Pachube is about to pilot citizen-led air quality sensor networks in New York and Amsterdam. Pachube’s business is to become a data hub for the “internet of things” — internet connected objects and ambient sensors — allowing citizens to share meaningful data and learn from one another. Civic engagement is part of their mission.

The granular air quality data they’re attempting to capture doesn’t exist anywhere– you can download a snapshot of air quality data from the U.S. EPA, but there’s no real-time stream and the closest EPA sensor is likely miles from your home. Or at least much farther than a DIY sensor you can mount outside your window.

Sensors were on my mind again after all of the discussion of drone journalism last week at News Foo.  I was certain someone must already be doing this project and stumbled across Pachube during my search. I spoke with Pachube’s Ed Borden earlier this week, fully aware that neither he nor any of the volunteers he works with know how this will turn out. I was still very impressed with their level of organization, ambition, and common sense approach to the problem.

Citizen generated data is going to create two big opportunities for news organizations — or for whoever steps up to fill the need.

The first opportunity is that a lot more data is going to create a lot of areas for news reporting. There will be real-time data visualizations and gradiated maps. Experts may provide analysis for seasonal trends and prediction. And when sensor data shows a spike that may indicate negligent or criminal activity, it’s going to take a shoe-leather reporter to fully investigate the matter and bring responsible parties to bear.

The standard analogy is the weather, a $4 billion industry that relies almost exclusively on data gathered by NOAA. While we may not see another cottage news industry this large, the cumulative size of many new niche areas could easily exceed this. If stage 1 of data journalism was “find and scrape data.” , then stage 2 was “ask government agencies to release data” in easy to use formats. Stage 3 is going to be “make your own data”, and those sources of data are going to be automated and updated in real-time.

Inexpensive, ubiquitous citizen sensors aren’t going to have the precision (at the outset anyway) of more costly professional sensors, and journalists should embrace these networks anyway. These networks aren’t trying to replace scientific and government detection equipment, they’re trying to both fill a data gap and advance conversation.

Air quality is the perfect test for many reasons. The technology already exists. It’s a fundamentally local (really hyperlocal) issue but without measurement, it feels abstract. I live near an airport and one of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants on this side of the Mississippi. If our air happens to be dangerous, and if the parents on my block had even the crudest awareness of the air quality trend outside their front door, they might take action. Drastically change their kids’ routines. Or move. Or petition for a rigorous scientific study of local air quality.

The second opportunity that open sensor networks will present for news organizations is the same one they’re already hesitant to embrace on other civic engagement platforms.  (I’m going to take a narrower, more specific view than what Jonathan Stray, JC Stearns, and Melanie Sill wrote this week. But I largely agree with them that we need to be open to redefining how we achieve our missions.)

The open government movement has already spawned many startups to solve problems that citizens and media believe are worth solving. These startups almost always lack a captive media audience. They need help recruiting citizen participants and driving awareness of their platforms.  Whether they know it or not, they do need an objective third party to validate their work and give it authenticity. News organizations are uniquely positioned to serve as ethical overseers, moderators between antagonistic parties, or facilitators of open public dialog.

For lack of a better term, I’ll call this ‘citizen engagement journalism’: applying the newsroom’s tools and values to advance the cause of journalism by means other than reporting.

It’s a responsibility that is every bit as noble as reporting and can achieve the journalism goals of informing the public, investigating corruption, speaking for the voiceless, and seeking truth. The other side benefit is that local media can deeply engage with their audience in new ways.

I think a lot about this a lot, because the public radio system has so much untapped potential to ignite its communities. Public radio has a footprint in every local market, and we’ve known for years that our listeners are dying to interact with us beyond just turning on their radios.

Collaborating is a lot more complicated than it sounds. Startups may have an activist bent and are puzzled why local media isn’t giving them free promotion. News media may either fail to see the new opportunity to become a new kind of community steward, or they may feel genuinely threatened by new civic engagement platforms. Partnerships have been slow to materialize.

Neither startup civic platforms nor media really understand each others needs and boundaries, so we can’t pin the blame solely on media intransigence.

This deserves a followup post on how journalists can take a page from civic hackers and fill a new role. I promise to include some detailed examples of where this is already working and how it could be better.

In the meantime, what do you think civic hackers and journalists need to learn about each other to collaborate?

(UPDATE: I think we’re on to something here…)

RT @digiphile LOVE this. Ties together #gov20, data & media: What do open sensor networks mean for #journalism? @javaun javaunmoradi.com/blog/2011/12/1…

— Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) December 16, 2011

I think the minivan is poised to reemerge — but first a bit of history.

