My guess is Olive Riley would have chuckled at my lame pun on “died with her boots on.” She must have been quite a gal. She is the subject of Yahoo! News’ story “‘World’s oldest blogger’ dies in Australia at 108.” The article tells us that Olive, born in 1899, blogged her thoughts “on modern life and her experiences living through the entire 20th century.”

Olive was a pioneer of the edges of the global smart mob. She added to the clustering of texting kids and hyper-twitting biz middleagers a voice and perspective from a nursing home “Down Under” and from decades as far back as ten. She had input into the wisdom of the crowd from the wisdom of age. Yahoo! reports:

Riley’s blog, initially on www.allaboutolive.com.au and more recently at http://worldsoldestblogger.blogspot.com, was “mind-blowing to her,” her great grandson Darren Stone said. “She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while,” he told the national AAP news agency.

“She enjoyed the notoriety — it kept her mind fresh.”

Alex Steffen of Worldchanging shares in a recent article some thoughts on Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Better Future.

Worldchanging was founded on the idea that real solutions already exist for building the future we want. it’s just a matter of grabbing hold and getting moving.

Alex says What it would be like, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed.

In a talk with Cory Doctorow he imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory dubbed it, the Outquisition.

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good atadaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

UCSF links with patients, donors via YouTube

The University of California, San Francisco, is using a new YouTube channel and a Facebook group to communicate with patients, concerned family members, physicians and — just as important — potential donors, as it begins to explore the brave new world of social networking. And other local hospitals are beginning to move in the same direction. UCSF’s new YouTube channel incorporates videos about Alzheimer’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and other forms of dementia that were produced by its Memory and Aging Center.
Source: Chris Rauber, San Francisco Business Times, July 4, 2008

Making Maps Work When Disaster Strikes

GeoCommons, OpenStreetMap, and Mapufacture are three online hubs where people can collaboratively map areas, which could help in emergencies.
GeoCommons.com, for example, runs a Web site where users can explore a huge atlas of maps with various data and add their own information. [...] In the wake of devastating flooding in the Midwest in May, people created their own maps of everything from bridge closures to outlines of flood zones to Home Depot (HD) locations where people could get supplies. The maps in turn were made available to anyone.
Source: Rachael King, BusinessWeek, July 7, 2008

Digging a Smarter Crowd

Digg, a popular social bookmarking website, began rolling out a recommendation engine late last week. The design of this recommendation engine, however, is quite different from that of the engines used by companies such as Amazon. While e-commerce sites tend to derive recommendations from a mix of information about users’ browsing and purchasing habits and information about the items for sale, Digg’s system, much like the site itself, places its trust in the wisdom of crowds.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, July 8, 2008

Crawling the Internet to track infectious disease outbreaks

Could Internet discussion forums, listservs, and online news outlets be an informative source of information on disease outbreaks? A team of researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School thinks so, and it has launched a real-time, automated data-gathering system called HealthMap to gather, organize and disseminate this online intelligence. They describe their project in this week’s PLoS Medicine.
Source: Public Library of Science news release, July 7, 2008

Hurry up, the customer has a complaint

As blogs expand the reach of a single voice, firms monitor the Internet looking for the dissatisfied.
When C.C. Chapman noticed a blemish in his high-definition television’s reception during the NBA playoffs recently, he blasted a quick gripe about Comcast into the online ether, using the social network Twitter. Minutes later, a Twitter user named ComcastCares responded, and within 24 hours, a technician was at Chapman’s house in Milford to fix the problem. “I was so floored,” said Chapman, who runs a digital marketing agency and advises companies to do what he experienced with Comcast - listen to what customers are saying about them online and respond.
Source: Carolyn Y. Johnson, The Boston Globe, July 7, 2008

A Patch to Fix the Net

On Tuesday, major vendors released patches to address a flaw in the underpinnings of the Internet, in what researchers say is the largest synchronized security update in the history of the Web. Vendors and security researchers are hoping that their coordinated efforts will get the fix out to most of the systems that need it before attackers are able to identify the flaw and begin to exploit it. Attackers could use the flaw to control Internet traffic, potentially directing users to phishing sites or sites loaded with malicious software.
Source: Erica Naone, Technology Review, July 10, 2008

Texting champ wins $50,000

A 20-year-old college student from Cleveland State University just won the $50,000 grand prize in a national texting competition held in New York this week. The winning text that Nathan Schwartz sent was, “Does everybody here know the alphabet? Let’s text. Here it goes … AbcDeFghiJKlmNoPQrStuvWXy & Z! Now I know my A-B-C’s, next time won’t you text with me?” Schwartz completed the text in 50 seconds with no mistakes.
Source: Marguerite Reardon, CNET’s Wireless Blog, July 10, 2008

Can’t find a parking spot? Check smartphone

The secret to finding the perfect parking spot in congested cities is usually just a matter of luck. But drivers here will get some help from an innocuous tab of plastic that will soon be glued to the streets. This fall, San Francisco will test 6,000 of its 24,000 metered parking spaces in the nation’s most ambitious trial of a wireless sensor network that will announce which of the spaces are free at any moment. Drivers will be alerted to empty parking places either by displays on street signs, or by looking at maps on screens of their smartphones.
Source: John Markoff, The New York Times, July 12, 2008

I rarely post press releases, but I had a great experience with ooVoo when Robin Good interviewed me, and this looks kinda cool, so I will pass it along

Podcamp Boston 3 takes place on July 18, 19 and 20 in the Harvard Medical School. ooVoo the video conferencing software, is a sponsor and giving away 20 PodCamp ’scholarships’ to college students interested in attended this unConference as guests.bThere are a few stipulations and things to know about.

