WHAT A START TO APRIL!  It could have been an April Fool’s prank. I mean, sci-fi type glasses tapping you into the data stream – imagine!  Except, of course, it was Google’s latest conversation starter, Google Glass.

Google, in case you missed the news (https://plus.google.com/u/0/111626127367496192147/posts), envisions a world where we walk around with a wearable digital interface to the world.

That’s right, instead of looking at the world and interacting with real objects in real time, we can also co-exist in a digital space, seeing a digital data overlay of our world.

Google Glass (I know, I know, we all want to call it Google Goggles!) represents the latest in a vision of “wearable technology,” an implementation of computing that takes the form of a device you wear on your body and that provides constant and ongoing interaction with a digital layer of information based on your location and actions.

What you see in the demo video is people wearing data glasses. The wearers of the glasses see a little pop up in their fields of vision when a sensor IDs certain elements in the environment.

• Look at a subway station: get an update on subway schedule;
• Look at an advertising poster: Make note to order advertised product;
• Look for friend: find friends location via a friend’s glasses and its sensor.

The whole process feels a bit like having your smart phone suspended in the air in front of you on a transparent screen.

This idea of Reality-Plus,  referred to by the phrase “augmented reality,” seems to represent a long-term human desire to experience the world beyond what our own senses tell us. We latched on to technology as means to this end centuries ago.

In 1665, English scientist Robert Hooke, who invented the reflective telescope among other accomplishments, authored Micrographia, the first book describing observations made through a microscope. In it he wrote of

“…the adding of artificial Organs to the natural… and as Glasses have highly promoted our seeing, so ’tis not improbable, but that there may be found many mechanical inventions to improve our other senses of hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.”  

A few centuries later in 1987, The Terminator hit the silver screen with the cyborg’s field of vision incorporating data and text overlaying the “real” world. A still image from that movie formed the most frequent illustration for the Google Glass coverage last week. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that more than one person now believes Linda Hamilton was modeling an early prototype of a Google product.

In our world, military applications have been pushing the envelope in developing cameras that ‘see’ for human operators and overlay various kinds of data atop the human sensorial field since the mid-1960s. Fighter pilots and foot soldiers alike have gone into the field armed with variations of wearable technology.

By 1994 the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), had gone public with its Smart Modules Program to encourage the development of wearable computers, even sponsoring a wearables conference/workshop in 1996 to encourage the work of industrial, university and military visionaries. Earlier this year it announced augmented reality contact lenses: http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/01/31.aspx

You might even remember Steve Mann, currently a professor at the University of Toronto (http://wearcomp.org/historical/index.html). In 1981, while he was still in high school, he gained 15 minutes of fame with a backpack mounted computer/photographer/image-the-world device.

Later as a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab, he started continually wearing a sort of goggle/camera combo, transmitting his cybervision to a server and eventually to a web page.

Thinking triggered by this project helped launch what became the Wearable Computing Project (http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/), which explored a whole other way to think about computing by treating it as portable, integrated, and providing a new way to interact with the real world in real time.

Other threads from wearable computing led to ideas like “gestural computing” where what you do and how you physically move control the computer and its interactions. If you’ve ever jumped and waved around a wii or xbox game, playing virtual tennis, karate, or golf (or like me, flapped like a chicken – http://www.capeeyes.com/2010/01/wii/)  you’ve experience gestural computing. You just called it playing a game.

Within hours of Google’s announcement, spoofs multiplied on the web and pretty much every late night show chimed it. To be part of the trendy digital cultural gestalt of the month check out a few of these, starting with the original “serious” honest-this-is-not-a-spoof Google vision at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9c6W4CCU9M4

Then, Jimmy Kimmel had fun with it:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/348068/jimmy-kimmel-live-project-glass

And so did Jon Stewart:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-10-2012/the-social-networth—google-unveils-smart-glasses—facebook-buys-instagram

And Search Engine Watch compiled a few of more popular web spoof postings (warning: some contain off-color content), which also serve to demonstrate that a lot of people have an excess of free time and that video editing tools have become pretty darn easy to use:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2166559/6-Funny-Google-Project-Glass-Parody-Videos

It’s all sort of funny … but it’s not. Twenty short years ago, we lived in a pre-web browser world. In a pre-smart phone world.

Our daily, taken-for-granted activities – emailing a file, taking a photo with our mobile phone and sending to a friend across the country, texting from the grocery store to see what the family wants for dinner, screen sharing and jointly editing a presentation from two locations … were less real than Google Glass is today.

Think about it – we now have a whole generation that can no longer remember a world where you literally spun a dial on a phone attached to a wall!

The parodies make us laugh, but this is no April Fools prank. Google and many many others are queuing up products that bring us into the world science fiction once imagined, where the boundaries of biology become unbound by technology.

Yeah, I’m a little scared too, but a little curious at the same time to see how it will feel to live in a future that was once just part of someone’s imagination.

HUH? YOU DON’T PIN?  You haven’t joined the throngs – somewhere between 11 million and 16 million people, depending on which rating service you believe – pinning and re-pinning their way across the web?

