Puzzlepieces – 2008

geoupdater - does something very similar to what I was working on.

I’ve got my location set in FireEagle, which I update via the site and Dopplr. I also found an app that turns FireEagle into geoRSS which allows me to include the updates in friendfeed and plot my location easily on a map, which I will shortly be adding to my personal homepage.

This tool (via Ogle Earth) will read from FireEagle and post updates to services like Facebook, and via an RSS feed that includes past locations, allows you to pull in updates to friendfeed, etc. Not bad.

Hossein (link goes to his English blog) is known as the father of the Persian blogosphere. I met him a couple of years ago (old link takes a while to load), not too difficult since he also lived in Toronto. Anyhow he’s been arrested in Iran on obviously fake charges. Considering that Canadian journalist was beaten to death after her arrest in Iran a couple of years ago, this is not exactly good.

Free Hossein Derakhshan // Libérez Hossein Derakhshan is a Facebook group that seems to be acting as an early petitiony-type thing. I wonder if the Canadian government can be persuaded to actually do anything about this at all.

Goal: find an online tool which allows me to list things that others (friends and neighbours) can borrow, and let me view things that others have listed

This doesn’t seem like an impossible goal. One problem is that most of the websites for this seem to be for only books, movies, etc., few work for just any miscellaneous items. The only thing that matches is Neighborrow. The site isn’t particularly well-designed, but I could live with that.

How this should really work is that I should be able to state my location as the source for all my items, and be able to search geographically. Instead I have to join “neighborrowhoods,” which can either be public or private. This isn’t as good as arbitrary locations, but it would do, except that there are no public neighborrowhoods for my location and it costs $$ to create one, versus private groups (which are not what I want) and are limited to fifty people. I thought that Facebook applications might be another good place to look, but there seem to be only media-sharing applications plus one that matches my idea but is broken and has no users.

So for now, I’ve listed most of my borrowable stuff on neighborrow, which can sadly only be seen if you join the private group I created which so far includes just me. bleh

So for the past few months I have been keeping track of the books I finished reading. Just a text file with ISBNs and dates. I finally got around to deciding how to expose that online, the choices being to publish it myself or use another website. I was looking for a well-done site that allowed import and export, and hopefully a site that was fairly large already so that it wasn’t likely to die, and if it had social aspects it could take advantage of the numbers. Turns out there are tons of sites, but I decided to only look at the two biggest, LibraryThing and Shelfari, both that I had known of, and both at least partially owned by Amazon now. I decided to go with LibraryThing, because it seems like a much more serious and powerful tool, and the attitude of the company (which does not get along with the other) was much more favourable. You can see my profile here. There is a limit of 200 books listed for free, but considering my pathetic rate of reading right now, that won’t be an issue for a long time, at which point I probably won’t be using LibraryThing anyhow. One minor point is that I think LibraryThing thinks I actually own all these books (I own none of them), whereas Shelfari had options for that.

Actually I added the LibraryThing profile link to my home page, but at some point I am going to redo that home page to be more dynamic and actually show information directly on that page via Fireeagle, Google Calendar, and Friendfeed, at least.

WorldChanging Seattle: Congestion Pricing: Can Tolling Be Fair? - WorldChanging Seattle (one of my favourite websites since I moved to Seattle, but also a great site for people anywhere) links to a really well-done report on traffic congestion and tolls, along with excellent commentary on the report.

Maybe this is a sad statement, but real hard data and analysis is so rare that I really appreciate when I see it done.

During election day here in the US, I noticed a church which was acting as a poll location also had a bake sale on that day. Think about how many more people will pass by that bake sale than on any other day that they could choose to do it. Someone there is really smart.

I started writing this post in early August and forgot to finish it and publish. So here it is now

I was an intern at Microsoft the previous two summers, and this week I started full time. Some things change and some things do not. The same people are playing foosball on my floor. Construction is everywhere, and despite a year’s absence, this still includes the street in front of my building. The shuttles that go between buildings are still white, but now have a green stripe. Kitchens finally have compost disposal, and the cutlery and plates etc. are now compostable. Not as good as real cutlery and plates, which I had wished for, but better than before. In many ways, it hardly feels as if I left.

Pie Chart on Pizza Box Advertising - information aesthetics - nice ads… we need to see more information graphics everywhere

Brain Off » Open Source Geo Stack :: Mikel Maron :: Building Digital Technology for Our Planet - since I emailed Mikel asking for a list like this about a year and a half ago, I can take credit for it, right?

Anyhow this is a great list that includes everything except the actual sources of data. The best one for that is often OpenStreetMap, but it really depends where and what you’re mapping.

Pipes Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing iCal and CSV Support - so this news is way old… somehow I never knew that Yahoo pipes supported iCal for both input and output. Pipes is such an amazingly powerful tool, I definitely need to play with it more, especially for events.

