MySociety.org, a British tech nonprofit project that builds and showcases new tools for civic good, has released a beautiful series of maps illustrating various transportation data sets around England.  See, for example, this sample map showing whether public transport (bus, light rail best is in red) or a private automobile (blue) will get you faster from the Cambridge station to any other part of the country.  (Cambridge is in the bottom right hand corner, nearish London.)  The project has created many other maps as well, illustrating a variety of data.

This is interesting, of course, primarily as a proof of concept.  I'm sure it was time consuming and expensive to create, but that won't always be the case.  If organizations like public transportation agencies expose their data via APIs then I can imagine that displays like this will only be a matter of processing power, which is only a matter of time.  Wouldn't it be great to be able to see a map like this for any trip you were planning?  "I'm at 44th and Killingsworth in Portland, and I'd like to go to 15th and Belmont.  If I'm willing to be dropped off within a few blocks, would it be faster to go by light rail or car?  How long is it likely to take me to get to a particular spot?  That particular place I'm headed isn't a public transportation dead zone, is it?"  Oh the questions you could answer!  This is just one of many maps  MySociety has published,  which is a good thing in light of Margaret Thatcher's famous (attributed) quote - "A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure."

Found via WorldChanging

"I like your roundups of eHub!" says Emily Chang in an email.  All the more reason to keep doing the darned things.  Emily Chang's eHub is a great resource for learning about new or newly highlighted Web 2.0 services and products, but it can be overwhelming.  In the spirit of helpfulness, I've now done a number of weekly summaries of my favorite items on eHub.  The following is the most recent in the series.  No substitute for reading eHub itself, of course, these summaries are just my favorites on the weeks I find time to do a write up.

Listed in order of my excitement this time instead of chronologically:

Social-Mail
Happy day!  Send emails to an RSS feed.  I feel far more comfortable using this tool, a Big in Japan offering, than I do using my previous stand by, mail2rss.org.  Mail2rss.org has worked well for me so far, but the fact that it's remained in "extreme  alpha" mode since I found it makes me very glad to find an alternative.  I use these tools all the time to create feeds for organizations that don't offer them (many in the nonprofit sector, for example.)

Byoms (build your own mobile search)
Not highlighted directly on eHub, but the product of a company that was (Kozuro).  Custom search via IM with support for natural language queries, search sharing and RSS feeds.  Not sure how all of these will work together yet, but those are some of my favorite features for anything - so I'll be watching closely for the June 5th public beta release.  The company says you'll preselect certain sources you want to be able to search, then you can use IM to query those sources on your computer or mobile device.  Sounds pretty cool to me.

Netvibes ecosystem
Makes ajax homepage modules easy to share.  Netvibes is one of the most popular Ajax homepages, which are themselves very poor ways to read anything more than a few RSS feeds with few items in each one (in my opinion).  But it may be one of the most realistic ways to hope for further RSS adoption, and the ecosystem's sharing does help make tangible the portability of feeds. There's an API that's being used to develop new modules, a Word Press plug-in - the announcement of the ecosystem got a lot of coverage throughout the blogosphere.

Farecast
In private beta, this system will use historical data to allow users to predict future airfare offerings.  Have to wonder if another larger vendor will buy this one out, I'm sure that's the idea.  Probably one of the best examples, in fact, of a technology built to flip.  Landing page visual design at least looks totally hip.

Big Blue Saw
You may have read some of the articles around lately about low cost rapid fabrication from CAD files.  Big Blue Saw is an Atlanta based service that offers just such an affordable service.  I've read about this type of thing being the future of manufacturing in the developing world, for now this service is getting press in Make Magazine at least. 

Spinvox
Turns voice mail into text messages or email.  Sounds great, presuming that it works well.  Discussion at MobileCrunch points to two likely problems:  long voicemail messages and the difficulty of trusting a translation to text of the important subtleties in spoken language (like the world "not").  Not having tested this myself, I don't know whether the text messages I get are going to tell me what the names of the callers are as well as my phone's recognition of contacts.  That would be very important.