You haven’t embraced social networking via “visual collections of things you love?”

You haven’t encountered the big corkboard in the sky?

I feel you looking blankly at me. That’s OK, I didn’t get it either.

But with the amount of buzz social media darling Pinterest (http://pinterest.com) has been drawing – its young founder Ben Silbermann attracted a crowd of more than a 1000 as he announced a Pinterest iPad app at last week’s trendy South By Southwest festival in Austin TX — I figured I better dig a little deeper.

I asked the company for an invitation to join. I have a pulse, an email address, and a Facebook page, so I passed the membership test and received a joining link.

Getting started involves nothing more than clicking the link, adding your email, connecting to your Facebook page, and dragging a “pin it” button into your browser bar.

Then, you find yourself  in the land of nested and cross connected virtual  corkboards.  And, if you’re like me, you have no idea what to do with them.

Lucky for me, I impulse-bought a box of discount of wildflower seed mix the other day. You know, one of those with an orange ‘special price’ sticker and generic picture of flowers on the front.

As I registered my name with Pinterest, that box sat on the sofa next to me, its seed contents listed by species name on the back in itty bitty type … and suddenly I had a pinning idea.

I created a board called “wildflowers.” I picked the category of “gardening.” I searched for each species by name. I picked a photo I liked and click the Pin It button.

Pinterest flagged the photo from the web page, I added a caption with the species and common names, and voila, the photo appeared pinned to my board.

I did not make the photos; I merely collected them from random locations across the web. That’s a key element of Pinterest: you don’t create the things you pin. In fact, the site specifically asks you not to promote your own work. Instead, you “tear” images from other websites and pin each one to your board.

That makes me feel a bit queasy. If you don’t want images you own being pinned, Pinterest provides a snippet of code you can embed into your site. But otherwise, well, let’s just hope someone rules that pinning falls under copyright fair use.

Taking that leap of faith, I pinned images for every one of the 14 seeds on the package. Here’s what it looks like:

http://pinterest.com/capeeyes/wildflowers/

Pretty, huh? I made a pretty collage of wildflower photos.

I was thinking maybe it could be a reference a few months hence when, in my perfect world, the seeds actually get planted, avoid bird beaks, sprout, and bloom.

“Hmm, what is that lovely blue flower?” I’ll wonder as I gaze upon the mound of blossoms spilling gloriously along the fence.

“Oh, let me look on wildflower board where I pinned those pictures and find out,” I’ll say to myself, clicking into Pinterest.

It turns out that pins take on a life of their own far more quickly than that, however.  Within an hour of creating my wildflower board, 27 people re-pinned the photo of Echinacea purpurea (aka, purple coneflower). Another five people “liked” it.

Even more surprising, I received an alert email that listed their names and comments and no one was named Cyberdude, Fjeirmasoma the elf, Bubba1234, or anonymous.  Instead, every commenter was a woman with a real first and last name. Mackenzie and Debby and Vicki and Kristina.

In interviews, the company talks about its core demographic being women in their 20s and 30s, living in the central part of the country rather than coasts. When I read what Beth wrote as she re-pinned the photo, I finally got it.

” I LOVE these flowers-they make me smile! I always try to have some growing somewhere in my garden.”

Pinterest is the stuff you tear out of magazines. It’s the shoes you might buy. It’s the hairstyles you ask your friend for advice on.

Pinterest is the cupcakes with fun flowers. It’s the holiday decorating idea. It’s the clever kitchen storage. It’s all the elements you’ll put in a redesigned bath (Deep soaking tub! Cool rug! Kohler curved faucet!) that you’ll build when you win the lottery.

I hate to say it, but I think its kinda’ a girl thing. (Go ahead, throw the tomatoes now!) Pretty much every female person I know, regardless of age, has some kind of collection of things ripped out of magazines or printed from a website.  Accessories. Ideas.  Inspirations. Dreams.

Pinterest understands this and knows that for many people, the act of creation doesn’t lie in designing the shoes – rather, the act of creation lies in gathering all the different shoes together for reference, conversation, or sharing.

Pinterest doesn’t want to you pin your own content because the point isn’t to be an artist – it’s to be a curator.

One group has been salivating over Pinterest: retail. Pinterest provides critical word of mouth advertising at its best, delivered from a peer group, and  illustrated by beautiful, clickable, photos.

For example, the online craft mecca ETSY reports that it draws more from traffic from Pinterest pins of pictures of its earrings and hats and picture frames and other hand-made accessories of life than from any other source.

Williams-Sonoma (http://pinterest.com/williamssonoma/), Nordstrom (http://pinterest.com/nordstrom/), and Lowes (http://pinterest.com/lowes/) incorporate pins into social network marketing.

A few creative organizations have explored other uses. For example, Canada’s CTV (http://pinterest.com/ctvnews/) created a feature called Canada Through Your Eyes (http://pinterest.com/ctvnews/canada-through-your-eyes/) in which it asks readers to pin images of Canadian news interest.