Minivans became the vehicle-of-choice among suburban families beginning in the late 1980s, when they unseated the then dominant family vehicle, the station wagon. (If you’re too young to remember family wagons, you may have seen them in movies). The minivan’s layout provided more passenger and cargo room in a shorter length vehicle. They were easier to park, load and unload, were often safer, and had better gas mileage than their large engine predecessors.

The emergence of the SUV or “sport” utility vehicle precipitated the end of the minivan era. At some point in the late 90′s, a minivan dad was stopped at a redlight. He peered at the SUV in the adjacent lane and wondered “can you put a carseat in one of those?”.

Ironically, a lot of used minivans were snapped up by outdoor enthusiasts seeking a practical vehicle. Paddlers, mountain bikers, and climbers found they offered tons of room for gear and you could even live out of them.

Minivans will come back into the mainstream because my generation is having kids and that’s what we remember riding in.  I expect to see a lot more modern amenities added to minivans, but they’ll be more modest and design-conscious than the ginormous-everything features of SUVs.

We Gen-Xers have hung on to our cynicism but have also become more pragmatic. Even if — like every generation — we’re becoming everything we said we wouldn’t, we’ll appreciate that Toyota is keeping us honest about it. We mocked our nuclear-family origins and the minivans we grew up riding in. But we’ve seen the alternative, and we’re not going there.

Today, I will announce the full beta launch of  my new project — HookBook — a social networking site to take relationship histories online in meticulous detail. I had a conversation last week with Mark Zuckerberg, and he agreed that my technology was a huge breakthrough in charting what we call the ‘coital graph’.

The concept is simple. Everyone who’s ever had a relationship  has a relationship past, and that past is usually pretty complicating for new relationships.  So why not get everyone’s dirty laundry out in the open, completely transparent. Imagine being perfectly comfortable with your new relationship because you know everything about your new lover’s past. Now, you’ll know every sordid detail of your partner’s prior life before you even go on your first date.

Log on to HookBook and you see all of the people in your network and all the people they’ve slept with — relationships, summer flings, drunken  hookups — charted in a network diagram. For each partner listed on a member’s profile page, you can view details of the encounter and how it ended. Egos, narcissism, lack of trust, mental instability, poor communication, cheating — these are just a few of the issues that bring relationships down. And we can chart those too.

(HookBook member profile page)

Unlike most social networks, HookBook has a lucrative revenue model. Jilted lovers can purchase contextually relevant ads next to an ex’s name. Individuals who want to control their ad space can purchase their whole inventory for a convenient monthly fee, depending on their stature (A and B-list celebrities and politicians have a higher cost-tier for their ad inventory.) We are also inking partnerships with companies in the online self-esteem space who are very interested in HookBook’s ability to behaviorally target certain types of customers.

Third-party developers can share in the revenue by writing apps for the HookBook AppStore. Our best-seller, the National Pasttime App, charts your past escapades on a baseball diamond and calculates statistics for Strike Outs and On Base Percentage.

HookBook’s privacy terms state that we will never accept payment to remove an embarrassing hookup from a member profile. Like all personal information, HookBook believes one’s sexual history should be public and permanent on the web.

I encourage all of you to sign up for HookBook and begin exploring your pasts. Finally, I want to give thanks to my wife, who is  very supportive of this new venture. Despite having just given birth to our first child, she’s agreed to return to work earlier than planned because, above all else, we value our lifestyle.

Ironically, I was coming back from the camera shop and had a real camera this time.

According to SmartBike’s website, 10 locations opened today, and the one I visited (Gallery Place) had about 12-15 slots for bikes. This is a far cry from the 750 lockup stations and 10,000 bikes that Paris launched on its opening day (they’ve since doubled both numbers), but still infinitely more than have ever existed anywhere in this country. 
I snapped this with my phone a few months back…

Washington, DC is the first U.S. city to launch a public rental-bike program like the one that launched last year in Paris. Like France’s model, DC’s bikes are underwritten by a corporate sponsor — in this case ClearChannel — who will get exclusive rights to sell the banner advertising on the bikes or at lockup stations. ClearChannel was the jilted loser of Paris’s sponsorship decision. The Paris experiment was part of the Paris Mayor’s program to relieve Paris streets and also included 125 miles of new bike lanes.