That's this week's highlights from eHub according to yours truly.  Don't forget to check out the whole site for hours of fun.

Steve Rubel discovers coverage and then goes in depth on eBay plans to incorporate blogs and wikis in their service offerings.  It looks like an impressive implementation, but I have a few questions about it.

• First, if people wanted more in depth discussion - wouldn't the product descriptions and the buyer/seller feedback be less mass produced than they are now?  "Great customer!  Would sell to again for sure!" over and over again.  What percentage of the auction pages are mass produced by huge eBay store owners?
• Given that this will be a pure commercial space it seems like the promised land for comment spammers.  Will eBay be able to fight spam in a way that doesn't shut down discussion but works for users?
• Not sure that these mediums are the best suited for this context.  It seems like kind of an awkward application of two very hip, exciting tools.
• Tag support makes sense if implemented in conjunction with pre-selected categories and full text search.  Given the nature of this particular market, though, I wonder if this will be the space where we really see tag spam emerge in a big way for the first time.
• Internationalization of discourse will be an interesting mess to watch, I'm guessing.  Most businesses large enough to do a lot of international business mitigate language and cultural differences by hiring specialists to help with these issues.  Micro-businesses will not have these resources and I'll be curious to see how many miscommunications, previously silent prejudices and other communication issues emerge.
• Business blogging often helps build relationships between companies and their customers.  How much loyalty do you feel to any particular eBay store?  I'm guessing not very much.  Thumbs up, thumbs down on reputation may be enough reputation/communication system for the vast majority of eBay users.
  

I'm not sure how much adoption these tools are going to see.  Blogging takes time and energy.  I'm not sure that people will find that investment worthwhile when sprucing up product pages and optimizing for search is already doable.  Does conversation drive commerce, as Rubel says?  Or in this case are we dealing with an intention economy - where people come to eBay intending to purchase something and only need help finding the best option at the best price?   I've never been too clear on how great an option it was to be able to call a seller on Skype, so I'm not sure how great an idea this is.  I've only been ripped of on eBay once, though, so perhaps I don't understand other peoples' need for communication. 

I just watched Hong Eun-taek,  Editor-In-Chief of the of South Korea based citizen journalism project OhMyNews speak at the NetSquared conference (disclosure: I work for Net Squared).  Amongst the interesting details of  Eun-taek's talk was a statement that the organization aims to become a global news wire similar to the AP and Reuters.  One of the most recent steps towards that end is a partnership begun in recent weeks to swap headlines between the prestigious International Herald Tribune.

I think there is an important difference between the recent high-profile partnerships between the AP and Technorati and between Sphere and Time Magazine and this partnership.  Specifically, while it is meaningful for a mainstream media organization to include links indicating "what the blogosphere is saying about this topic" - I would contend that it is meaningful in a different way for prominent parties in the citizen journalism camp and in the traditional media camp to permanently display each others' headlines in a box on their sites.  It's an interesting form of mutual recognition that goes beyond the relatively casual link list to the medium in general.

The IHT/OhMyNews partnership is also clearly important because it involves two parties that are not based in the United States.  Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online is speaking now about the huge explosion of content producers from China, Africa, Brazil and the Middle East/North Africa that is on its way.  This partnership is liable to be remembered as a key development in the relationship between old media and new media on the global stage.

Call them memediggers, community moderated news sites, or digg clones. User submitted news moderated up or down by other users and available for comments. Call them whatever you wish, this new class of social media warrants close examination in order to make the most of the potential it presents. Which of these sites get the most use, see the most conversation and are most useful to their readers? How should people looking to launch new digg-style sites organize things in order to maximize adoption and impact?

One first step could be to examine a variety of leading sites of this type and that is what I've done below. It's arbitrary, it's unscientific and I think it's interesting. Last Friday evening I looked at the front page of 4 interesting memedigger sites and wrote down some numbers. Digg is clearly the standard, but also examined below are Reddit, the Spanish-language site Meneame and Hugg.com, a project of the hugely popular environmental blog Treehugger. I would have liked to include Newsvine, but was unable to find numbers to compare.