Hard as it may be to believe, no one knew what to make of Twitter at first. Just a handful of words and maybe a link – what can you do with it and who cares? But in a few short years, tweet and trending have become verbs and hashtags are part of business.

So who knows, maybe the pin becomes the new tweet.  And personal collections become public property. And we all add a third channel to our online personas.

I DID SOMETHING LAST WEEK  that I haven’t done in years: I changed my browser home page.

The last time I made the switch, it was from Alta Vista to Google. Anyone remember Alta Vista? It had the cleanest, most simple, and speediest search interface. Then, pressured by a need to generate revenue, it morphed into a ponderous portal.

Google then took the #1 place in my heart for clean, simple, and fast. But last week, Google started giving me the creepies. Last week, Google’s new privacy policy went into effect, driven by the company’s need to monetize my online activity even more than it already has.

Now, on one hand, I can certainly understand why a company would want to consolidate 60 or 70 policies into one single policy – just for operational sanity, if nothing else.

But, on the other hand, the consolidation brings into focus the integration of data across Google’s applications and by extension, the way that data records, reflects, and repackages for sale one’s life.

With its new policy, Google makes no bones about using your data, my data, and our data to sell, sell, and sell. If you don’t like it, says Google, then leave. Don’t use our products.

And so, I’m not.

Or at least I’m trying not to. Turns out it’s pretty hard to go cold turkey from Google simply because Google shows up, well, everywhere.

Honestly, I don’t think for a second that Google cares about me, personally. It doesn’t want to sell what I, Teresa Martin, see or do. But, it does care about me as a set of eyeballs in its collection and it wants to be sure I’m packaged with the just the right mark up for its advertiser customers.

With the new policy, what I type in my Gmail account, what I do in Google docs, what I post in Google +, what I watch on YouTube, and what I add to Google Maps — not to mention what I search for in the Google search engine — combine to create a target profile sellable to the highest bidder.

Google, of course, tells me that it merely does this so that the advertising I receive will be more valuable to me. It’s really just another service it, the benevolent gorilla, offers.

“If you’re signed into Google, we can do things like suggest search queries – or tailor your search results – based on the interests you’ve expressed in Google+, Gmail, and YouTube,” it writes on its privacy page.

To me, that’s not a benefit. That’s an unwanted filtering, unasked for editing, and unneeded intrusion.

But let’s be honest. Our information hasn’t been private for years. The direct marketing industry, for example, has long known how to pinpoint target based on buying and giving histories. It developed sophisticated data triangulation to ID very specific matches with very specific offers, and purchased information about people from all kinds of sources, including magazines, catalogs, and registries of motor vehicles.

Google gives me another whole layer of the creepies not because it wants to deliver ads based on my search terms. That’s a given. No, it goes a rung up the creepies ladder because it combines data from multiple ongoing interactions and because those interactions pervade and integrate so tightly into so many people’s daily lives – both personal and professional.

This extensive mining of data from a myriad of sources, including social media, has become what one might call a trending topic, under the moniker Big Data. Capital B. Capital D.

A few weeks back, The New York Times Magazine used Target as an exemplar of the power of Big Data. In the magazine article (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all), the writer revealed that the store’s data gurus had developed buying pattern analyses that could accurately predict not only that a customer was expecting a bundle of baby joy, but also that bundle’s due date. Target used the data to send product-specific coupons to the customer’s home along a specific pregnancy cycle buying pattern.

Big Data workshops abound, too. For example, earlier this month, MIT’s Sloan School announced a two-day series in March which promptly sold out. (http://executive.mit.edu/openenrollment/program/big_data_making_complex_things_simpler/49?cid=eml_data_jan12).

What would make a company shell out $2900 for two days of insight? MIT’s Prof. Sandy Pentland put it pretty bluntly in the press release:

“Many managers undervalue the worth of data, but really it is like money in your bank account and you should be getting a return on it. This program will show managers how to capture the benefits of data such as creating better customer analytics or capturing real-time consumer preferences.”

In other words, my data and your data belong to someone else’s bank account.

I don’t know if shifting my search allegiance makes any different, really.  I went with Microsoft’s Bing because it feels fast, it seems to yield good results, and I kinda’ like the daily photo with its trivia tidbits.

I’m using a not-Chrome browser – switching around between Mozilla and Safari. My mobile apps travel in the iPhone world, not the Google/Android galaxy.

My email is open source client-based. My domains live in yet another location from another provider. My driving directions come from AOL’s MapQuest. Facebook gets only the occasional promotional post.

I don’t want to leave the 21st century. I like having my digital tools. I just don’t like being for sale all the time.

So my strategy for combating We-are-the-Google (http://www.startrek.com/database_article/borg) assimilation comes down to a strategy of having lots of baskets and lots of eggs and hoping they don’t all buy/sell/trade with each other.

In the age of Big Data, that may be a lost cause, but I like to think that I’m maybe, just maybe, I’m making the data octopus twist a few tentacles to find me and making it just a teeny bit harder to put me and my habits into the market basket.

THE SPRING CYCLE BEGINS today as the Christian calendar marks Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the 40 days of Lent which lead up to Easter.

I’m kind of a traditionalist and so my browser came to a screeching halt at this HuffPost headline:

Pope Tweets Lent

 Huh? The 84-year-old pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI, hardly has a reputation as a hip and modern kind of guy.  He’s more known as an enforcer who stood solidly behind old line conservative views, offended a lot of people with these views, and may well feel more comfortable in 1612 than 2012.

For that matter, the Vatican bureaucracy itself hasn’t changed much since it was created in the 1500s to handle big global changes including the Protestant Reformation and the race to the New World.  Progress and Vatican are rarely used in the same sentence.

But in with the new! The Pope Tweets Lent.

According to Vatican Radio, the idea originated with – and I couldn’t possibly make this up — the Pontifical Council for Social Communications. I guess that’s sort of the pope’s social media consulting group.

The news release quotes a Msgr. Paul Tighe, secretary of the group, as saying – and again I could not possibly make this up – “Many of the key Gospel ideas are readily rendered in just 140 characters.”

Now, to be fair, in the past year or so the Vatican created a YouTube Channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/Vatican), a Facebook page named JohnPaul II (http://www.facebook.com/vatican.johnpaul2), officially blessed a few iPhone and iPad apps (perhaps Android swings Protestant?), and brought a web-based news portal online (www.news.va) last June.

In case you doubting Thomases need to see to believe this, the (London) Telegraph has actual video of some pontifical iPad action. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/the-pope/8605484/Pope-sends-first-Tweet-at-Vatican-iPad-app-launch.html) I gotta’ confess that the pope looks about as engaged and excited as you’d expect your own elderly father/grandpa/great grandpa to be when faced with what he’s clearly viewing as this new-fangled tablet-screen-thing.

But that’s not slowing him down, no siree bob. Just like in any corporation, the CEO’s got a team that gets out the tweets!

I can’t help picturing, in some turret in Rome, a couple of intern-priests high-fiving each other after getting designated as official papal posters. Although I suspect it rather more likely that a marketing functionary has been running the messages through a development cycle for the last quarter, getting them approved for the start of the Lenten campaign.

I also keep thinking about how to combine this tweeting news with the other mobile apps. For example, the papal-approved “Confessions: A Roman Catholic App” might be just the thing to combine with Lenten tweeting.

It provides – and I quote because once again I couldn’t have made this up on my own! – “Custom examination of Conscience based upon age, gender, and vocation (single, married, priest, or religious)”

It also features: “Ability to add sins not listed in standard examination of conscience,” as well as the always-needed “Confession walkthrough including time of last confession in days, weeks, months, and years” and of course the option to “choose from 7 different acts of contrition.”

Imagine! Today’s 8-year-olds no longer need struggle to remember the last time they went to confession or invent suitable sins to confess.

(I used to wonder if making up a story about being mean to my sister so I had something to say as the priest breathed impatiently on the other side of the dark box would count as something I could confess in the next confession -alas, if only I had my iPad and Confession App in hand back then!)

We shouldn’t laugh at the Pope, though.  Everyone gets credit for trying something new. Or at least agreeing to let one’s staff trying something new.

Besides, there’s something even more unexpected than papal tweets — and that’s the serious coverage and community dialog about Lent in places like The Huffington Post. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/lent/)

I don’t know about you, but I tend to think of the HuffPost and its kin as source for rumor about PAC money or gossip about the skinniest celebs. I do not expect a well-crafted, extensive, serious, and far-ranging editorial package about Lent ranging from meditations, to history, to religious analysis, to fried fish recipes.

It’s kinda’ weird yet at the same time oddly normal. Why shouldn’t a cultural/religious season get commented upon and reported with as much intensity as, say, the celeb cycle du jour? Why shouldn’t this commentary happen in digital media which is, afterall, merely a reflection of all things human?  Why is it that religion and technology should seem so mutually exclusive?

Even some of the amusement from the non sequitur “pope tweets” comes from this sense of religion and technology as inherently non-intersecting circles.

Among tech circles, you’re allowed to tell funny childhood stories about religious traditions gone weird. You can have a spiritual interest as long as it involves the far far east, an obscure ancient culture or, preferably, both.

At the same time, in religious circles, technology becomes cast as the evil force, the thing that breaks the bonds, a temptation, the cause of sin.

Yet these two non-intersecting circles share a common intersecting line in the form of the people who create and inhabit both, people whose lives inevitably pass through, shape, and become shaped by each sphere.

Technology and region have more in common that either might like to admit. Both are imperfect products of mankind’s attempt to understand and interpret the world around us. Both bring gifts – and both have the potential to be abused and used for harm. The simplistic interpretation of either can be a scary thing to behold.

At their core, they are both about the most misunderstood thing of all: us. Humanity.

So … so … maybe they shouldn’t be quite so disconnected. As we create tools and techniques that push the envelope of being, why do we think that using tools and techniques from another sphere as a lens for looking at our work should be weak or ordinary or anti-intellectual?

Which bring us back to Lent. Or if you, as a technologist, prefer, the time just before spring has sprung, the time when the ancients acted out rituals to ask whatever mysterious forces drove the world to send life back to the cold and frozen land.

As druids chanted or drummed or danced or mediated their message to the universe they created a tradition and a tool set for introspection into our very being. It wasn’t about dogma; it was about understanding.

We call them different things now, but that same tradition and tool set lives on with us. So maybe in this season I should give up a gut reaction of cynicism along with the instinct to roll my eyes at tweeting popes. And maybe, just maybe, give a drumming druid a chance.

That’s right, you can get the column delivered to your inbox … I write about two of ‘em a month and am happy to send it direct to you. Just let me know who you are and what email you’d like it delivered to you by filling out the form:

Delivered via icontact.com

Brrrrrp.

At 3:45 pm, as I type these words, the National Weather Service posted a wind advisory for Barnstable County.

Brrrrrp.

My NOAA Radio iPhone app let me know the advisory was in effect.

Almost two years ago I spent a lovely spring day at a Gov 2.0 unconference in Cambridge (http://www.capeeyes.com/2010/03/the-unconference-a-whole-other-way-to-meetmarch-10-2010/).

The group talked about OpenData, a concept that said if you open up information for everyone to use, then interesting things will happen.

They were right.

Just look at how the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has changed things. In 2009, NOAA became one of the first governmental bodies to embrace open data.

“The basic tenet of physical climate data management at NOAA is full and open data access,” it wrote its policy paper that year, as it led the pack in opening up proprietary weather and other earth data.

Fast forward two years. After a deceptively gentle autumn, winter has arrived in New England.  Ice. Snow. Wind. To get ready for it, I just spent $3.99 to download a NOAA weather radio app in the iPhone store.

One of the cool things this app does is sound an alarm if my selected geography falls into a weather emergency – even if my phone’s ringer is turned off. This year I vow that I will not be the dolt who decided to drive 60 miles in the blizzard of the century!

One of the even cooler things about this app is that I didn’t buy it from NOAA, even though it uses trusted NOAA data.

Entrepreneurial types using the data feed have built literally hundreds – I mean, I stopped scrolling at 125 titles! – of downloadable mobile product for every niche you can possibly imagine. And that’s just on the iPhone platform.

Heck, there’s even an app that turns scientists into mobile media heroes. With Hurricane Hunter you can, and I quote  “follow the world famous Hurricane Hunters as they fly their missions into hurricanes and tropical storms. These men and women from USAFR and NOAA fly directly into and through these weather systems …”

A bit closer to home, ACKweather wants to be your source for all things water and weather (check out those NOAA buoys!) from Nantucket.

Should you want to follow toastier options in January, you can always turn to California Surf Way  (that NOAA buoy information again!) which combines weather data with its own surf knowledge to point your board in the right direction.

Or maybe you’d rather move even more tropical with Touch Hawaiian Weather — yup, buoy data involved here, too.

OK, back to snow.  And wind. And data.

Emergency radio, aka police and fire communication, gives weather and information junkies another peek into what’s really happening out there. Time was you could buy a scanner and plug crystals into it and eavesdrop. Now? You got it; the data from the airwaves has been packaged into hundreds of apps

“Know what is really going on. Listen in on police and fire crews in your local area!” trumpets Scanner911.

“Live in NYC and want to know what’s going on down the block? Turn your iPhone into an FDNY scanner!!!!” screams FDNY Live Fire Radio even louder.

Mashing – aka, the combing  – of open data creates whole new categories too. Geograph mixes EPA, USGS, census, FAA, and a variety of government sources to create a mobile app that for $4.99 gives you the physical and human geography for your chosen state.

The Languages Nearby app uses US Census data, which has been moving reams of information into open data accessible formats, to find out what languages are spoken in your current geographic location. While I personally never needed this information – how powerful is it that someone in some market did … and innovation found a way to provide it.

This month the US government votes on legislation that turns digital distribution channels into a de facto enforcer for a small but powerful group of private companies desperate to keep a death grip on their fast-fading proprietary (but profitable … for them) world. They say it is about piracy, but fear of legal competition is the unspoken elephant.

Misguided efforts like SOPA (http://www.capeeyes.com/2011/11/a-chill-online-wind-blows-with-sopa/) squash innovation and prevent the market from speaking.

A SOPA-esquue way of seeing the digital world chills the efforts of entrepreneurs – the largest job generating engine in the country – to the bone.

The minds behind SOPA and kin represent the antithesis of the flowering of creativity that the government itself has unleashed by opening its own data to developers.

You want to support innovation? You want to support growth and jobs? You want to let the market respond and fill emerging needs?  Just look at the window. Just look at the weather.

If you don’t give it a try, you don’t know what will happen.

That’s why I have to applaud the Town of Barnstable for taking a stab at something new. Or at least something new for this technically conservative region of the country.

Earlier this month the town unveiled Barnstable iForum (http://www.barnstableiforum.com/), an interactive space built upon a product from a startup based in Omaha Nebraska.

