If you haven’t already heard, there are only a couple more days (Monday, March 24, 2008) to vote for the The NetSquared Mashup projects. NetSquared sponsors ‘mashups’ that promote and enable social change. This can apply to a very wide variety of projects, from awareness to funding aid. It’s incredibly easy to vote, and the top 20 voted projects of the 120+ submissions will go to the NetSquared conference in May to pitch their project for additional resources and also engage closer to the rest of the community.

When you register, you have to vote for at least 5 projects (to make sure people don’t just vote for their one personal favorite, but actually investigate other projects), and you can vote for up to 10 different projects.

I’ve personally been working with Alan Gutierrez of Think New Orleans on his incredible work in bringing awareness, and a stop to, the improper demolition of houses after Katrina. He is digitizing City Buiding permits, demolition plans, notifications, and incentive options to help citizens protect and rebuild their homes. He runs GIS coworking at Trinity church to educate local citizens on the use of GIS software for doing a lot of the heavy lifting - and we’ve been working with him to help bring all this together into the web to share and utilize by a broader community.

You can check out that project here: City of New Orleans: A Mashup for Citizen Monitoring of the Recovery

Another great project is Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya - where they’ve built a preliminary site to accept user-contributed information on violence outbreaks.

The projects are addressing real world issues with real solutions - so far they have had success on their own and are making a difference. Independently the projects will still be successful and important and their success will only be improved upon by support of the NetSquared community.

It can be daunting to hunt through the rest of the projects. It reminds me of going through conference submissions - I would recommend going through topical areas such as “Health”, “Community Improvement”, “Arts”, etc. to make it easier to compare all the great ideas and potentials.

Remember, voting is only open until this Monday, March 24, 2008 - so please register and vote!

I’m a little behind on some news, so here’s a quick run down of interesting things from this week:

24ways to impress your friends

I wrote a very quick introduction tutorial on adding maps to your web site using Mapstraction as part of the 24ways advent calendar.

KML 2.2 Request for Public Comment

The OGC recently announced a request for public comment of the first “OGC” version of KML, essentially a stamped 2.2 that is the currently documented Google version. The standard is available at the OGC site. This comment period runs from December 4 until January 3 - conveniently timed over the popularly vacant winter holidays, but that means nice fire-side reading.

Global Child Stories with the OLPC

Reading over the large catalog of applications available an in development for the OLPC, I ran across the “Our Stories” application, developed jointly with UNICEF nad Google support, to provide a platform and site for children to annotate their communities and lives. The companion site, OurStories.org is a simple, but intriguing map of the stories from around the world. Makes me really think I need to get an OLPC to work on projects like this to help enable story telling and community building. Oddly the projec is using a unique OurStoriesXML rather than something like Atom which supports all of the desired functionality (title, description, photos, location, audio, author). I’ve suggested this on the wiki discussion.

I’m setting up a special “travelog” installation of GeoPress that I’ll be using while traveling through China and will drop a link here when it’s ready.

I currently have 68 blog post drafts (I don’t usually track my productivity v. laziness as well as Ed Vielmetti does) This is a fault of running across a lot of interesting things during my digital travels, starting to foment a post and discussion - saving the draft, and then letting it sit for awhile - usually well past the expiration date, at which point it just becomes a permanent draft.

So in the style of LabNotes, I’m going to periodically drop a quick post on the various topics and ideas I’m tracking. It’s kind of a mix of my del.icio.us feed (which I removed auto-posting to this blog, if you want the feed, just get that feed), twitter, tumblr, and my blog reader.

Location Patents that shouldn’t have been awarded - Apple recently applied for a Locative Media patent and Google was awarded a Geo-Ranking patent - both of which, on the surface, appear to be common techniques implemented in other systems. But obviously the USPTO knows.

http://my.templated.url/{-prefix|/iscooler/thanWho} - BitWorking has a draft for advanced URI templates that address some of the vocalized shortcomings of the otherwise very powerful, and widely used, OpenSearch. Namely the ability to specify several search endpoints for a single service and also rulesets for additional information required depending on the type of search. This could be very useful for continuing development of RESTful OGC services like WMS and WFS. Check out the Addressable rubygem for easy parsing and template completion of these types of URI’s.

GeoAppleTV? - someone wrote a GPS Plugin for AppleTV extensions of AwkwardTV - it’s called Road Trip and would be useful for an in-vehicle carputer. Though I still think the MacMini makes a better platform due to the optical drive, full install of OS X, and multiple ports. But the AppleTV is small and boots fast.

?q=open+mobile+software-gphone - It’s not really surprising that Google isn’t doing hardware, but instead is developing and supporting a mobile software stack. That’s what they’re good at. Leave chipsets and electronics to the SaMotorachi’s of the world (oh, and Apple).

I’ll be in Chicago later this week and I am completely psyched about the Chicago Festival of Maps. I’m just annoyed by the lack of GeoRSS/KML export of the events and locations. Looks like I’ll need to spend some time on Platial and Mapufacture to make my travel itinerary and access it on my mobile in the field.

Tigert pointed me to this research demo on Multiple Object Tracking. You are first presented with a collection of ‘faces’ spread randomly over an area. The demo identifies several (the more the merrier) ’spies’. Then the faces go back to normal and they all start bouncing around. After a short time period, the faces stop and you then need to identify the faces that were originally identified as spies. Go ahead and try it, I’ll wait…

It’s a really interesting experiment in your ability to track, both through your eyes, and perception of the objects as they move about in your periphery. Perhaps it’s a good indicator of “multi-taskability”.

However, for me, the most striking thing I found was while playing with the object tracking, I felt just like I often do when working on several projects at once. There are some ‘primary’ goals, objectives I want to or need to achieve. Bouncing around with these are a bunch of other tasks that do a lot to distract: blogging, IRC, chat, cats, food, etc. Can you track the projects for the distractions?

By the way, I got a perfect scores on all the levels, so I guess that bodes well for my projects - or perhaps I just didn’t go to a high-enough level of spies.

I’ve worked on a couple of environmental focused websites such as VerdantConcepts and Greener Earth Maps. A concern has always been the benefit/environmental cost ratio of running servers 24/7 that use up power and resources. This has been a big issue in persistant worlds such as Second Life where every acre of digital world has a real-world cost due to maintaining the simulation, even if no one is there!.

Therefore, it was a happy surprise when one of the hosting companies I use (such as this blog), Dreamhost, announced they are carbon neutral. What this means is they’ve purchased certificates from a carbon offset provider. You can be carbon neutral by planting trees, using renewable energies, use carbon sequestration techniques, or the easy (yet effective) method of buying carbon offsets from an organization that will do this for you.

The internet, and computing usage, has a huge, and growing, impact on the environment. Companies create power stations just to power large internet companies and their hosting requirements. Therefore it is important to understand this impact and alleviate it through any of those means mentioned above.

In some ways, it is buying yourself the “Green” label, but in the end the effect is the same. You’re putting your money where the need is, saving the environment.

So the question you should all be asking yourselves: “Is my hosting provider carbon neutral?” If not, make them, or move to one that is.

Update: for the low-down on how carbon offsets reallythis informative-info-graphic from Salon. (thanks to Sean Gillies for being the sleuthy detective in finding this gem via Reddit).