An overview of some observations:

• Front page items are more commented on in Reddit than Digg, relative to the number of points those items have recieved.
• Meneame seems to be successful in terms of votes but receives fewer comments.
• Hugg isn't being used very much. I am curious why.

For each site I counted:

• the total number of points listed for all items on the front page of the site
• the number of items listed
• the age of the oldest and second oldest items on the front page
• the total number of comments listed on the front page
• the estimated number of registered users in the system

ActorTracker.com is a very impressive mashup of feeds from TV talk shows, movies and more mixed with affiliate links for videos and other memorabilia concerning your favorite actors.  Most commercially oriented mashups seem a step away from cheesy splogs, but this one is very nice.  Many features and a nice aesthetic let you know that the people behind ActorTracker spent a lot of time on it.  Unfortunately, there appears to be some problem with the  MyTracker feature, as I'm not able to log in to accounts I create.

The site has been around for awhile, but it may take some time before mass media loving consumer audiences are comfortable dealing with data like persistent search results and the like.  If and when that day comes, the right marketing (and a log in proccess that works) could put this site in a good place to get many users.  The service has an unintimidating interface, including e-mail subscription for new results.  It's a good example of the way that RSS could end up being implemented by small players for mass audiences without waving the acronym around too much.

Given the huge amount of consumer goods available online around various celebrities and pop culture, matching affiliate links and listings shouldn't be too hard.  Not always perfect, though, as the 700 Club's listing ends up next to an affiliate link to buy the movie Fight Club.  I suppose millenarians do have to stick together!

Found via Programmable Web.

Being bought by the owner of the Fox empire hasn't scared MySpace away from partnering with Al Gore's high profile film about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."  Announced last week but receiving little play in the blogosphere to date, the partnership appears to be more low-key online than the previous X-Men promotion but set to leverage the online community for real-world public events.  The movie's main site doesn't appear to make any reference to the partnership, as it is described on MediaPost, but MySpace friend to all Tom does have a Truth badge and link to the film's MySpace profile.

According to MediaPost,  "the campaign will culminate in a 10-city MySpace theater buyout on June 16, with free tickets going to select members of the film's MySpace community.  MediaPost also reports that MySpace is contributing a significant amount of ad space to raise climate change awareness.  The MySpace music channel is reported to be planning  an artist-on-artist interview between the former vice president and a to-be-announced rock star who is also happens to be part of the MySpace community. The MySpace movies channel will spotlight an interview with the film's director, Davis Guggenheim.

The partnership between the film and the high profile online social network appears to be remarkably low-profile.  No press releases appear on PR Web, few bloggers outside of MySpace have written about it and a Google News search brings back surprisingly few results.  The MySpace community itself appears to be responding well, however, as almost 45,000 users have added the films as a friend to their profile in just less than a week.

EarthLink announced today that they have been approved to provide wifi service to New Orleans.  According to the company's blog:
"The network will have two tiers -- a free (and ad-free) service at up to 300kbps during the city's rebuilding efforts, and a paid service at 1mbps up/down. EarthLink will also allow other providers to offer their services over the network, allowing for open access and competition."

There was some seriously strange legal wranglings about whether the city would be allowed to contract with anyone to provide this service and apparently it was the local state of emergency that allowed it.  Given that, and the incredible reliance on the wireless network there during the rebuilding - why doesn't the federal government just subsidize the top-tier service for everyone?  That's a silly question, such a policy would obviously interfere with the market's ability to monetize human suffering.  I can't imagine that Earthlink would mind.  At least permission has now been granted for the market  to partner with local government so that some service at all is available.

I'll be watching Esme Vos's Muniwireless.com for analysis of this deal.  See also New Orleans Voices for Peace, a liberal grass roots group "providing Internet access, website hostng, media development and training for partnering organizations and communities effected by the Hurricanes Rita and Katrina."