Mindmixer and its eponymous product (http://www.mindmixer.com) came to market just over a year ago. The genesis of the product came from direct experience with community meetings where only a tiny fraction of the people who could be impacted by the outcome showed up.

Community planner Nick Bowden started thinking there had to be a better way to generate and share community ideas. So he began to create one. The company launched in the summer of 2010 and took in a $300,000 round of funding from Omaha’s Dundee Venture Capital last February.

Since then, a host of towns, cities, community groups, and civic organizations have signed on to set up a “virtual town hall” with Mindmixer – organizations ranging from a neighborhood consortium in Santa Barbara CA, to a planning agency in Burbank CA, to the Cities of Wichita KS, Los Angeles CA, Kansas City MO, and Flagstaff AZ  … and the Town of Barnstable MA.

In social media speak, Mindmixer and products like it are “community engagement platforms.” In normal English, it means the companies provide a ready-to-use online place where people can share comments, thoughts and ideas that could lead to action.

For Mindmixer, the community it wants to engage includes municipalities, elected officials, and other quasi-government entities seeking the input of their constituents. In short, it provides a place for people to talk with both each other and with their community leaders, without the constraint of a specific time or place.

In Barnstable, the Barnstable iForum started out with some proposed topics, each introduced by videos from town officials talking about the issue. For example, Alisha Parker from the growth management department and Lyndsey Counsell, chair of the Community Preservation Committee introduce the topic of bike transportation, while Hilary Sandler with the Committee for Barnstable Dog Parks asks for thoughts about dog park development in the town.

Then, people chime in with ideas, comments to ideas, seconds to ideas, and alternative ideas.  Participants get publicy ID’d by first name and last initial and have to register for a site account using a real name and email.  To encourage participation, the site hands out points for ideas, seconds and comments. You can trade your points for rewards like a dog license or a ride on the police department’s Segway.

I’ve been following and writing about Gov 2.0 for a couple of years now. The Gov 2.0 blanket enrobes all those idea that use technology to reshape the interactions of governance and civic engagement.

All that cool stuff about data visualization and open data? Gov 2.0. Mobile devices that let you report potholes and unplowed roads? Gov 2.0. Civic engagement platforms? Yup, that’s Gov 2.0 too.

Efforts like Barnstable iForum have the potential to reshape the ways communities, their members, and their leaders interact and drive decisions and direction. They have the potential to use technology to open up the doors and invite more people into the tent.

They even have the potential to change those relationships and dynamics that seem to have created a sense that government is “them” and we are “us” — the dynamics of being two teams on opposite sites of the field.  Deep my hidden optimist’s heart I wonder if perhaps Gov 2.0 applications could be the trigger we need remember that we are all part of governance and that there is no ‘them’ vs. ‘us.’

It won’t just happen though. Nice as it is, the mere presence of a community engagement platform doesn’t actually engage the community.

A thread in Barnstable iForum called “Think Tank for well paying jobs” shows this pretty clearly. There’s a back and forth among the same group of people. In the middle of it Eddie D asks:

It seems like all we’re doing is talking to ourselves … What was this Barnstable iforum created for? Is there anybody in charge to pass these ideas on or are we just wasting out time. [sic]

Fair question, Eddie D!

Because that is the challenge of Web 2.0 and Gov 2.0. It only works when a critical mass both talks and listens. And that takes work. Real work.

Communities need people to nourish and tend them. Online communities are no different. Getting the software platform into place is the easy part. Setting aside the time to monitor, comment, interact, and engage … well, now …

If Eddie D gets a meaningful response posted, he’s going to keep engaging. And he might even encourage others to engage as well. But if no one responds to Eddie, pretty soon he’s going to click away and never return.

I’ve always called this the watering hole effect.  You put out something attractive. You put out tools that let people get to the attractive stuff. Then you put out tools that let people share what they find. And create new stuff from it.

And then you watch the watering hole, adding extra bait to draw in more critters or shooing away predators that threaten to shutdown the watering hole.

You make sure fresh and clean water trickles through and you spend time drinking there yourself in case anyone didn’t get the message. You can’t force anyone to come to the watering hole, but you can make it an attractive, safe, rewarding, enjoyable place to be.

If you’re lucky, pretty soon it starts to take on a life of its own and it attracts more and more activity. It begins to grow organically. Interactions happen. It’s a success!

But it wasn’t a random unplanned and untended success. The world of 2.0 works because someone in every 2.0 community tends to it.

I love that Barnstable put Barnstable IForum out there. I have my fingers crossed that someone has been tending the watering hole. I hope the right balance of bait will bring people in and that predators don’t take over.

There’s potential! Will it work? Only time will tell. But if you don’t give it a try, you never know what will happen.

I LOVE MY FOOD, so when I hear the word sopa on a gray November day I think: mmmm, warm, soup, good. But this week’s political definition of SOPA is giving me the chills.

SOPA, for those of you who don’t live in a world of technology or politics, stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. SOPA, the US House bill, and its Senate cousin the PROTECT IP Act, want to tighten and enforce online copyright with a sledge hammer.

