It has all of the familiar city-run departments providing all of the services and assistance they’ve always provided – that’s not going away. Then it also has public services offered by the mega companies, the Google Traffic, IBM’s Smarter Cities, and so forth. Those are huge added value to these open cities – they’re used by a large percentage of residents and make life in those cities better.

But THEN, it also has an insane long tail of services set up and run by anyone with an interest in doing so, just by hooking into city data, distributing it in a new way, improving on it, mashing it up, giving it back to the city, etc. These services each individually get used by a small minority of people, but collectively they get used by more than any other single source in the city.

The post namechecks San Francisco and Washington DC as open data leaders – but with wouldbe-Canadian-immigrant pride, I noted: no Vancouver? Didn’t they hear:

As part of its commitment to enhancing citizen engagement, fostering digital innovation and improving service delivery, the City of Vancouver is taking bold steps to provide more of its data to the public…By freely sharing its data in accessible formats — while respecting privacy and security concerns — Vancouver is joining many government agencies in moving to harness the energy and involvement of citizens, community-based organizations and private businesses in everything from creative community problem-solving to the development of new service delivery ideas and solutions.

That language is from Vancouver’s open data portal, which is enabling all kinds of cool applications for civic data — such as Vantrash.ca, which will send you email or twitter reminders before garbage pickup day.

So Vancouver is opening itself up. Will the rest of Canada follow Vancouver’s lead? David Eaves, one of the developers and champions of Vancouver’s open data practices, notes that there are deep-seated political differences between US and Canadian views regarding ownership of public data. He writes:

In the United States the burden is on the government to explain why it is withholding that which the people own (a tradition that admittedly is hardly perfect as anyone alive from the years 2000-2008 will attest to). But don’t underestimate the power of this norm. Its manifestations are everywhere, such as in the legal requirement that any document created by the United States government be published in the public domain (e.g. it cannot have any copyright restrictions placed on it) or in America’s vastly superior Freedom of Information laws.

This is very different notion of sovereignty than exists in Canada. This country never deviated from the European context described above. Sovereignty in Canada does not lie with the people, indeed, it resides in King George the III’s descendant, the present day Queen of England. The government’s data isn’t your, mine, or “our” data. It’s hers. Which means it is at her discretion, or more specifically, the discretion of her government servants, to decide when and if it should be shared. This is the (radically different) context under which our government (both the political and public service), and its expectations around disclosure, have evolved.

Here’s hoping Vancouver’s public servants uphold their enlightened views on data sovereignty, and that Vantrash is just the beginning of Vancouver’s “insane long tail” of open data-driven services!

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Stewart Brand is an intellectual magpie, drawing on an incredibly wide variety of sources for his new book Whole Earth Discipline. Fans of Brand will not be surprised at much of the content, as he has written earlier on similar subjects: the scope and scale of climate change, the dynamism of megacities, the controversy and promise of genetic engineering and nuclear power. What’s new is the synthesis of all of these subjects into a narrative and argument that compels you with its strength while bewitching you with its range.

Brand has put much of the text online already to create an annotated version with links, photos, and source material — which is either an unbelievable resource or the end of your productivity for the week, depending on the degree of your willpower. If you never emerge from this list of recommended reading, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The hard copy version of Whole Earth Discipline launches today. Buy it here.

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If I hit 15k, I’m declaring RSS bankruptcy and marking all as read.

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via @robinsloan

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It was awesome – hundreds of fans jammed into this random record store for the all-ages show – we must have gotten there early because I don’t think I was even ten feet from the band. Things got pretty crazy considering it was in a fluorescent-lit record store at 7:30pm — a mosh pit started up and people were actually crowd surfing in the store.

After the show, the band hung out outside for a while. I got them to sign the flyer for the show, a full-page ad on the back of the Rocket or some other weekly. Krist and Dave were friendly and kidded around with me, Kurt stood back a bit. And then it was over, and time for homework and dinner with my mom. I skipped school a week or so later to go buy the album when it was officially released…and it was 1991, so yes I bought the TAPE.

