTimes: “Phone Apps Aim to Fight Harassment”
Observer: “Want to Help Dig Out Some Police Cars? Site Crowdsources Snow Cleanup in NYC”
Snowmageddon Clean-Up: New York
StreetCorner.com.au: “Police and public turn to social media & maps in the Queensland flood crisis”
EveryMap and ABC Qld Flood Crisis Map
Mercury News: “O’Brien: What Haiti tells us about the promise and limitations of digital media”
GigaOm: “How Social Networks and Mobile Tech Helped in Haiti”
CNN: “Ushahidi: How to ‘crowdmap’ a disaster”
O’Reilly Radar: Alex Howard: “The role of the Internet as a platform for collective action grows”
Related:
slacktivist: “The terror of knowing what this world is about”:
Nothing new here — nothing novel or innovative or unusual. But worth repeating, I think. In any case, it was something I needed to repeat after firing up the computer this morning to find that the artists and the saints had conspired against me, teaming up to remind me what this world is about.
Love dares you. Mm ba ba de.
Related:
Greater Good: Philip Zimbardo: “What Makes a Hero?”
Both good reads.
In 1968 Douglas C. Engelbart, along with a team of 17 researchers at Stanford, in a 90 minute taped demonstration, showed us what was then the future – which is now the present (and soon to be the past?) – hypertext, gui based interaction, online collaboration including email, and more.
Stanford has a terrific page on the demo, including video clips of it broken down by time and topic, and a single clip of the whole thing. If you’ve never seen this before, take the time, scroll to the bottom of this, and watch beginning to end. It’s not called “The Mother of all Demos” for nothing.
I’ve watched this a few times over the years and I keep coming back to it and being blown away. How far have we gone? How far have we not? There has been much added to the mix these past ten years, but it was a long way from there to here.
Related: