While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics [...]

Erik Hersman presents the remarkable story of Ushahidi, a Google Maps mashup that allowed Kenyans to report and track violence via cell phone texts following the 2008 elections, and has evolved to continue saving lives in other countries [...]

[Technology] A Perfect Personal Data Collection Application: The number of Web applications to colle.. http://tinyurl.com/c7coa8 # [Interaction Design] Interview with Peter Morville at IA Summit 09: “I think we are at anoth.. http://tinyurl.com/cmnmga # [Interaction Design] Space-time trails and locative technologies: (Pictures of space-time t.. http://tinyurl.com/c85ceu # [China] A Professor’s Comments on Mental Illness Draw [...]

Monthly groceries at Metro: frozen bagles, panninis, and laffa! Thank you, Lord! # [China] Chinese president meets Brazilian leader in London: Chinese President Hu Jintao met his Brazilian.. http://tinyurl.com/cd6jd2 # [Interaction Design] Music That Makes You Dumb: Virgil Griffith, a CalTech graduate student,.. http://tinyurl.com/cgbw7j # [Technology] Report: Google in Talks to Buy Twitter?: Google is [...]

Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action — and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group [...]

[China, Media, Cartoon] SpongeBob SquarePants is China’s most popular children’s show http://tinyurl.com/dm997g # [China] Shanghai details new hukou policy (Shanghai is opening up to talent by approving permanent residency) http://tinyurl.com/db7g8f # [Design] How to make Agile and UX work in harmony (Jeff Patton gives advice on how to make the two get along) http://tinyurl.com/cfekx9 # [...]

Furthering its commitment to providing the geospatial open source community with faster innovation and support for standards worldwide, Autodesk announced the availability of new providers developed on Feature Data Object (FDO) open data access technology. FDO technology, originally created by Autodesk and now a fully endorsed project in the open source community through the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), allows users to store, retrieve, update, and analyze geospatial data…

Autodesk has announced that it has donated the source code for CS-Map coordinate system technology to the open source community and is seeking to establish it as part of an official OSGeo Foundation project for coordinate reference systems. The contribution represents Autodesk’s third major contribution to the open source community, following its MapGuide Open Source and Feature Data Object (FDO) Data Access Technology donations [...]

KidsGIS is a cool project from a group of professionals and educators out in Oregon (USA), who have been using MapGuide Open Source tools to create an open source geospatial portal as a tool for educating kids about environmental issues and about using open source software and open data standards. The project has an impressive group of sponsors, including the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, Autodesk, the San Diego Visualization and Supercomputer Centers, URISA, local governments and schools, and private companies such as Spatial Integrators and SPATIALinfo…