WorldChanging Seattle: Smaller Homes, Bigger Communities - my interests seem to converge a lot. Reading an article about how small houses are better (which I have been trying to convince people of for some time) on a Seattle (where I now live) website, the article goes on to talk about trying to do the same thing in Toronto.

Sidewalks Can Be Cool Too…So Why Aren’t They? | hugeasscity - just what I was thinking during a lot of my time in Europe a few months ago.

Freebase Parallax - when Freebase first came out as a sort of open version of Google Base, I doubted if it would come to fill that role.

Today Freebase has tons of data, and is really well designed and managed. This video of what you can do with one Freebase-based tool is truly amazing. Watch it.

I’ll Take My Infographic in Bright Orange, Men’s Medium | FlowingData - t-shirts with information graphics. One of my dozens of failed infographic ideas was to put them on t-shirts, but I didn’t get past one design (in my head).

WordPress › MyBlogLog: Just for you « WordPress Plugins - I doubt this will get much uptake, but it is actually really neat. Anyone with a mybloglog cookie, when viewing a blog with this plugin, will see a list of posts on that blog that specifically match their interests.

15 reasons Mr. Rogers was best neighbor ever - CNN.com - a lot of this I didn’t even know. How many Mr. Rogers are left in this world?

URLinfo beta || Fagan Finder - URLinfo is a tool I built years ago. It was first called “Site Specific” when I put it up on on October 1, 2001 (see a November cache), finally rebranding it as URLinfo during August 2004. I last updated it on October 2004, which unfortunately means that although an excellent tool in theory, it needs some updates to be as useful once again.

URLinfo isn’t totally unique, I have seen a variety of other tools do something similar (such as Firefox extensions), but nothing as comprehensive, or done in exactly the same way.

Anyhow, today, via del.icio.us popular I find http://url-info.appspot.com/ . I’m not linking to it, because I don’t think they deserve that. Now, URLinfo is a name someone else could come up with themselves. Even with the same spelling. Even for a similar tool. Of course, the fact that the actual text of their home page is partly copied off of my URLinfo’s homepage pretty much eliminates the coincidence aspect. Not to mention their equally prominent mention of bookmarlets, although of course they aren’t as cool as mine

If this was a site by another name, and without blatanly copying mine, I would say “nice effort” and bookmark it. So, loyal readers (all two of you)… what should I do?

So I finished the last book I had with me a few days prior, leaving me with not much to do for my flight back from Europe. I managed to find a copy of the Evening Standard, a London paper, which I think was free at the airport. Reading through some of the articles led me to want to blog a couple of things.

Page 4 (this is the July 8 issue) has two big articles on car transportation. One on London’s congestion charges, and another on how tons of people are signing up for car clubs. I wasn’t familiar with that term, but it is what I have known as carsharing, what companies like Zipcar do, and I’m a big fan of them. I was happily surprised to see just how fast people were joining up for City Car Club and Streetcar. I don’t know the stats, but these UK companies see far ahead in usage compared to those in North America.

Getting to page 12, I felt like the UK is sooo far ahead. Here we talk might talking about moving from driving to biking (well, I wish). In this article, Will Self talks about giving up biking in favour of walking. Now that’s where it’s at. Biking is great, but nothing really beats walking, overall. That page also includes another article on the congestion charge.

On page 26, there is an article about the Paris free cycle scheme, which has apparently lead to a 70% increase in cycle traffic (wow!) . The article title is actually about the increase in injuries and at least one death, yet they point out that the accident rate has declined by a fifth and that most accidents involve new riders. The way I see it, the program increases the number of bikers, so after it has been around for a while, the percentage of new bikers will go way down. I also think that this huge change in traffic patterns is the best way to do it. Some things evolve, but sometimes it is actually easier to have big changes happen all at once. If suddenly the number of bikers spikes way up, then drivers will be conscious of the change and consciously change their driving habits. The article also mentions that a certain number of bikes have been stolen or damaged; I hardly have time to do a comprehensive assessment (although someone must be doing one), but it seems to me that these must be minor costs compared to other savings and benefits from the scheme.

Speaking of biking, although I knew that the Europeans are way ahead of North Americans, it was very refreshing to see it in person. Of the countries I visited (mostly, but not all, eastern Europe), Germany was the most on top of things, with excellent dedicated bike lanes everywhere and tons of bike racks. It was great to see as many bikes as cars parked in front of restaurants.

Page 39 has an article (argh, can’t find a link to it) on why bicycle helmets should not be required by law. I always wear a helmet and chastise those who don’t, yet by the end of this article I was convinced. Apparently when helmets became required in Australia, the number of cyclists went down by a third, and the rate of accidents actually went up. Other statistics seem to support this as well. In general, I think that the fewer laws, the better. Beyond that, the points about bicycle usage, how riders with helmets tend to have more accidents, the low rate of accidents in general, convinced me. I will, of course, continue to wear a helmet myself, but am now firmly in favour of this not being required.