• You are a college student with an active .edu email address. Youíre on the honor system, so we ask that professors and alumni sit this one out.
• You are an ooVoo user who can provide us with a valid ooVoo ID ó it doesnít matter if you subscribe to the fully loaded Super + Phone package or the free Standard package; in fact, it doesn’t matter if you just signed up today. But you will need to include your valid ooVoo User ID in the body of your email and send an ooVoo friend request to philprobertson for verification. We promise not to bother you; we just need to make sure you are a subscriber.
• You have a first name, last name and a date of birth. We know you do, but weíll need to know them to complete the PodCamp registration form– so if you are selected for a scholarship, weíll need to ask that you share this information with us.
• You let us know youíre interested by emailing us at ooVoo@crayonville.com.

If you want to come to PodCamp Boston3 and youíve got some EDU to show the ooV’s, read the details here.

Syed Mohammad Ali of the Pakistanian Daily Times writes: “Unless the prevailing range of gender-related hurdles in availing the opportunities being provided by communication technologies, it is likely that women may become further marginalised from the economic, social, and political mainstream of their countries”

Numerous studies have pointed towards the positive relationship between phone penetration and national incomes.

As mobile penetration levels increase, the overall gender divide may reduce. But there will still be need for proactive government and NGO support to make poor women familiar with these technologies so that their potential benefits diffuse through to all segments of developing societies.

This is a long flight for a very cool floppy hat that I get to wear once a year, but it’s also an honor from the people I know and respect at De Montfort University, especially my colleagues at the Institute of Creative Technologies, Sue Thomas and Andrew Hugill. We’re hoping to do some continuing exploration together in the coming year, via the Social Media Collaboratory.

I have never described myself as an “Internet guru,” but it’s been a sticky meme for a long time, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’ve never been in the business of telling others what not to say. I’ve not been called “Professor” so many times that it sounds normal. I don’t believe that this degree empowers me to try to get people to call me “Doc.” Besides, my daddy told me never to eat at a restaurant named “Mom’s” or play poker with a man named “Doc.”

Internet guru Professor Howard Rheingold, who is Visiting Professor at the DMU Institute of Creative Technologies, will become an Honorary Doctor of Technology on Wednesday, 15 July.

My first attempt at creating a teaching and learning widget via Sproutbuilder:

“Ubiquity and sustainability could turbocharge each other“, with these words Alex Steffen starts another thought provoking column on Worldchanging.

“The Net and the public square, as Castells wrote, are symbiants. That symbiosis makes informatics — the understanding of how people use technology to interact with information — a critical field in sustainable design. And if you’re looking to get a nice, quick taste of the cutting edge of informatics, I really enjoyed Matt Jones and Tom Coates’ presentation, Polite, Pertinent and Pretty. (..)

In a talk exploring their own work, Matt and Tom look at the proliferation of data sources in our lives: personal sensors, direct reporting, environmental sensors, bureaucratic files, attention records, networked objects, and “ambient information” about our daily habits, etc. Because these sources can be connected into a web of data though services and APIs and “in this connected space, every piece of data you can open up can be combined with everything that already exists,” there are phenomenal opportunities available to help people understand their lives and choices in new and empowering ways”

A Columbia University computer science professor has co-founded a New York-based company named Sense Networks to sell tracking software to other companies. It is also distributing a free version of this software named Citysense, which shows on your cell phone where the wild things are happening in your own town. Citysense ‘uses advanced machine learning techniques to number crunch vast amounts of data emanating from thousands of cell-phones, GPS-equipped cabs and other data devices to paint live pictures of where people are gathering.’ Citysense is available today in San Francisco before being soon deployed in Chicago and five other U.S. cities. But read more…

Links: ZDNet, Primidi

In science classes at Woodland Park High School in Colorado, lectures are recorded and assigned as homework so students can spend class time with hands-on projects, getting teacher help, and discussions. Tony Vincent describes this highly successful experiment on his blog LearningInHand.com. An article about the method in The Pikes Peak Courier View begins:

Two Woodland Park High School chemistry teachers have turned class work and homework on their heads using technology. Now students listen to the teachers’ lectures at home and come to class to do their work

Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams started recording their classroom lectures last year, which is nothing new - college professors have been doing that for a few years. What is new this year is that the two have taken the process a step further. Now they record lectures at home as video podcasts. Students watch them at home and come to school ready to try out what they’ve learned.

The video podcasts are created starting with a basic PowerPoint document. Software allows the teachers to record voices and write over the power-point document using an electronic tablet.

The lesson is saved so that students can download it from the school Web site for use at home or, if they don’t have high speed Internet at home, they can download it to a flash drive and take it home.

Students who don’t have computers at home can get the DVD version of the lecture and watch it on their TVs. Some students even watch them on their I-Pods or I-Phones, Bergmann said. . . .