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This We Know

One of three finalists of the Sunlights Foundation’s annual Apps for America contest, This We Know is touted as an Everyblock for federal data.

This We Know lets you get local and explore government data about your community. Enter your city or zip code and get a list of facts

Click an individual item and be taken to a breakdown of the data. Even better, from there you can go straight to the source in data.gov.

Over a Million Books…for Free

Google is offering over a million out of print, public domain books free for download.

I’m excited to announce that starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we’re hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places.

To download a book, search for a title in Google Books and click on the Download button in the toolbar.

The Need for 3D City Models

Stu Rich at spatialexplorations.net wrote an excellent post on the need for comprehensive 3D city models if we’re to truly understand our cities. To plan for public administration and public safety, monitor public health, energy, facilities and space management, we must understand how city projects affect citizen and the operation of the city itself.

Landscape planners and urban designers need to be able to visualize the impact of newly proposed projects on the city environment. They need to be able to understand how proposed projects will affect the skyline, how they will affect available sunlight in the surrounding area, how they will impact the local transportation infrastructure, how they will impact utility infrastructure, and how they will affect the need for public services such as schools and public safety.

When you add open source urbanism to these models, cities will be better prepared to handle growth, energy needs, emergencies, constructions projects and so on.

Did you know?

Google recently launched Google Apps Scripts to all Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers. Scripts “provides the ability to automate a variety of features in Google Apps, such as reading and changing values in Google Spreadsheets, creating Google Calendar appointments, sending email and much more.”

For more of an overview, watch this video.

Did you know?

Mashable has a quick overview of five ways you can enhance your Gmail signature –

1. Random Signature
2. Wisestamp
3. Location in signature
4. Black Canvas Gmail Signatures
5. Signature Tweaks

You can read more here.

Twitter Announces Geolocation

Twitter accounced a new geolocation API that will attach latitude and longitude to each tweet.

From Twitter’s Development Talk Google Group –

"The Geolocation API will give us the ability to attach geographic metadata to tweets to provide additional context with your update. Along with the option to tag updates, we will be able to search for nearby tweets and view the geo metadata in user timelines. The additional context allows for us to deliver more meaningful and localized experiences to users."

Data Visualization Examples

I’m a sucker for great data visualizations, creating a visually rich context to otherwise flat data is an artform in and of itself. Webdesignledger.com rounds up 15 of the latest visualiszions, take a look.

Open Source Urbanism

Mark Gorton, founder of Limewire, announced the launch of software for open sourced urbanism, with the goal of "crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people’s needs." Gorton wants to open up the city planning process and make it accessable to more people.

The tool is gaining traction and the city of Portland has already used Gorton’s GeoServer software to plan it’s bus routes and the GeoCommons are looking to integrate it with their services. The project aims to add "multi-layered complexity to its software like intelligent data on urban communities, so that the system can incorporate more factors."

Did you know?

This feature has been around for new users for a few months but now is available to everyone. You can now quickly and easily import old messages and contacts from your non-Gmail accounts into your current Gmail account.

How do you do it? It’s simple -

Go to the Settings > Accounts & Import page and click “Import mail and contacts.” A window will pop out to lead you through the short import process. If you want us to continue to forward any new mail your other account gets for 30 days, we can do that too.

Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives. And once it’s done, you can forget your old account and enjoy having everything in one place.

Did you know?

You can now easily share calendars, sites and documents with your entire Google Group. How easy is it to add access to a document for example? Instead of inviting users one-by-one, you can now just add the entire group -

And as people leave or join you group, the correct privileges will apply.

Reburbia

The top 20 finalists for the Reburbia contest “a design competition dedicated to re-envisioning the suburbs,” have been announced. The point behind the competition?

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia? How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community?

Some of the more interesting ideas?

• Parasite Catalyst: Freeway Wind Turbines
• Entrepreneurbia: rezoning suburbia for self-sustaining life
• PURE: Transforming Swimming Pools into Water Treatment Plants
• Regenerative Suburban Median

You can head over and vote on these ideas here.

Threaded Twitter Conversations

The original creator of Delicious has put together a simple site that allows for forum like conversations within the Twitter 140 character limit. The site is sparse and very simple, here’s how it works -

[T]ake tweets and thread them together to form conversations, adding context. This works by using the a tiny thread site to both start new conversation threads, and add your comments to old ones. After authenticating via OAuth, your comment is then sent back to Twitter, with a link back to the a tiny thread conversation page.

This is great for setting up easily tracked conversations which isn’t so easy on Twitter. Check it out.

The Culture of Excellence at Netflix

Check out this great internal presentation from Netflix on their core principals for maintaining their culture of excellence -

Did you know?

You can now grant access to your email account to someone else on your domain.

You can delegate access to your Gmail account to someone else in your organization so they can read, send, and delete messages on your behalf. For example, you can delegate e-mail rights to an admin, or you can set up a small group mailbox.

Here’s how -

1. Click the Settings link, and select the Accounts tab.
2. Under ‘Grant access to your account,’ click the Add another account link.
3. Enter the email address of the person you’d like to access your account and click Next Step.
4. You’ll see a confirmation message. Click Grant Access if you’re sure.

For more information, click here.