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Once the transcript of Bernie Sanders' 124-page, nine-hour, one-man filibuster came out, I thought it would be fun to make an animated movie out of it using Xtranormal.com. Unfortunately, Xtranormal sort of explodes when you post more than 20,000 characters, which amounts to just the first six pages of the filibuster transcript. Nonetheless, it's kinda fund seeing and hearing the filibuster as told by a cute puppy. Or is that a teddy bear? No, it's a puppy.

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This morning at the start of PubCamp, we went around the room and had everyone introduce themselves, using three words or phrases to describe themselves. Mark Stencel kept track of around 50 of these introductions, and I've taken the liberty of putting all those words into Wordle.net to create a tag crowd. These are the results.

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Earlier today champion competitive eater Takeru "Tsunami" Kobayashi was arrested while trying to go on stage at the annual Coney Island hot dog eating contest. He'd won the contest numerous times since 2001 but had refused to compete this year due to a contract dispute.

Rather than show you video of him getting arrested, I thought I'd share this video of Kobayashi competing in a hot dog eating contest with a half-ton Kodiak bear. The color commentary is just hilarious.

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Kayleigh is way serious while we sing Happy Birthday to her. Apparently she was just waiting for us to finish the song so she could...well, you'll see.

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Courtesy of Kayleigh's Nana and Grandpa, we managed to set up this ginormous 7'x8 sandbox a few days prior to Kayleigh's 4th birthday. It took 26 bags of sand to fill it, 40 pounds each. That's a lot of sand!

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telecentres-from-the-ground-up.pdf Download this file

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Video of my March 2010 TEDxNYED talk, The New Volunteers: Social Media, Disaster Response And You:

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Sean shows off some of the animal noises he's learned.

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This is a video of my recent talk at IgniteNYC. For those of you who have never been to an Ignite talk, it follows a tight format: you have exactly five minutes to present a topic, using exactly 20 PowerPoint slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds.

My talk is a five-minute version of a speech I often give about how the evolution of the Internet and social media has impacted the evolution of volunteerism in response to disasters. Normally the speech is an hour long, but somehow I managed to hit the highlights within the allotted five minutes.

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Kayleigh leads Sean through the US Botanical Garden.

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Ever since the third DC CrisisCamp a couple of weeks ago, I've been thinking about the potential role that matrix codes can play in disaster response. A matrix code is kind of like a UPC symbol used when scanning items at a store, except that it's shaped like a grid and can be used to contain all sorts of information. For example, it's not unusual to see matrix codes on billboards in Japan, so when you take a picture of it with your cameraphone, it'll direct you to a website related to the product on the billboard, or perhaps a coupon.

But what about using matrix codes in a disaster? For example, there's already precedence for marking buildings with coded information: the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

(Photo by cbank, licensed under Creative Commons)

Following Katrina, search and rescue teams went from house to house, looking for survivors and human remains. Using spray paint, they'd mark the front of the house with a matrix describing when it was searched and what was found. Meanwhile, after the Haiti earthquake, a satellite photo captured one building with an SOS message on the rooftop:

Apart from that powerful plea for help, though, there weren't any other details about what help was needed.

Which leads me to the question: what about using matrix codes for keeping track of even more data? For example, groups like the Sahana Foundation are running databases that document the capacity at Haitian hospitals, like this Adventist Hospital in Carrefour. What if hospitals put matrix codes on their outside walls so any aid worker with a cameraphone could aim their phone at it and immediately access all sorts of data about conditions at the hospital? In theory, you could even put matrix codes on your roof, though I'm not sure how large they'd have to be in order to be picked up by the highest resolution satellite imagery. (Does anyone know the answer to this?)

And matrix codes don't have to be printed out on high-quality printers in order to work, as I discovered this afternoon. You may remember a couple of weeks ago I created an electronic version of this matrix code for that Adventist hospital, using a free matrix code generator called ScanLife. I decided to use ScanLife because it seemed like it was the easiest one to replicate by hand, as the blocks are in a simple 11x11 grid. (I might also try QR codes at some point, but they're a lot more complex than ScanLife codes.) Today, I finally got around to taking that same matrix code and drawing it on a piece of .5" graph paper, coloring in the relevant squares with a black Sharpie marker.

I purposefully didn't do a pristine job; I scribbled in the squares, and the edges of each square are often pretty rough. To my amazement, though, the hand-drawn version of of the matrix code works like a charm. Using the free ScanLife app on my iPhone, I aimed the phone at the piece of paper, and it immediately brought me to the correct page on the Sahana website with details about the hospital. You can try it yourself: just search for ScanLife in the App Store (or the Android Market, for that matter), download it, then aim your phone's camera at the matrix code.

To make it a bit more challenging, I took my DIY matrix code and taped it on my kitchen window:

As you can see, there's a lot of potential noise in the background, including trees, falling snow, even a paper leaf my daughter made at school. Once again, the ScanLife app recognized the matrix code immediately and brought me to the hospital database page. I imagine these DIY matrix codes could be created in a variety of ways. I want to try doing it with little black squares with velcro on them, allowing you to reconfigure them easily. For that matter, you could get yourself a bunch of cheap black tiles and lay them out against a wall, or on a roof.

As cool as this is, is it actually useful? Set up wouldn't be too difficult; aid workers or other volunteers could generate the matrix codes and then give instructions to hospitals or other facilities how to configure the grid. Even if the hospital didn't have Internet access, you could pass along the info to them by giving them grid coordinates (1A, 3C, 4C, etc.) But what I'm not sure about is what practical application it would have on the ground. Would it be useful for aid workers to grab this data in real time? If so, how would you keep the details - numbers of beds available, morgue capacity, etc - up-to-date? You could probably come up with a variety of workarounds, getting volunteers somewhere to update the databases, but is this too complex to make it worthwhile, especially when the spray-painted method during Katrina worked fairly well? And would it be valuable to put these matrix codes on roofs, assuming satellite imagery could pick up the grid details?

It really boils down to one question: is this just a clever technology in search of a practical application, or could this somehow make a difference in disaster response? Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

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