Not surprisingly, the film and recording industries are behind the effort. Also, not surprisingly, technology companies are against it.

And, least surprising of all, this week’s House Judiciary Committee hearing has created a frenzy of lobbying so intense you can almost hear the sound of dollar bills flying through the year.

To listen to the sound of the debate, you’d think Congress is either going to create a million jobs by killing off piracy or is about to destroy the very fabric of the Internet.  But it’s worse than either of those: SOPA is half-baked legislation that turns the web into a network of enforcers.

A quick read of the bill summary (http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR03261:@@@D&summ2=m&) shows that it creates a somewhat undefined chain of responsibility and pushes the responsibity for enforcing copyright onto those running the mechanics of the web – and if you don’t play enforcer, you’ll be considered guilty too.

SOPA paints a broad sweep of illegal use of copyright material. That cute video of the kindergarten twins singing a pop pop pop hit song that mom posted on YouTube? Criminal activity that must be shut down and prosecuted.

CNET, reporting on this week’s debate (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20128239-38/sopa-hollywoods-latest-effort-to-turn-back-time/) put it very clearly, writing that SOPA:

… creates vague, sweeping new standards for secondary liability, drafted to ensure maximum litigation. It treats all U.S. consumers as guilty until proven innocent. If passed, the bill would give media companies unprecedented new powers to shape the structure and content of the Internet.

No one — proponents or opponents — argue that piracy should get a free pass. Piracy does indeed pull money and jobs from the economy and stealing is wrong. For that matter, it’s also illegal.

Uhm, yeah, it is already illegal! And there are methods for dealing with it on the books. Now. Today. Of course, that process doesn’t turn everyone up and down the Internet food chain into a free enforcer for one industry segment.

Not to mention the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998 (http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf), which updated pre-digital era copyright regulations and attempted to balance content producer and web service provider rights. While not perfect, DMCA has been a platform for working through the nuts and bolts of managing content ownership in a world of easily transmitted files, user created content, and the whole reshaping of media as we once knew it.

Years ago, the recording and entertainment industries stuck their collective heads deep into the growing layers of silicon and then took a big business model body slam when the world simply moved past them and adopted different channels for digital music, movie, and TV distribution.These folks have been increasingly and vocally unhappy with DMCA and lobbied hard for SOPA.

It’s big bucks at stake here! To give you a sense of the scale, in 2007, media giant Viacom brought a $1Billion – yes, billion, with a B – copyright suit against YouTube.

Opponents of SOPA, including technology giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as media rights watchdogs like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) say that SOPA is nothing less than a step toward government-backed-corporate censorship and blacklisting.

Various tech-centered sites “celebrated” the first day of the House hearings November 16 with a campaign called “American Censorship Day” posting a “this site has been censored” popup with a call to action to fight back. Campaign (http://americancensorship.org/), supporters include EFF, Public Knowledge, Mozilla, Creative Commons and a number of others.

Mozilla, home of the open source browser Firefox, went black in mourning at midnight, and subsequently ran a black “stop censorship” banner across the site, with links calling for action. (http://www.mozilla.org/sopa)

Corporate copyright vs. censorship sizzles with emotion. But that’s just part of the debate. SOPA makes me shiver because it feels like part of an on-going trend where people with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, fueled with massive mountains of lobbying cash, create solutions somewhat akin to carpet bombing a city to squash a mosquito buzzing around one’s head.

It also should remind us that this thing called the Internet has a life bigger than any one of us, that it was nourished with government funds, invested in by business, turned into an economic engine by entrepreneurial vision, and become the tool for individual expression and civic engagement around the globe.

Is that really something we want mucked about in a half-baked way driven by profit motive on the part of one industry? We – all of us – deserve better than that!

As Congress continues to debate, and the November rain continues to fall, I think that I, for one, will return to the other kind of sopa, the one with chicken broth and chilies and all sorts of good things that you can find (http://www.food.com/recipe-finder/all/sopa) with the click of mouse … because the Internet remains a place where no single interest or bloc of money can dictate what we do and how we use it.

YOU’VE BEEN HERE, HAVEN’T YOU?  You know, where you sit bolt awake for no particular reason at 2 am, sleep but a fleeting memory.

You don’t feel like playing a computer game, there’s nothing on the tube but offers to buy cubic zirconium or to repent your sins, and you’ve read every single book on the bookshelf at least twice. What to do? What to do?

Well, this week I found an answer: Go to the library.

That’s right, your public library. I don’t mean get literally get in the car and drive, of course. But if you are one of the growing population with an e-reader device, 2 am turns out to be a great time to logon and download that trashy detective novel to take your mind off the million and one reasons you can’t get back to sleep.

Here on the Cape, the CLAMS network (http://www.clamsnet.org/) manages about 3,000 eBooks, available for reading from your Kindle, iPad, Nook, or laptop, depending on the readers you’ve installed.

CLAMS stands for Cape Libraries Automated Material Sharing. CLAMS provides a real regional service, connecting all the libraries and providing backend delivery and shared materials.

