“Only a crisis, real or perceived, produces real change” stated Milton Friedman, economist and vanguard of the free market and indeed the free market has prospered through human suffering. Friedman is a classic Conservative who believed that if one suffered, tough, one was dealt a poor lot, it is not upto society to fix the situation. According to Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron there is hope for the disenfranchised even during the rule of the free market.

Hope is knowledge and communication (the basis of Enlightenment ideals - classical Liberalism) - “to resist shock is to know what is happening to you and why”. I’ve tried to believe this for a long time, but when I read of what is happening in our world and to consider the parallels of how it has happened before even within my liftime (and I’m not old), it’s difficult to believe in information as shock resistance. And hell, I’m a firm believer in informationalism, but one must have some level of entitlement, whether by birth, geographic location, migration, or availability of information. To say that information is resistance, assumes a great deal and only one that is entitled would be so careless to make that declaration. Perhaps the liberal revolution has lost to a powerful deity, one that was always with us, human nature - lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride… the engines of Western civilization.

My school recently switched to a new email client, Zimbra, which I avoided for a while, because I felt like it had too much going on and it takes a while to load and I was just used to the good’ol squirrel client. But Zimbra is amazing, it’s like the web in hyper drive. Zimbra is an early “web2.0″ product that needs code updating for some platforms, but it’s only crashed my browser once and works well otherwise.  For example, I received an Amazon notice that my order had shipped with the UPS tracking number. After spending nearly an hour at the post office yesterday and watching people in line nearly get into fights, I’ve decided that I’m going to closely track the package as not to miss it. The tracking number was a hyperlink, so I clicked on it and a new window opened up with the UPS page for my item. Generally, I’d copy the number, go to the UPS site and paste it… Also any address are also hyperlinked so that an ajax preview box pops up with a yahoo map of the location (yahoo recently acquired Zimbra). I’m sure Zimbra is old news to people, but it’s a surprise to me. Best of all it’s open source and free to download.

High numbers of children with asthma? Adults afflicted with cancer? What was previously buried in the land near a small town? What pollutants flow in the tap water of a given region? Are you living near a Superfund Site? In 1980, Reagan reluctantly implemented the Superfund Act, initially written by the Carter administration due to civic demand for the government’s acknowledgment and action to clean up hazardous sites.

Today the Superfund is broke, there is little money to clean up past sites of waste and environmental disasters, but people still have a right to know and to learn about the environments we live in, however the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t make this easy. Concerned citizens may request Superfund data from the EPA, but the data tends to be dirty - missing information or out dated information, so it’s a good thing that Brooke Singer (full disclaimer - she’s my wife) with the support of turbulence.org has launched Superfund365.

Each day from September 1st 2007 through August 2008, Singer will post a data visualization of a Superfund site. Superfund365 presents a wealth of information on the United States environmental reality. As there are thousands of Superfund sites in the United States of America, Superfund365 only paints a partial picture of the damage to this region of the world, however it is enough to get an insight into the environmental disasters heaped by industrialization and commerce. The project is an incredible exercise of environmental data visualization at a time when people are becoming increasingly conscious of the changes that we have inflicted upon our planet.

September 15, 2005
A new experiment by Sal Randolph - “Whereyouare is an experiment in the collective documentation of neighborhoods… Everyone is invited to participate by documenting any neighborhood they love… The project harnesses the power of folksonomy tags from a range of sites that host and organize content of different kinds (flickr for photos, vimeo for video, delicious for links, etc.).”

I love the concept of this experiment and it’s use of current popular web tools too establish an open documentation of neighborhoods that anyone who is willing to establish an account with flickr or vimeo or delicious or opsound… can participate in.

At the moment, Williamsburg seems to have the most stuff, since it is the neighborhood that Sal lives in and can facilitate getting initial contributors to join.

If people contribute worthwhile content and build an engaging representation or documentation, it could be a really great use of folksonomy. However at the moment, Williamsburg includes a couple of videos of an awning flapping against wind and some pigeons hanging out on a street - the sort of content that leads me to question whether or not this is just more unnecessary stuff online, time will tell.

It will also be interesting to see how widely the site is passed along and if neighborhoods of non-Western or underdeveloped countries are added to the site.

July 04, 2005
The Bush administration’s regressive nature toward late capitalism is once again made apparent in today’s announcement that the government will keep control of the  computers that manage the Internet.  As usual the Bush administration is using security and guarding against global terrorism as the reasoning behind not moving forward in the global development of the WWW.  The Internet would be well served if the root servers did not remian under the control of one government, this was necessary 30 years ago, and even 15 years ago as USSR came to an end, today it portrays the unilateral nature of the current administration.  It will be interesting to see if Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann remains part of the Commerce Department or becomes a private corporation as scheduled for Sept. 2006…

Guardian UK story

NY Times story

February 22, 2005
Now Wal-Mart has the 4th largest television network and it’s right in their stores - focused on making you a better, more productive consumer!  A New York Times story - presents some funny remarks from shoppers and media executives:

Shopper states:

“It’s sort of a neat idea…  I just walked up here and I was looking at it. I think if you’ve got children with you, it would entertain them.”

Mr. Lempert (editor of business magazine) argues that the current setup does not do enough for customers. “They should have a 60-inch monitor that’s triggered by consumers, and prints out coupons and recipes,” he said. “That’s what people want.”

He added: “You might be able to say it’s the fifth-largest network based on the number of people who walk by it, but it doesn’t mean they are paying attention to it and that it’s empowering them to buy those products.”