National Geographic’s Digital Places has a new story about using GeoRSS: Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds.

In particular, it covers how GeoRSS can enable environment monitoring and notifications and is useful for more than (though in addition to) tracking your friends and travel photographs.

You should also see the NG article on Global Positioning Tech Inspires Do-It-Yourself Mapping Project, about OpenStreetMap.

Andri Snaer talks about how last night, all the lights were turned off in INSERT_ADDRESS. Then a famous astronomer talked about the night sky over the radio for people to enjoy the natural beauty of the cosmos.

I think this is a simply marvelous idea. I’ve been in several European cities when they’ve had “Car Free days”, most recently in Brussels during EuroOSCON. The idea is one day of the week that everyone will go car free, and enjoy the relative quiet and easy biking/strolling about town.

Overall, I am an idealistic technocrat. I really enjoy technology, gadgets, programming, etc. However, I also enjoy natural beauty and the environment as it is. I hope that towns here in the US start promoting these sorts of activities. I mean, what’s the worse that can happen, people actually think its a good idea and turn off their lights at night?

Living in the motor city you sometimes wonder about its support of the environment. Well, I was surprised, and pleased, to get a link to the Detroit Green Map. They seem to have worked with GreenMap to use the standard icon set.

You should also check out Sustainable Detroit, which is working to promote the idea of sustainable living. Power to them!

Technorati Tags: michigan, sustainable

There is a CNet article: Congress targets social-networking sites, that lays out a current discussion on Congress wanting to push the requirement of websites retaining user data for 1-2 years. This is similar to what is required now for ISPs.

The article mentions that this could be as little as retaining the IP address for each user – which seems absurd, since users will likely be coming from many IP addresses (dynamic IPs, laptops, cafes, etc.), and go so far as storing identity, messages, websites visited, and any info available.

What constitutes a “social networking site”? Would a blog be required to track comments, visits to the blog and link that to the IP address? What happens to blogs that are up and gone in 6 months?

And these suggestions come under the guise of national security, but also protecting minors, and copyrighted material.

These are some very frightening prospects.

Tonight I got to enjoy a benefit of living in a reasonably metro-area, and an excellent art museum & school nearby to hear Craig Newmark, the developer/inventor of craigslist. He had a discussion with one of the deputy editors of Wired Magazine.

Craig is definitely a geek, but also a geek who has gained some interesting experience with web society. To start-off, Craigslist currently has 190 sites in 35 countries, 10 million viewers per month looking at over 3 billion pages. All this with only 21 employees. For me, that was the biggest suprise of the night. With the amount of moderation, infrastructure, support, development, accounting, managing, selling (real estate, job, and apartment postings are paid), for 10 million users per month, this seems rather amazing.

Overall, the discussion was around how Craigslist, while not radical in its own right, has been steadily at the forefront and plodding along with the forefront of web culture and a connected society. The moderator brought up the points that Craigslist has been accused for the: death of newspapers, end of proper scientific study, and even the demise of pimps. It is an excellent example of user-created content made for other users creates an entire culture. It came at a time when the technology was becoming widespread and people wanted a new method of disseminating information, thoughts, and odd items for sale nearby. Craigslist was also the inspiration behind what I think was the first Web 2.0 mashup, HousingMaps (which retains as stark a UI as Craigslist itself).

Traditional media and culture is complaining that this “free for all” is ruining their revenue streams while also bringing down quality. Yet, people continue to seek and use this truly level forum rather than the Top-Down, one-way direction of traditional media. As Craig pointed out, for example, online/electronic forums can “deal with” information that is out there by correcting it, removing it, moderating it or otherwise, whereas traditional media will not be able to react, retract, or correct the original (and possibly inappropriate) classified ad or news article.

Lastly, there was discussion of the various “wars” that are waged on online forums like Craigslist. The current big war is the hot-bed discussion between pet-breeders and people who want their animal companions au naturál. There are also continual problems of dis-information ala certain public officials.

You know you’ve done well as a Website when you warrant your own Wikipedia article.