The activist in me is absolutely thrilled with this HUGE and very welcome step to make DC commuting more friendly. As groups like WABA will tell you, laws protecting cyclists are great, but what really helps turns cities around is increased participation in cycling. We need more bodies out there running errands on bikes, commuting on bikes, and driving demand for better laws, better commuting facilities, and better bike paths.

The rider in me thinks the bikes look pretty sweet. They all have front/tail lights and small baskets for carrying Cargo. The frames have adjustable seats and a low standover height so that people of all sizes can use them. They’re red, just like my first Schwinn. They’ve put the pilot lockup stations in some of the best neighborhoods in town, so I think we’ll see both tourists and residents take advantage of the program.

(You signup for SmartBikes — on their site I believe — and you receive a card that you swipe at the kiosk to release a bike. They don’t offer bike locks outside of the station lockup yet.)

However, the mechanic in me is wondering how these bikes will hold up against normal wear and tear. It sounds as if ClearChannel is on the hook for normal maintenance. Regardless of whether the city or ClearChannel spec’ed the bikes, I definitely think they could’ve made some better equipment decisions.

The three-speed drivetrain is the least of my concerns. The Shimano internal hub shifting is durable and fairly low-maintenance. It’s not a bad choice, considering most users on errands or casual riders would want the benefit of some gears, and this is a way to give it to them without exposing complicated parts to abuse. I’m more worried about the cables, which will corrode over time as they are exposed to rain. If they could’ve routed all cables internally, that would’ve given them more shelter from the elements, since the bike stations don’t have roofs. It was also a no-brainer to add chain guards to keep pant-legs out of the drivetrain.

The wheels and tires are more problematic for me. They’re using tires smaller than the standard 26 inch cruiser (I didn’t check to see whether they are 24 or 20″), and the wheels are high gauge spokes. That will make them stronger, but they’re still going to suffer a ton of normal abuse. Why not use solid plastic wheel with molded spokes, which won’t ever come out of true and are just about bomb-proof. The tires were all freshly pumped up today, but I don’t think they can keep them inflated regularly. Why not instead use solid rubber tires that can never get soft and never get punctured by the glass and potholes of DC streets.

Solid wheels and solid tires will be much more consistent from bike to bike and they’ll age much slower. You won’t get a bike with perfectly round wheels and perfectly pumped tires one day and a wobbly-wheeled lemon the next. The most common mechanical, a flat tire, will be non-existent. Of course, the wheels are going to be heavier and less fun to ride IF you have your own bike that’s always perfectly tuned, but are those the people who are going to be using the service? These bikes aren’t meant to do anymore than short trips — short in terms of length and distance. Riders aren’t supposed to take them outside the district and there’s some hint that they don’t even want you locking them up except at lockup stations.

I’m guessing one factor in the choices was cost. The Paris bikes were rumored to cost as must as $1400 per bike. SmartBikes will charge$550 for a lost/stolen bike, so that may be some indication of the cost of the bike which also includes an expensive lockup harness.

I don’t want to send mixed signals, I’m absolutely delighted DC is doing this. I also want to make sure that the the underwriters are prepared to see this program succeed.

So what is an API and why should you care? From a technology perspective, an API is a channel that allows one application (such as a website) to share information and procedures with another website or application. A perfect example is a Google Map mashup. Any website or blog can embed a Google Map and plot their own data on top of it; for example, Trulia plots homes for sale in DC on a Google Map.

From the larger perspective of freedom of information, an API is a much bigger idea. It means that our content can appear anywhere, in almost any format. Anyone with an idea and some basic web skills can select, repurpose, and embed our content on the web, on a desktop computer, or even on a handheld device. Fans of David Sedaris, NPR Election coverage, or Ketzel Levine’s Talking Plants no longer have to search all over our website to find their favorite content. Audio, text, and photos can now come to them now as an embeddable blog widget, a Facebook application, or any other format they can imagine. I should mention that only a few of these widgets exist so far, but the API is out there, so it’s only a matter of time before people start building them.

The UK Guardian and BBC have experimented with very limited APIs. The BBC makes available feeds of short program descriptions and its program schedule, but it does not make its full content available. Back in May, the New York Times announced that it would be making all of its content publicly available via an API. As far as I know, NPR is the first major media organization to launch an API to make all of its content available.

