Web

Quite possibly the coolest visualization ever* -- showing edits to the OpenStreetMap project during 2008.

Click here for details on the project itself. H/T to Eric & Jeff for the link.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

* I was going to say "the coolest visualization of open source ever," but a) that may not be a very high bar, and b) that sounds ridiculously geeky, even for me....

The New America Foundation, like half the sites on the web, makes extensive use of embedded YouTube videos. We long ago made the decision to use YouTube as our de facto video hosting service -- both for the added exposure it offers to New America events, and for the simple reason that the cost of storing and streaming our hundreds of hours of video was more than the organization could afford.*

This evening, though, I hopped over to NewAmerica.net and was greeted with the unpleasant surpise of YouTube search boxes plastered atop every one of our embedded videos. Apparently this "feature" was unveiled last month, but must have been rolled out gradually -- because at 6pm, our homepage looked like this:

and at 11pm it looked like this:

Such is life when you're relying on free web services and third-party APIs, but it's definitely not the look we're looking for. And the effect was even worse on our event pages, where the video search box appeared almost directly below our site search box -- making things confusing as well as clunky.

Luckily, Google is pretty good about making this stuff optional -- it'd be nice if such "improvements" were opt-in rather than opt-out, but it's an easy fix.

... from the Media Future Now lunch discussion on the state of the (online) economy.

Jeff Jarvis is -- as usual -- right on target with this post that pillories Los Angeles Times staffers for suing Tribune owner Sam Zell when their own complacency and hubris over the past 15+ years is at least as much to blame.

Diane Lim Rogers -- formerly of the House Budget Committee, now Chief Economist for the Concord Coalition -- has just launched EconomistMom.com. The site officially debuts (fittingly) on Mother's Day, with an op-ed that's running in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

In my day job, I run all things online for the New America Foundation, and we're in the process of ramping up our new media efforts. Doing that, of course, requires good people, so we're in the market for a Managing Editor for NewAmerica.net.

If you're interested, or know of a good candidate, please let me know!

From l'Observatoire des Médias (via the Online Journalism Blog):

I'm at a New America event on Microplace -- an eBay-backed venture that facilitates microloans -- which we're webcasting live -- go to http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/can_online_investing_end_poverty.

Cool stuff -- both New America's experiments with live-streaming and using chat for remote questions, and the social change that's being attempted by Microplace and others. To learn more about these policy ideas, go to GlobalAssetsProject.org

A belated reminder for a panel discussion I'm moderating tomorrow (Tuesday, Feb. 26) at Google's DC offices.

A quick summary and list of the panelists follows. It looks to be a full house, but last-minute attendees are welcome.

Much like their mass-market cousins, publishers that target DC decision-makers are scrambling to adapt to a rapidly changing digital landscape - trying to capitalize on "web 2.0" trends while also protecting their existing reader bases and business models.

GrandCentral.com -- the Google-acquired service that offers "one number for life" and a host of call forwarding /screening/management tools -- is tiptoeing out of private Beta and effectively giving out numbers to anyone who wants one. (Well, anyone in 46 of the 48 continental United States, anyway.)