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156 posts
Arthur Foelsche and I take a few minutes away from the rest of the CivicActions June Off Site in Geyserville, CA to troubleshoot and fix a mail issue for a client. Geyserville is a rather small town, no internet cafes. So we made due, after about 10 minutes of wardriving, we found an open wireless signal near the railroad tracks.
Had a quick Skype with Eric Gundersen of Development Seed . Eric and I catch up every week or three to talk about developments in drupal development. Particularly the modules that our shops are working on (and modules that other shops are workign on too!). We’ll be having a call sometime soon to talk about their seed campaign module, our mapthing module, and forward and send. Basically this is my dream recipe that does viral e-activism with maps! Eric pointed me to this blog post about some google based geotagging work they are doing. “[They are] working on building a new geocoder module for Drupal to make syndication of content to maps and Google Earth easier.”
GoodStorm , the Drupal Powered on demand T-Shirt printing service, is launching a new service called “ MeCommerce ” (see article here which will allow bloggers (and other websites) to include an ecommerce widget which will: allow bloggers to insert product listings in a javascript and iframe box on their sites and keep 50% of the retail mark-up for themselves. Blog readers will be able to purchase books and CDs inside the box without leaving the blog page they are on. Blog publishers can populate their boxes by tag or with specific items of their selection.
From Worldchanging Crowdsourcing describes the substitution of extremely low-paid or volunteer labor for what were formerly paying jobs: for instance, the substitution of computer science students and volunteer coders working on an open source project for paid software engineers working on a proprietary project. It should be noted that sometimes far more jobs are created overall in such a transcommercial approach .
Last night I went to see An Inconvenient Truth , the Al Gore movie about Catastrophic Climate Change. I saw it with a group of friends and we went out afterward for dinner. Go see the movie. Every American should see this movie. You cannot watch it and wonder how things would be different if Mr. Gore had faught a little harder after the election of 2000. But that aside, seeing images of the Katrina Aftermath made me cry, literally. I could not watch it. I had a dream last night about the movie, in which I was moved to tears by the facts laid out so eloquently by Mr. Gore.
The DefectiveByDesign.org campaign has really taken off! In about 3 days we had 1000 signups, in a week we had 1700! Thanks to the help of Diggers and SlashDoters! Well, we’ve decided that the target of the next action will be Apple because the iPod and iTunes music store make Apple the largest seller of DRM infected technology. On June 10, we’ll warn citizens in 6 cities of the dangers of DRM in Apple products. Sign Up
Today The Free Software Foundation and CivicActions launched the Campaign in Seattle at the Microsoft WinHEC conference. We had a great time with about 20 local Free Software and privacy advocates. We all dressed up in hazmat suits and handed out leaflets warning of the dangers of DRM to attendees of the WinHEC2006 conference.
Flickr recently added search functionality that allows users to search for Creative Commons licensed photographs on their system. This is great news for anyone looking to source photos from Flickr. Now you can just look for photos that bear acceptable licensing.
I have bitched about Craig’s List before, but i needed to blog this for once. The Seattle Craigslist covers way more than Seattle. It might as well be called Western Washington CL. I am trying to find a dresser. I only want something close by, but i get stuff in Tacoma, Renton, Edmonds. If CL simply had a zip code function, the utility of the site (and productivity of millions of Americans) would rise instantly. Basically, every posting on the classifieds would have a zip code field and the when searching you would be able to limit your search by zip code proximity.
I found this podcast, Distributing the Future via dorkbot, I think. Anyway, I listened to the Attention episode yesterday, and it is relevant to us and the way we work, and the work that we do. I think that everyone should listen to this particular episode, and I am hopeful about this podcast as a keeper in my itunes line up!