“On Earth Hour hundreds of millions of people around the world will come together to call for action on climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. The movement symbolizes that by working together, each of us can make a positive impact in this fight, protecting our future and that of future generations. Learn more about how Earth Hour began, what we’ve accomplished, and what is in store for 2010.

Participation is easy. By flipping off your lights on March 27th at 8:30 p.m. local time you will be making the switch to a cleaner, more secure nation and prosperous America.”

“Within days of the earthquake in Haiti, Pictometry captured more than 45,000 aerial oblique images of the damage in the capital city of Port au Prince and its surrounding area. The imagery was then donated to URISA’s volunteer GIS Corps to assist with the recovery efforts.”

The fun part of architecting  this new site has been the rapid design cycle enabled by Drupal and all it’s myriad modules and theming capabilites. Got an idea in the morning? You can see it implemented by the afternoon.  Or maybe even in a few minutes depending on the situation.   Drupal ( or I should say Drupal and all it’s companion modules) succeeds because the granularity in component construction is at the web design pattern  level.  If a good idea for the web has been thought of, there is probably a Drupal module to support it.

Calais for semantic tagging and we’ve added Facebook Connect to the site, both work well.  We’ve also successfully integrated with NPR and PBS, we pull feeds fresh headlines from NPR news every day using their API and you can watch some of your favorite shows now, right from your web browser in very good quality video. There’s much more, but too much to list here. All I can say is check it out and let us know what you think.

“The Obama administration recently excited the world of open source software by choosing to launch recovery.gov on Drupal. Their choice of a free, open source platform over any proprietary system is as hopeful and promising as the purpose of the website they built, which is to lend transparency to the spending of the $800 billion dollar economic stimulus money. We should be happy both that the U.S. government is embracing open software, and that it is promoting Open Data…”

via Where Open Source, Open Data and government meet | Dries Buytaert.

I think the most interesting outcome for me was the realization that the global tweet stream might actually have some hidden potential value for the semantic web.  what I once thought was a fairly useless communal stream of consciousness, the endless stream of twitter messages about silly things and foolishness, might actually contain hidden semantic gems.

It turns out there is a common subset of twitter messages that follow the same pattern of semantic metadata.  For example many messages are commonly in the form of;  “Mike Axelrod is going to the Rochester Museum and Science center today http://www.rmsc.org/“  This twitter message actually contains some fairly decent semantic data.  It’s in a nice concise triple form (subject, predicate object) it’s just not quite consumable by machines, yet (that is to say, not in the RDF, OWL)  Hint, Hint  folks, we could have something interesting here.  As it stands if we just filter for all the tweets that have URLS we might have some interesting semantic data to mine.  Tweets are so short that if they do contain an url typically it will be just one.  This guarantees us a semantic triple every time. The sender, the comment and the url.

Ok on to the second part of this post. So how do I actually fit this whole tweeting, twittering foolishness into my lifestyle?  Well here’s what I came up with so far.  First of all  I only want one point of entry for my tweets.  One client, one ping to rule them all. So naturally I’m gravitating to ping.fm.  This tool allows me to route a single status update  (tweet) to all the social networks I use.  This would be LinkedIn, Facebook, and (it seems) twitter now.   Next I want a better client experince than what a web page can offer.  It’s just not conducive to the way I work to have to navigate to an url when I want to post an update. additionally some of the clients have a very concise format and play well on my desktop.   And finally I want control over where tweets go.  Sometimes to linkedIn, sometimes to Facebook, sometimes to both and sometimes to my WordPress blog.  So ping.fm gives me this fine grained behavior with one exception. To route tweets to my wordpress blog I had to install the ping.fm wordpress plugin, which I’m happy to say works like a charm. (<–look over there in my sidebar and you’ll see it.)

Now there is only one missing piece of the puzzle. Of all the front ends to ping.fm I tried. None of them had all the features I wanted.  Twitterific is wonderfully simple but only works with Twitter, Tweetdeck works well but only gives me the choice to send to Twitter or Facebook.  Twhirl is getting much closer to what I need and has almost everything except one critical feature. The ability to easily pick which ping.fm group I wan to send to. The last one I tried today does this! It’s called MePing but alas it does almost nothing else, compared to the others I tried. (It’s very beta) Well I’m not giving up and I’m sure very quickly one of these clients will fit my full set of requests. I have the feeling we are in a horse race right now and if you are reading this post 6 months from now many of the above mentioned clients will have everything you need (or will have dropped out of the market.)

