At this year’s Future of News and Civic Media conference I learned about The Open Planning Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to civic empowerment through public space and transporation reform. They have produced a number of interesting web-based projects to catalyze change in the urban landscape, including ‘Uncivil Servants,’ a website for citizens to report […]
Category Archives: blogogracy
water map
This week Scot Frank showed me his pre-alpha of Citizen Water, a cohesive effort to monitor water quality around the world in order to empower community advocacy and direct development efforts. The effort is two-pronged: Scot’s team has been on the ground in numerous locations to help locals test their own water quality using low-cost […]
Also posted in conviviality, food, maps, visualization
Comments closed
rate my landman
The Extract project is an internet-based advocacy effort for land-owners being targeted by the oil and gas industries. Unaware of their rights, their land’s value or the health risks of drilling near residential areas, many residents of mineral-rich states unwittingly sacrifice the mineral rights to their property resulting in the propagation of thousands of wells […]
Also posted in environment, traceability
Comments closed
renaissance map
While visiting the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence last year, Director Paolo Galluzzi treated us to a sneak peek inside a new feature on his musem’s media-rich web site: maps drawn by Leonardo da Vinci scanned and posted in a Google maps interface so we could compare the renaissance originals […]
Also posted in art, free & open, maps, visualization
Comments closed
news filter
Now that it’s over I can finally look back at the very special re-interpretation of the presidential debates by Boston Data Jockeys sosolimited performed live at the ICA this past September. They re-mixed the live television footage through computer vision and custom-made algorithms that analyzed the closed caption text in real time. The results are […]
Also posted in visualization
Comments closed
political calculations
One of the Obama campaign’s web-savvy contributions to political discourse is this tax calculator, a website (and a badge) that allows anyone interested in calculating their taxes under his (or his opponent’s) proposed plan to find out which makes the more sense. Web-based calculators are nothing new, and I’ve written before about environmental footprint calculators […]
Also posted in customization, marketing
Comments closed
place link
Louise Shannon from the V&A pointed me to pachube.com, a site that enables you to connect sensors in the real world to each other and to virtual worlds. Similar to the principle of Dual Reality, the service makes it possible for a virtual world (like Second Life) to mirror what’s happening in the real one, […]
Posted in blogogracy
Comments closed
watts up
Saul Griffith has just released WattzOn, a personal footprint calculator that allows you to account for everything in your life – including taxes and the embodied energy of the products you own. You can then compare your impact with other people in the world and start to understand how much alternative energy is needed to […]
Also posted in customization, energy, environment, materials, possessed products, visualization
Comments closed