NPR’s Zach Brand and Daniel Jacobson were the leaders of the project, and here are the full credits :

There were a ton of contributors to this new API with the primary technical architect being Harold Neal. Other major contributors include Joanne Garlow, Jason Grosman, Tony Yan, Ivan Lazarte, Stephanie Oura, Ben Hands, Shain Miley, Lindsay Mangum, Sugirtha Solai, Todd Welstein and Vida Logan, and others.

Google launched a new hosted site search solution on June 11. Though aimed mostly at SMBs, it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of large enterprises give Google’s Site Search a serious look.

NYTimes.com is splitting traffic, so to see the beta search you’re going to need to click the links below. In addition to the differences mentioned below, the algorithm is tuned differently in the new search. There is a different result set returned, possibly with less emphasis on AP stories, and I notice a lot more photos in the new results.

Old Search:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=afghanistan&st=fromcse

1. No multimedia included in results. Toggle result to match on “Closest Match”, “Newest First” or “Oldest first”
2. Date range radio buttons are difficult to discern and include a “custom date range” function
3. Complicated search filters and link to advanced search
4. Numbered results set
5. Separate blog results included in a right hand box
6. Refine results by NY Times section (Arts, Books, Business, etc). Pagination suggests an overwhelming results set.

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

New Search:
http://query.nytimes.com/beta/search/query?query=afghanistan

7. As a whole, the interface is much, much cleaner. Results are no longer numbered. Fonts in the results set are slightly larger, snippets are more legible, bylines and dates are diminutive yet easy to find. Multimedia (video, interactives) are now displayed intermixed with other result (not shown in my screencap)
8. There is a separate tab for just Multimedia, in addition to one for just articles
9. No more advanced search or complex filters. Date filtering is reduced to 5 links, allowing search scope as recent as “Today” and as comprehensive as “Since 1851″, a nod at the Times efforts to make their whole archive available
10. The ad column has much more room to breathe, and text ads are used more sparingly. In this case, there wasn’t one
11. They’ve killed “topic” search links and greatly simplified pagination
12. They’ve moved the “Also Try” links to the bottom and call them related searches. Why put them up top if you’re confident you got it right the first time?

(Click to Enlarge)

(Click to Enlarge)

With 3,000,000+ pages in the Google main index, the Times is no small site. However, there are a few compelling reasons for them to stick with Google for hosted site search.

According to Hitwise (and not surprisingly), Google is the number one search engine referrer to NYTimes.com. Since it’s the engine their readers prefer, it does make sense to give site visitors a continuous search experience. Beyond that, I’d guess that using Google site search allows the Times to consolidate a lot of duplicative work. Google Site Search has its own index but also draws results from the main Google index. The Google Site Search crawlers rely on many of the same structural basics (clean and valid code, XML sitemaps) to populate its index. This means that a lot of the efforts by Marshall Simmonds to improve organic search will also help make site search more relevant. Focus on a few key areas, and win in both places. Pretty smart.

Anyone else like the Times new site search? What do you think?

The site is a social tagging experiment, and it aggregates all of the phrases for each brand into a tag cloud. (For those unfamiliar with a tag cloud, it’s a way of visually showing the prevalence of a certain tag. The more often a brand phrase is tagged by users, the larger it appears in the cloud.) The site is a side-project of a marketer, and in his blog he reports that he received over 600,000 tags in the first 2 weeks.

NPR: Awesome AND Boring

What first comes to mind when the masses think of NPR?

NPR’s brand tag cloud.
High recognition and a lot of favorable brand attributes, such as “intelligent”, “smart”, “honest”, “good”. We also have some negatives: “boring”, “stodgy”, “old”, “who?”. There are some misperceptions to overcome, such as “liberal”. And let’s not forget “schwetty balls”, the legacy of a very memorable Alec Baldwin SNL skit.

What about Taco Bell’s brand tag cloud?
As khopper said on Twitter:

The largest brand associations with Taco Bell, after CHEAP FAST MEXICAN FOOD appear to be CHIHUAHUA and DIARRHEA – yikes!

Comments? What did the masses say about some of your favorite brands?

I have a few that I’ve put on the back burner. More immediately, I’ll probably throw out a lot of mountain biking related posts, since that’s preoccupying my thoughts.

as a morning practice I listen to npr and do a little sketch on one of the stories

It’s a really simple and unique idea, and she does it extremely well. Alessandra already has a following who listens to the radio and tries to guess which story she’ll choose.

You can also receive her illustrations as a daily email newsletter through feedblitz.

Here’s one from April 14: “too many boys: demographic crisis looms in china”

Illustration by Alessandra Olanow