advocacy

Creating People-Friendly Streets

Creating People-Friendly Streets (Gotham Gazette, November 2007): Against this backdrop, many West Side residents and elected officials believe the time has come to reclaim the streets as public space. In November, several hundred people filled the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan to hear Jan Gehl, the Danish urban planner renowned for humanizing the streets of Copenhagen, London and dozens of other cities. Gehl’s talk launched the Upper West Side Streets Renaissance, a campaign to radically reconfigure the streets led by Transportation Alternatives, the Project for Public Spaces and the Open Planning Project.

Gehl is working as a consultant for the transportation department. With a team of volunteers, he conducted studies of how the streets are used in various parts of the city and made recommendations for supporting “walkability” in public life. [Go, Go!, GO! (Am I enthusiastically for all this? Mmmm, yes!)]

NYC’s “Flawed” Traffic Plan Brought to You by… Toyota

CBS 2’s award-winning political reporter tells us that "Londoners are now cloning license plates to avoid congestion fees" (note they’re not copying license plates — they’re cloning them. Terrifying). She doesn’t tell us how widespread the practice is, how many people might be doing it or how it may be impacting a system that has reduced traffic congestion by 70,000 vehicles per day and is raising $250 million a year for mass transit (You’d think it would be easy for an award-winning investigative reporter to find this sort of information). Rather, Kramer gives some airtime to Westchester obstructionist Assembly member Richard Brodsky, incorrectly referring to him as "head of the Congestion Mitigation Commission."[Oy.]
Source: StreetsBlog

Russianoff and Schneiderman Map the MTA’s Road to ‘Ruin’

Russianoff and Schneiderman Map the MTA’s Road to ‘Ruin’: Spitzer has a lot on his plate, but ending Albany’s systemic abuse of our 7.5 million straphangers should be at or near the top of the pile. He must work with the Legislature and the MTA board, both to avoid a fare hike in 2008 and to set a new agenda for our state’s mass transit program – an agenda that breaks with the unsustainable and inexcusable policies of the last 12 years. [What a mess…]
Source: StreetsBlog

Google hopes to undercut coal with cheap, renewable energy

Google hopes to undercut coal with cheap, renewable energy: The company itself is also trying hard to reduce its drain on the environment. Google is working to reduce the energy expenditure of its data centers across the world, all of which need power and cooling for the servers, and plans to be carbon neutral by the end of the current year. It has also been developing an array of solar cells to power its California headquarters, the Googleplex, and is involved in an initiative to arrive at more energy-efficient computers.

Presumably, the idea behind this move is as follows: if you can’t persuade people that burning coal is a bad idea ecologically, providing them with a cheaper, cleaner alternative makes it more expensive to pollute than not, and even if shareholders don’t care about the trees, they’ll care about the bottom line. At a time when report after report highlights the growing damage done to the planet through the use of fossil fuels, this move by Google to spur renewable energy uptake ought to be applauded.

[Excellent. Git’er done! The flip side of evil.]

The next step in Digg clones

The next step in Digg clones: Imagine Digg in the old days, when there were just 25 people using it. Maybe that wasn’t enough. Maybe it didn’t really get interesting until there were 100 users or 250 or 1000. It was good, the articles were gems, things we weren’t finding on our own, there were huge numbers of them, but they were prioritized, and the community had a heart of gold, people were doing it for love. The maturity level was high.
[A friend and I were discussing a very similar idea, so I’d toss the following into the fire. Create an API for the blog readers that “marks” a story as highly rated by your community. The point it to avoid having a feed of highly rated stuff, but maintain whatever org system you want and just see that this story is recommended.]

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Blasting the Myth of the Fold – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design: Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.

Advertisers currently want their ads above the fold, and it will be a while before that tide turns. But it’s very clear that the rest of the page can be just as valuable – perhaps more valuable – to contextual advertising. Personally, I’d want my ad to be right at the bottom of the TMZ page, forget the top.

The biggest lesson to be learned here is that if you use visual cues (such as cut-off images and text) and compelling content, users will scroll to see all of it. The next great frontier in web page design has to be bottom of the page. You’ve done your job and the user scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page because they were so engaged with your content. Now what? Is a footer really all we can offer them? If we know we’ve got them there, why not give them something to do next? Something contextual, a natural next step in your site, or something with which to interact (such as a poll) would be welcome and, most importantly, used. [Nice report.]
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Time to write our own rules

Time to write our own rules: My own version: Stop petitioning Facebook and Google to solve our problems for us. They’re not creating those problems alone. We’re been allowing them to create those problems in the first place, and we’ve been doing that for too long. Time to come up with some new rules of engagement — ones that work for us as well as them. [A continuing problem as the inversion of control will take time to build strength.]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Making Rules, II

Making Rules, II: What matters is the first point. (Forgive me, but the others are red herrings, even if you’re an entrepreneur hoping to make money on the advertising gravy train.) Facebook crossed a line here. They lured us into a vast stockyard, and then began to monetize us in ways that violated our quaint notion that we are not in fact cattle.

Treating users of free services like cattle is as old as TV, radio and billboards. It may be as old as people painting in caves with charcoal and spit. The difference now isn’t in Facebook’s manners, which are no different than those of NBC or the New York Times. The difference isn’t even that this time it’s personal. That’s been a holy grail for advertising since the beginning as well. Facebook is reaching for a golden ring here, and I’m inclined to forgive them for doing that. [A must read about marketplaces and understanding our role in it (or what our role should be).]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Amazon Announced Kindle

Amazon Announced Kindle: You’re going to see two kinds of reviews: bad ones from people who haven’t used it and good ones from people who have. It’s that kind of product—plus Jeff Bezos’s reality-distortion field isn’t as large as Steve Jobs’s. I have used it and if someone gave me a choice of receiving an iPhone or a Kindle, I’d pick the Kindle. [Here’s what I don’t like… Guy doesn’t mention that Truemors is carried before he starts opining (although he does note it with an exclamation point later on). Second he sets you up by saying “bad ones from people who haven’t used it and good ones from people who have.” which immediately dismisses the opinion of people who haven’t used one as invalid, and further suggests that anyone who has used on has written positively. Wow. No wonder he was a world class evangelist. It’s a bit overstyled IMHO. but check out Mark’s take on it, and Seth’s. Granted each with their own agenda, but still. My take? It’s a digital rights issue. BigCo’s are always trying to grab them and give nothing in return. Not such a good thing. I’m trying to teach my son right now that it’s OK to give away toys he doesn’t play with anymore. Same for his books. How does this lesson fit into these corporate interests? Not.]
Source: Guy Kawasaki

JumpBox Inc.

Applications | JumpBox Inc.: We take popular Open Source server applications, remove all the install headaches and make them much easier to use. We call our virtual appliances JumpBoxes and they are free to download and use. To earn our living, we sell access to enhanced features of the JumpBox platform and additional support options in the form of JumpBox Assurance plans. Feel free to browse around, there’s something in the library for pretty much anyone. [Nice. Where’s a Rails setup?]
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