Regarding my comments on laws, more laws just make things more complicated, and often less flexible. Don’t make laws about internet privacy, make laws about privacy, and have them apply everywhere. In general, laws should be the last resort, ideally systems should be designed to make the preferred behaviour preferable to all parties.

I didn’t even mention the articles discussing safety on the rail network, comments on traffic, etc. This was presumably a random day’s newspaper. Transportation is a big issue.

Yet another in millions of articles over the years about supposed schemes to reduce global poverty and otherwise deal with the problems of developing nations. The problem with all of this of course, is that world leaders always go for big, top-down plans that end up costing huge amounts and accomplishing nothing. The World Bank, for instance, runs massive projects that burn through money, and often end up leaving countries worse off than they began.

The only thing that has ever really worked anywhere, is local, small-scale, bottom-up ideas. Microcredit comes to mind as an example, now served by companies such as , as pioneered by Kiva and MicroPlace. It also makes me think of Wangari Maathai’s work.

It seems that practically every city has a slightly different way of indicating pedestrian and/or vehicle signals. I especially noticed this, what with my recent trip to Europe. Essentially, they differ in the ways that the signal changes to inform you of whether you should proceed. The way I see it, a good design maximizes the information provided, the ease of comprehension, and minimizes cost. The least information given are signals that have two values, “go” and “don’t go.” If you don’t actually see the change from “don’t go” to “go,” it means that you have no idea how long “go” will remain the state, and whether it is really appropriate to go.

A ternary system is better than a binary one, because at least you have an idea that it will soon change to “don’t go.” I love when they replace a ternary pedestrian signal with one that counts down. Everyone has their own speed, they know how long it will take them to walk across the street, and knowing the number of seconds remaining, can properly evaluate whether or not to proceed.

One option that I found recently (via information aesthetics) is the Marshalite, a traffic signal that is essentially an analog clock, with the traditional traffic indicators of red, amber, and green around the circle. Apparently it was used in Australia for decades. I think it is fantastic, providing people with perfect information about the current status and how long until it will change. I think we could do a lot worse than switch to these everywhere. Some might argue that this is not simple to understand, but I don’t believe that. The Wikipedia article suggests that this method can’t cope with changing durations, but I have no doubt that it could be modified to handle that.

Page 17 features an article about Cook, Eat, and Run. Basically, during your lunch break, you visit their kitchen, learn how to cook a meal, and eat it, all in around an hour. I believe we can design solutions that are parsimonous, win-win-win, etc., and I think this is a great one. It accomplishes:

• people get out and have a real break for lunch
• people are eating fresh food
• people learn how to cook new things. nobody knows how to cook anything any more, and this is a big problem.
• the hosting company makes money
• you get to meet new people, and shared participation is the best way to really meet people properly, in my opinion.

In other words, brilliant. I believe there is room for a whole host of other similar ideas, such as perhaps workplaces hiring a chef once a week to organize everyone into making lunch in the company’s kitchen, for instance.

And people call me crazy when they see me slicing meat and vegetables at my desk. But nobody questions how great my sandwiches are

Topix Nabs 6 Content Partners To Become Local Info Hub - Topix is already one of the best websites for local news, but when they integrate all of this new content (events, classifieds, business listings, etc.) they will have made a serious move ahead in the (hyper)local space.

And of course, local is where everything is at.

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete - while this article itself is fairly thing, it makes an important point. The quantity of data (about anything and everything) is increasing insanely, and will be (and already is) perhaps the most important thing in science and in business in the coming decade or so.

Most individuals today generate more data in a day than most countries did 200 years ago. I’m just making that number up, but think about the data you generate daily, from the photos you take, logs you generate globally by browsing the web, making phone calls, purchasing items, etc.

All of this data can only be analysed with computers, and it will (and is) tell us all sorts of things we did not know before, with greater accuracy.

I came back from vacation a few days ago and am still catching up on missed news, and I need to publish some posts that are currently in my head. Anyhow, Jon Udell never ceases to impress me. He’s taken his community-building work in his town beyond the web and pushing it to local television as well; Turning Internet feeds into TV feeds « Jon Udell. Every town needs a Jon.

so I intended to write this post last week, after reading some articles to make sure I had my facts right. having procrastinated, I see that Councillors back down on anti-gun proposal, and also I didn’t have my facts completely correct. Regardless, I think there is still a point in what I was going to say.

In general, I’m against guns; the average Torontonian has no need for them. I am not against well-run organized places where people shoot at targets. One of Toronto’s complaints was that guns used by gangs are often acquired by stealing them from private homes, rendering pointless the fact that those guns may have been registered in the gun registry. But gun ownership and gun stealability don’t have to go together.

My idea is that gun clubs could rent out lockers at the club for people to store their guns, rather than having them kept in the individuals’ homes. The gun clubs would have to apply and pay for a bulk gun storage license, and would be periodically inspected by the police to ensure proper security. They would more than make up for the license fee by the locker fees they could charge themselves. Seems like a sound plan to me.