Update:  There's an email excerpt just added to the Earthlink blog from the New Orleans CIO about he's having people hug him on the street about the fact that free wifi is on its way.  It's an interesting account, nearly a tear jerker.

Working on a presentation for a conference where I'm going to talk about RSS and am wondering - what are the coolest examples of nonhuman generation of RSS feeds?  I know that technically every search feed, stock report feeds and things like that are generated without the immediate involvement of humans.  But some time ago Lisa Williams told me about a buoy at sea that publishes a feed of hourly updates to all kinds of weather conditions.   That's from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS).   She told me she would like to be able to subscribe to a feed that would tell her when her home's heating oil was running low. 

There's got to be more examples out there - anyone care to point to ones you know of?  I know there are systems to track package delivery (like FedEx).  There have to be some RFID systems that utilize RSS.  I know there are quite a number of  innovative examples of RSS feeds generated in libraries.  Limited  traffic reports for particular cities from Yahoo and Traffic.com.  Incidentlog.com is a cool use of police reports, mashing up feeds and Google Maps.

Really far out examples of RSS feeds being generated for a useful purpose without substantial human input is what I'm looking for.  I really believe there will be a lot of this in the future, but the sooner we can find examples the sooner we can prepare ourselves and others for the idea.  Please do post examples in comments if you can think of or find any that I haven't.

To be honest I'd be curious to see peoples' favorite applications of RSS in any context.  Anything already listed by Tim Yang or Basement.org excluded.

Steve Rubel just wrote that his employer Edelman has acquired the Silicon Valley PR company A&R Partners.  Rubel says that many of the company's clients are already blogging.  Edelman leadership appears focused on bringing corporate communications into the new world of social media in some very cool ways, albeit learning from mistakes like the Walmart bloggers situation.  Here's a client list for A&R, you might notice that Mozilla is on there.  Interesting.  There are a number of people using these new social media to remake PR and save it from it's unsavory past.  Those efforts are said to be based in honesty - and that's a radical concept.

Valleywag has a more Valley-centric take on this.
Nicholas Carr has a hilarious response to Rubel style cheerleading of honest conversation as being of central importance.  Fair enough, and don't miss the comments.

California Attorney General candidate Rocky Delgadillo doesn't just have a long list of endorsements on his side - he's got new web tools going for him as well.  Delgadillo's campaign just launched a new service offering for supporters wanting to keep up with the campaign - RSS to IM notification from immedi.at. 

The letters RSS don't appear anywhere on the site, in fact there's not a link to subscribe to news from the campaign in a feed reader - but there is a link that allows you to plug in your IM username and get instant notification of new developments that can be passed on to others.  Timely updates have an excitement that may be more likely to spread by word of mouth.

Delgadillo's "vision" page begins with the sentence: "As I look around our state today, it's not just crime and violence that threaten our families.  It's also the greed and arrogance of corporate power run amok."  Sounds interesting enough to me.  I wonder how extensively the campaign is using RSS to IM internally.

The international blog aggregation community Global Voices Online has released its first edition of the Global Voices Podcast, a compilation of clips from podcasts around the world.  The first episode manages to fit in satire from South Africa about the visibility of queer people, coverage of bloggers' take on an upcoming election in Mexico (in Spanish) and clips from Jamaica, Israel/Palestine, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.  Set to music from Creative Commons label Magnatune, the whole thing fits in 17 fast paced minutes!  It's hosted by the very charming Georgia Popplewell, from the Carribian Free Radio podcast (an Adam Curry favorite).

The show reminds me in of a more grass-roots, web 2.0 version of the Global Shortwave Report, a fantastic, long running weekly 30 minute compilation of international shortwave news in English. 