There is plenty more to explore with twitter intrgration to websites. I certainly won’t be spending a great deal of time looking at all of this but I do believe there may be some value to discover, if applied correctly.

GoodGuide goes a long way to fulfilling an idea I’ve been kicking around with some of my friends lately.  The idea is that we need to become more conscious of the “Global cost of Ownership” or GCO of the stuff we make, buy and consume. The idea is not “what does it cost me?”, the consumer, but “what does it cost the planet?”  What is the total toll on our environment, health and social well being as the product moves from cradle to grave.

There have been many efforts to rate products over the years but they have often been focused on a singular or narrow concern for example  child safety, carbon footprint, health and toxicity, etc..  But a product strong in one area might be weak in another.   By exposing all the data, or as much as we can, we can encourage manufacturers to improve there products in all the columns  as we educate consumers about what a particular product is doing to their local and global body.   GoodGuide also follows through and reveals the sources of it’s ratings.  Verifiability is very important if we are going to be able to trust rating systems like this. Try it out.  look at a product on GoodGuide and click on the link to “See all data”.  Sources for ratings are revealed, sometimes accompanied by a direct link to the source.

Here are some other characteristics of GoodGuide as summarized in a recent post by Wikinomics blogger Paul Artiuch:

Easy to understand 10-point based rating for the health, environmental and social performance of the product

Aggregate 10-point product rating based on 600 criteria derived from 71 product facts

Scientific approach to calculating scores using information from government, not-for-profit and private databases

Comparison ratings in various product categories

Ability for users to add their own ratings and reviews with links to reviews by Amazon

iPhone application for mobile browsing

Tips on reducing environmental impact

Intuitive interface which greatly speeds up browsing

Hey, this works for me.  So in my opinion the upshot is that GoodGuide is indeed a good guide and one I think I’ll use., but more importantly it may be a model for how we can make guides good.

“Going green” doesn’t have to be a daunting task that means sweeping life changes. Simple things can make a difference.

The contents of this list might not be new, but they bear repeating. Sometimes it takes a few reminders for things take root.

The Open Source initiative has, to date, approved 73 licenses. How many do you really need? If you’re a company or individual producing Open Source software, no more than 4. And you can get along with just 2 of them.

It’s hard enough trying to explain what open source licensing is to the legal department, but just go ahead and trying explain the differences between all 73 existing licenses.  Forget about it. I like Bruce’s idea.  Let’s just settle on a handful we an all agree on and simply things a bit.

Here’s Bruce’s final four:

1. Gift license: The Apache License 2.0

This is similar to the MIT and BSD licenses, but provides a little more protection from software patent lawsuits to the Open Source developer.

2. Sharing-with-rules license: GPL 3

Descended from the GPL, the most popular Open Source license, this license is updated to deal with the vastly larger amount of copyright and case law that exists today.

3. In-between license: LGPL 3

This is for making software libraries under the “sharing with rules” paradigm, but which are usable in proprietary software.

4. A special license to cope with the SaaS phenomenon: Affero GPL3.

This license is specifically engineered to keep Google from running away with your product without sharing their improvements to it. Well, actually, it deals with the software as a service problem. The GPL class of licenses does not require that anyone share source code until they actually distribute the software. But Google doesn’t distribute software, it performs it on its own site.

Works for me, this  simplifies the situation.  You  only need to understand two licenses Apache and GPL3.  The last two are simply GPL3 variants.  (Read  Bruce Perens article for more on this.)

…a community platform supporting professional social networks across local government and the public sector. It provides a secure environment for knowledge development and sharing through online communities of practice.

I recently was invited to join a Scottish group on “shared representation using semantic technologies”.  I noticed this site has recently won the 2008 eGovernment national award in the UK. And rightly so, it is a very good example of a site for people who care about people.  This collaborative tool features forums, library (document management), wiki, news feeds (RSS) and user blogs.  All entries are tagged so one can navigate and search more effectively.  A member can start up a  new community of practice (CoP). To do this the site provides a “create new CoP wizard” that asks the creator to agree a number of  principles and responsibilities for positive, effective collaboration, although a usability hurdle I can see how  it really would make one think about what they were about to start up. Apparently the site is a success as there seems to be  a very large number of groups collaborating on it.  I think it’s a good benchmark for social software to support communities of practice.