Thump thump. There’s a lot of data out there. Right now, someone sent a geolocated tweet from over the road. Thump thump. And you’re sitting in a tax block that has three DOB violations, one outstanding road surface issue and an unresolved request for a bike rack. Thump thump. Someone upstairs in your building is photographing local stores and putting them on twitter, and just last week a volunteer group came by and uploaded details of your street trees to a webmap. Thump thump.


The Happening City map keeps an ear open for new data, all the time. As geographic information gets published, the Happening City absorbs it. Each update or new source is a mini heartbeat, and collectively the pulses of new information show what’s happening around you.

Zoom out, and the map really becomes informative. Each time new data is released, the map updates all five mile grid cells covered by that information. Compare places to get a sense of the scale of open data that we’re generating. If content generating, open places are liveable, find the hotspots on the map and move there. Keep zooming, and the grid resolution becomes coarser. You’re looking at the pulse of cities, regions, society, humanity.

Thousands of data layers go into the Happening City map, from federal datasets to local crowdsourced info. It’s a dynamic artwork, and an essential tool to measure the vibrancy of cities and regions. Wizzy algorithms plus some whizzier humans keep the inventory up to date and wise to the latest feeds and downloads. Everything gets republished as a data feed — we’re smart enough to avoid including that in the aggregation, could lead to a black hole.


Really Sleepy Syndication helps you stay on top of your RSS and blog feeds — while you sleep.



Overwhelmed by your Google Reader inbox? Unable to keep up with the volume of your network’s twitter updates? Are you staying awake just to stay connected?

Really Sleepy Syndication will help. Import your Google Reader feeds, plug in your earphones, and go to sleep. Wake up eight hours later, filled with insightful analysis, witty comments and the latest buzz (and Buzz) from your network.

It’s RSS while you ZZZ. Really Sleepy Syndication waits until you’re asleep, then drip feeds the day’s updates into your ears. The latest text-to-speech guarantees accurate and easy-to-absorb renditions. Any links in your messages are followed and summarized, so you get the complete picture*. The soft murmurs continue for a few hours, or until your feed runs out.

Download today, be rested and well informed.

* actual pictures only available with additional headset extension.


Noteworthy turns your precious Moleskines, Muji notebooks and Staples pads into tagged, indexed graphics on your desktop, iPhone and iPad. Combine the beauty and flexibility of a paper notebook with a intuitive and powerful digital book editor.

Ever wished you could look something up in an old notebook? Are you carrying two full notebooks, just in case you need to refer back? How easily can you find those initial sketches from a couple of months ago? Have you ever backed up those notes?

How Noteworthy turns your old notebooks into essential reference materials:

  1. Sign up on the Noteworthy website. Print off the mailing label, and drop your notebook into the mail. Buy a three notebook deal for the best rate. We’ll even send you a fresh notebook.
  2. The Noteworthy team scan the notebook, and alert you by email. This process takes a few days, but it’s worth the wait.
  3. Go online to browse the notebook pages in crisp high-resolution images. Tag any page section with keywords - maybe a project number, or client.
  4. Download the Noteworthy app to your mobile device, and browse your notebooks anywhere. Search, tag, share, forward as pdf to email.

The notebook pages aren’t just images, they’re like a hypertext-enabled super version of your printed notebook. Noteworthy’s cursive script recognition identifies and tags of titles and dates. It detects and tags changes in pen or density of text, helping you divide the notebook into logical chunks. And images are extracted from pages, making it easy to find that critical chart or diagram.

Noteworthy isn’t the end for your filled-up notebooks. It’s the beginning. Keep annotating. Make links to other pages, add tags, link to external documents or embed the pages in other places.  Noteworthy remembers these layers of data and presents them on the page, alongside your original scribbles.

Meanwhile, carry on taking notes in your current notebook. It’ll become Noteworthy soon enough.


Take one large party-able space with four projection screens, one per wall. Hook up each screen to Chatroulette with a webcam pointing inwards for each one.

Throw a party, and the random webcam people can join us. Like a flash mob but with no control and no guarantee of finding it. Ignore the screens, or chat, or click Next…

Who doesn’t like naked strangers at their party?


quote
startups
ideas
how to
words from the wise
2010.03.18 // 1268890387 // @fkh

If you want to start a company and are working on new ideas, here’s how I’ve always done it and how I recommend you do it. Be the opposite of secretive. Create a Google spreadsheet where you list every idea you can think, even really half-baked ones. Include ideas you hear about (make sure you keep track of who had which idea so you can credit them/include them later).

Then take the spreadsheet and show it to every smart person you can get a meeting with and walk through each idea. Talk to VCs, entrepreneurs, potential customers, and people working at big companies in relevant industries. You’ll be surprised how much you’ll learn. The odds that someone will hear an idea and go start a competitor are close to zero. The odds you’ll learn which ideas are good and bad and how to improve them are very high.

Developing new startup ideas, Chris Dixon. 

March 14, 2010

WhereItGoes.org shows your personal sewage and stormwater overflow infrastructure. In a heavy rainstorm, sewage and stormwater mix and discharge into local waterways at CSOs (Combined Sewage Overflows).

WhereItGoes.org estimates the flow of stormwater and sewage for any address you provide. Factoring in rainfall, elevation and information about city-wide infrastructure, interactive maps show you the most likely CSOs serving your block.

Change location on the map, and see the CSO mapping change. Click a CSO to read more about it, upload your photos and leave comments. Add a CSO to your watch list, and get alerts via email, SMS or social media when an overflow is imminent.