Global Voices recently received funding from Reuters.  Its primary function is to aggregate content from bloggers all around the world.  The project has long published interesting interviews with people from around the world, but this newest foray into the news and culture serialized audio space wil be interesting to watch.  Many Global Voices participants are aspiring mass audience journalists as well, so whether new mainstream media stars emerge from this space or whether it thrives as a niche media project will help make the history of Web 2.0's impact on media.

Found via David Weinberger.

MySpace and youth social software expert danah boyd has released the full text of an email interview she and Henry Jenkins, Co-Director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, recently did with the MIT News Office on MySpace and the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA).  Lots of good detail and analysis here, a great example of the usefulness of email interviews.  Helpful in understanding the proposed legislation, MySpace and youth social software in general and the public work of two prominent voices on these issues.  Both boyd and Jenkins are funded by the MacArthur Foundation to do academic work on these topics currently.

Here's how boyd explains her work:

"For my doctoral dissertation, I am investigating why and how youth are engaging in digital publics like MySpace, how this affects identity development and how youth socialization has changed over the last century. This work is being funded by the MacArthur Foundation to help understand the nature of informal learning. Understanding why moral panics emerge when youth socialize is central to my research."

Jenkins says about his work:
"[My work] seeks to identify the core social skills and cultural competencies young people need in order to become full participants in the cultural, political, economic, and social life of the 21st century. In doing this research, we are reviewing the current state of educational research surrounding participatory culture and examining how teachers are currently deploying these technologies through schools. We want in the long term to develop new curricular materials which help parents and teachers build a more constructive relationship with new media."

Both provide some useful thinking and talking points in regards to the much maligned sector of youth-oriented social software. 

A multi-year agreement has been made between Yahoo and eBay to bundle many of the two company's services together.  Here's the Seattle PI in case you haven't seen the story yet.  Watch the discussion unfold over the day at Techmeme. 

Update: Mick Weinstein of Seeking Alpha precedes his summary of blogosphere reactions with this noe.  "Note that JP Morgan Securities had a report (.pdf) out just two days ago predicting such a eBay-Yahoo alliance as the most likely deal of its kind among the big internet players."

Thoughts:  I think this is liable to be seen as a less obtrusive partnership than some other search engine/other vendor deals.  As far as I know, nobody's computer or even browser comes with Yahoo or eBay baked-in top-level (Firefox Yahoo inclusion is substantially more low key than that of Google)  so I think this is going to be received as an extension of voluntary use. 

Second, I'm not sure how limited the possibilities are here.  Will people start using Flickr to upload their photos for eBay?  Will future auctions be promoted on Upcoming.org?  Maybe I'm being silly here, but the point is that Yahoo's recent torrent of feature-add-by-acquisition offers a lot of creative potential for a partnership with a huge player like eBay/PayPal/Skype.

Some people have said this is just a trial balloon, that these two companies are really competitors, etc.  But in the face of Google's success and Microsoft's largess I can't imagine that Yahoo and eBay wouldn't be able to work out some really powerful collaboration.  The fact that Yahoo gets more page views than any other site online, has acquired so much hippness and yet is the dark horse in this space is amazing.

FON, the experiment in shared wireless internet access that allows members to use each others' connections and nonmembers to pay for access, has announced a key software adaptation that responds to users' concerns about security.  The company just announced on its blog that its next release will include two different environments using the same router, one public and one private.  By using two separate SSIDs, or service set identifiers, FON appears to be making a technical response to widespread member concerns about sharing internet access with strangers.  I can imagine this will make the system much easier to promote to prospective new members.  Apparently non-anonymity of FON community members and assurances that hosts wouldn't be held liable for activities through their connection weren't assurance enough.  I'm not surprised.

Though funded by some heavy hitters like Google and eBay/Skype, FON seems to be acting like a good Web 2.0 company should - agile, responsive and with frequent updates to its service.  The hardware end of the social web acting just like the software sector Web 2.0 evangelists say should be the modus operandi.  Yet this development demonstrates that it's not all a happy picnic of sharing and love.  Some technical means of user control are still needed at the same time all this sharing is going on.  That's what this looks like to me.