I was intrigued by the post, Letting Off Some Steam, and would like to take a shot at answering the question, “What other infrastructures do you think are ripe for public involvement?” My observations are based on real use of smart phone, mobile web and web reporting on SeeClickFix - a…

I don't know about you, but I've been hearing a lot of people wondering what's so special about the L train and the 34th Street crosstown bus that allows these transit routes to make known the ETA of the next train or bus? And then, just when civic-minded tech developers take matters in their own hands and push schedules onto the mobile devices of riders, they get the smack-down from...

In 2003, as a grad student at NYU, I created a site called Neighbornode, which was a series of bulletin boards for local neighborhood residents to log on to and talk to each other in cities. The site was very simple, and to be totally honest a bit of a hack (I was never a fabulous coder). But the idea alone was enough to attract a good amount of attention and interest from...

Yesterday's reports of MSNBC's acquisition of Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock have generally treated the latter as a "hyperlocal news service." And to be sure, this is abetted by some of the language Everyblock itself uses to frame and describe what it offers: a "news feed for your block" which can help you "find news nearby." But for whatever it's worth, I've never understood Everyblock's fundamental proposition in quite this way, and here's why I think understanding what it offers as "news" is giving it short shrift