(For more on CSOs in NYC, check out Storm Water Infrastructure Matters.)


Community Supported Agriculture is sprouting up in many cities - over 100 groups are offering vegetable shares in NYC this year, up from 70 last year. Most are run on a volunteer basis.

CSAmazing is a hosted web management system for CSAs, taking care of the most common tasks, including payment, registration and volunteer coordination.With CSAmazing, volunteers spend less time working on admin, have an easier time delegating and can help the CSA group grow together as a community.

Common CSA tasks managed by CSAmazing include:

  • easy sign-up for new members, including waiting lists once all slots are taken
  • flexible payment options - thanks to generous support from non-profit food organizations in NYC, online payments via CSAmazing have no fees.
  • cost calculators allow CSA organizers to forecast income and costs over the season, and share this info with the farmer
  • email and social messaging tools to communicate with members and other CSA volunteers
  • volunteer shift management - flexible re-scheduling, reminders and nagging emails make the process of staffing the CS pick-ups very smooth
  • farmer communication, including details of vegetables each week
  • tools to share data with other CSA organizers, to support local food efforts and build on experiences from other schemes
  • a flexible, modular system, with optional extras including recipe databases, photo sharing and community food mapping

Getting a CSAmazing portal is simply a matter of registering with the main CSAmazing site, and filling out some info about the CSA. A custom domain is automatically set up, like this: crownheights.csamazing.org. With some simple customization though the admin interface, costs, shift times and other essential info can be entered.

Development of CSAmazing is open source, with a tiny team of developers supported by small contributions from participating CSAs and generous assistance from food-related foundations. Using a hosted solution means that backups, upgrades and security updates are taken care of. And since the underlying system beneath CSAmazing is a widely-used content management system and database, the foundations are solid.

The site is optimized to be undemanding. It runs smoothly on mobile devices and also older hardware and older browsers - helping CSAs reach a wide audience across the spectrum. The mobile version of the site even allows volunteer coordinators to check off shifts and edit schedules directly at the pick-up location.

Do you run a CSA? Say goodbye to miscellaneous google docs, long email chains and binders of volunteer shift coordination - sign up for CSAmazing today.


Air Freshener is a Firefox extension. Tired of reading comments from crazy climate denialists? Do you wish skeptics were actually skeptical rather than brainless? Interested in facts, debate and science?

If the tide of crazy comments on news sites and blogs gets you down, let Air Freshener invisibly take care of them, leaving all sane contributions untouched. You won’t even know what was there.

Air Freshener uses advanced Bayesian filters to target comments likely to contain ludicrous climate change denial. Spot a missed comment? Click the Freshen Up button to alert the server and improve the filtering.

Typical keywords include:

  • AGW corpse
  • massive liberal fraud
  • cherry picking data
  • warmists
  • climategate
  • false science
  • money making hoax
  • discredited fraudsters
  • “climate change” hysteria
  • why is it snowing if…
  • (anything definitively talking about PROOF, anything else in CAPS and/or sentences mentioning Al Gore’s personal wealth).

We can’t make climate change go away. But we can blank out the idiots, and focus on constructive steps. Install Air Freshener today and enjoy a better web browsing climate.


Introducing View Finder, a web tool for evaluating the visual impact of new transmission corridors.

Placing power transmission lines across the landscape is a necessary to transmit energy from source to destination. Until we get a breakthrough in efficiency, distributed and localized generation, new transmission corridors will be needed.

Choosing where to put corridors is contentious and drawn-out - for example, see the well-documented campaign against new corridors in Virginia run by the Piedmont Environmental Council. Reviews take a long time, and require data, expert analysis, public and stakeholder consultation. What if new tools could help make the processes more effective?

Here are two such tools:

  • View Finder. A visibility analysis for the entire US, running in your browser. Discussed below.
  • Path Finder. A collaborative platform for contributing, assessing and commenting on corridor options.

These two tools alone don’t resolve all the challenges around corridor placement, but they represent small building blocks towards more inclusive and open processes.

What is View Finder?

View Finder uses freely-available datasets to calculate what can be seen from a particular location. While detailed viewshed analysis is expensive and slow, View Finder provides a rough sketch of the same information in seconds, right in your web browser.

From your browser, click a point on a map, or draw a path to represent a transmission corridor (shown green in the screenshot below). View Finder overlays two colors: blue, showing locations that can’t see the point or corridor, and pink for locations that can.

Pre-set options relevant to transmission corridors allow you to specify the height of the pylons. Taller corridor infrastructure increases the size of the possible viewing area.

Vegetation cover data are used to calculate summer and winter views, where the corridor is located in or near a deciduous forest.

The ground cover also affects how likely you are to see the corridor from each location - forest gets in the way more than scrubland, for example.

After tweaking the settings, share, save or print the viewshed.

Behind the scenes, View Finder uses the National Elevation Dataset, and the National Land Cover Dataset. Both are stored in Amazon Elastic Block Storage, and called as needed by a GRASS GIS script running in Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute to calculate the visibility for the current location. Map tiles showing the view shed are generated on the fly by Mapnik and stored for re-use.

View Finder is an integral part of Path Finder - to be covered in a follow-up post.


Querelous is a disruptive app for a disruptive technology. Why should creative graffiti be limited to human-readable materials?

See a QR code in the wild.

Use Querelous on your iphone to snap the QR code.

Querelous will decode the code, and search for a valid alternative that can be created by changing only a few pixels.

Uncap your black sharpie.

Follow the on-screen instructions, coloring in the indicated pixels to subtly subvert the code.

Recap sharpie and leave. Another QR code subverted!