“Smells Like Teen Spirit” – Nirvana at Beehive Records in Seattle, September 16, 1991:

“School” – Nirvana at Beehive Records in Seattle, September 16, 1991:

The story of the show, from a book about Nirvana:

And for diehard grunge fans, footage of the entire concert:

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So when Jeff Jonas’ head starts spinning about the privacy ramifications of the mobile device location data that cell phone providers have access to, it behooves one to pay attention. From his blog post on “space-time travel data,” a sampling of items your mobile provider could identify:

(a) The top 10 places you spend the most time (e.g., 1. a home address, 2. a work address, 3. a secondary work facility address, 4. your kids school address, 5. your gym address, and so on);

(b) The top three most predictable places you will be at a specific time when on the move (e.g., Vegas on the 215 freeway passing the Rainbow exit on Thursdays 6:07 – 6:21pm — 57% of the time);

(c) The first name and first letter of the last name of the top 20 people that you regularly meet-up with (turns out to be wife, kids, best friends, and co-workers – and hopefully in that order!)

(d) The best three predictions of where you will be for more than one hour (in one place) over the next month, not counting home or work.

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My brother and his friends arranged it – see my bro’s behind-the-music shots here.

Update: Devin details the entire production process on Crunchgear.

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NYC mural by Brazilian brothers Os Gemeos. Need more of this.

Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” reminds us how great a music video can be.

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In June the Zoological Society of London launched an online version of Scott’s books ["Red Lists" of endangered species]. It unpicks the existing global lists held in Morges and examines them at the national level. It should thus be possible to identify which species are at risk of extinction within any given country’s borders. The database contains details of more than 50,000 species in 40 countries and regions, such as the Baltic Sea.

That may sound impressive, but it is not. It demonstrates that whole swathes of the world have been left unexamined … The list’s sparsity shows that in the parts of the world where biodiversity is greatest and conservation planning is most important, conservationists lack the information with which to prioritise their efforts.

My hope is that projects like EOL will seek to provide not only a baseline of information about individual species, but also a platform where aggregate information like this can be more easily collected, presented, and acted upon.

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My earliest memories of Michael Jackson’s music, like so many of us, are hard to separate from my earliest memories of music, period. Like every other kid who grew up in the 80s (really, from 1969 onward), I was steeped in it. Michael Jackson WAS pop culture. I moonwalked in front of the mirror. I measured the worth of a jacket by the number of non-functional zippers. Thriller was impossible to escape, and why would you want to?

That album was already a cultural phenomenon by the time I developed some musical awareness, but I remember all the Bad singles coming out one by one, and how captivating the videos were (Smooth Criminal!). My favorite memories of MJ, however, are the hours I spent driving around Montana for a summer job in college. I had a Jeep with a worn-out Jackson 5 tape on repeat, and the songs just kept getting better and better.

One week after his death, there has been an incredible outpouring of Michael Jackson memories and stories. Soul Sides and Allmusic have culled some of the most rewarding writing on MJ so far in a couple of link-heavy posts, and Pitchfork has an immense collection of MJ videos to get lost in.

I’ve been surprised at how much his death affected me. I guess I see him as a tragic figure, a uniquely American story of success and excess, and one of the last links to the now-fading Motown era. An unbelievable package of talent and ambition, driven by himself and others, isolated from normalcy, spiraling into the dark and bizarre. Yet somehow (despite this? because of this?) still able to connect with all of us. Literally, all of us — I’m sure he was the most famous person on the face of the earth. What a strange and rare creature.

I think Michael Jackson biographer Nelson George expresses it well:

Sinner or saint? More apt is artist and sinner. People want to simplify a truly complex life. We have to be sophisticated enough to acknowledge that greatness and a touch of evil dwelled in the man. I’ve always believed that transcendent art emanates from the purest, most evolved parts of our soul. But that highly spiritual achievement doesn’t absolve us of our daily misdeeds. To simply brand him a smooth criminal, as some have, or to overlook his tragic nature, as have others, is to deny his humanity. The meaning of Michael Jackson’s life — as a black man, a sexual being, a abused and abusing adult — will be interpreted to fit the prejudices of the speaker. His music — it speaks volumes.

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