The Charlottesville farmers’ market was full of local berries this morning. Local peaches are just starting to come in. Lots of folks were out walking and on bikes, baskets filled with greens.
What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life… and the prime cause is not vanity… but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization. – Henry Seidel Canby, 1926
Flickr combines the power of visual storytelling with the very nature of a social network - engagement and conversation. Three arts organizations (Houston Ballet, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Luce Foundation Center for American Art) are innovating ways to use Flickr creatively, and in the process offering backstage passes to the organization, amplifying programming, and engaging stakeholders in real decision-making.
The National Geographic Society, in addition to making a magazine, TV shows and website, also funds research and exploration. Once a year, they bring their grantees together for an Explorers’ Symposium in Washington, DC. I had a chance to attend some of the sessions.
I spent much of the week at the NetSquared N2Y4 conference in Silicon Valley. NetSquared brings together social entrepreneurs, whose tech projects compete for funds. Last year the projects were mashups. This year’s theme was mobile.
Here’s a quick summary of the projects presented at NetSquared N2Y4 this morning. The complete list of Featured Projects is on NetSquared’s site.
What’s a multi-modal application? One that does phone, web, and perhaps Twitter, etc. One example is TwitterVoteReport, a Rails application that collected reports of waiting time at the polls for the 2008 US election. Produced in 3 weeks by Dave Troy. Input came from telephone, Twitter, SMS.
I sent a letter to our CIO the other day asking for OpenID for the office. Strikes me that OpenID is one place where traditional interests of IT (ensuring users have access to what they need, compliance) jibe with those of Web 2.0 service users.