Most of us know CLAMS as the way you can have a book from Wellfleet delivered to your local library branch in Falmouth.  Or track down a DVD in Harwich and pick it up in Eastham.  Like they tell you in kindergarten, sharing is indeed a beautiful thing.

As books move digital, a shared service like CLAMS makes even more sense.

It is easy. You jump to CLAMS from your local library. My beloved physical library happens to be Eastham, and Eastham library’s site offers up a “Download” link right at the top of the page. It connects to a CLAMS page promoting both digital and audio books (http://clamsnet.lib.overdrive.com).

The library didn’t recreate the wheel to make this possible. CLAMS, like thousands of libraries around the country, uses a service from Overdrive (http://www.overdrive.com).

OverDrive, a Cleveland Ohio-based company, develops and manages digital distribution. It handles content for all major platforms, from Mac and Windows OS computers to mobile devices like from Apple’s iPhone/iPad, Android, Kindle, Nook, and a bunch of others.

If you feel insecure, not to worry. The CLAMS folks offer both text and video how-tos that show you the way, even at 2 am when most sensible human librarians are sound asleep.  Both are linked from CLAMS eBooks search page (http://library.clamsnet.org/screens/matebook.html)

At 2 am, in my laptop computer window, I see some highlighted stacks: new releases, just purchased, and most popular. I browse a bit.

I can’t help clicking on the title The Dud Avocado. The name just makes me laugh. I see that it was bought by Friends of the Mashpee Library and is available as both Kindle and Adobe epub formats.  Hmmm.

Click. I’ve added it to my cart.  Once I check out, I’ll have it for a week. I can return it earlier, or at the end of the week it will automatically return itself. Hey, cool. I can’t forget to bring it back!

Let’s see, I want some really light reading. Teen pop writer Meg Cabot writes adult fluff too. There’s a handy search button right at the top of the screen. Select: Author.  Now type: c-a-b-o-t. Click the Search button. Ah, with one more click I’m adding Size 12 is Not Fat to my basket.

Oh, and while I’m here, I’ve been wanting to read that latest book in that series. You know the one. Botswana. Precious is the detective. Alexander someone wrote it.  Ladies Detective Agency something something. Agh.  A straight search isn’t going to help me out here and my poor brain seems fogged in at this time of night!

But look, there’s a bunch of browsing options along the side. Browse eBook fiction. Click. Mysteries. Click. Ohhh. At the top of the mystery listing here’s a Dick Francis/ Felix Francis I haven’t read yet. Click!

And now I can search only within this genre.  The phrase “Ladies Detective” brings me a list of the books and I quickly find Book 12, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, and add that to the list as well.

I sadly note that not all the series in the books are available as eBooks, which reminds me of one of the drawbacks. While 3,000 may sound like a lot of books, it barely taps the possibilities. EBooks are still in their infancy and you might not find what you want … yet.

I also wish for more flexible search options. So many times I can remember bits and pieces about a book, but not the structured data like “Author” or “Title.”

But for now, I’ve found a few things that fit the bill and so it’s time to check out. I enter my library card number and I’m ready to rock and read.

I use the Kindle reader on my iPad. I’ve used several reader applications and for a million tiny reasons, I keep coming back to Kindle. I like the physical form of my iPad, but the Kindle reader app has nailed the eBook experience.

Happily, in September, Amazon and OverDrive announced Kindle eBook lending for the 11,000+ U.S. public and school libraries in the OverDrive network. Before this fall, you couldn’t check out a Kindle e-book, but Kindle’s owner Amazon finally worked out the kinks.

The library shows me the books I’m holding in my virtual arms. I click on each to check it out. But here’s another rub. You need an Amazon account. Remember, Amazon=Kindle.

With an account, you just log in and “get library book.” Without one, the only option you have is to, well, create one.  Or use a different format of reader. Creating an account is no big deal, but I wouldn’t have the energy to do it at 2 am. Luckily, I just log in to my existing account and I’m on my way.

I flip open my iPad again and open up the Kindle reader. Everything synchs. I turn off the light and settle into the pillows, for a nice mindless read.

Did you catch that? I turned OFF the light!

Yeah, that’s another nice thing about late night eBook reads – no light. How many times have you woken up bright light glaring in your eyes because you fell asleep while reading? Or woken up in the morning with Bitty Book Lite imprints on your face?

Libraries play an increasingly critical role in our digital information age. Paper books remain wonderful and I can’t imagine ever letting go completely. But eBooks add a whole other dimension to the mix.

Whether it’s a middle o’ the night read, a snowy day, a lack of transportation, or using the passage marking and notes functions of the applications, eBooks belong. Thanks to libraries, they belong to us ALL as well.

Click. Read well! And have a good night’s sleep!

I NEVER GAVE MUCH THOUGHT TO GEORGIA State University before. But now, well, a bit of glow comes from the name because I’ve been listening to a series of brief musical lessons on the history of jazz.

Hmm, I guess I better connect a few dots here. It starts with iTunes U.

In 2007, Apple launched the space as a way for schools to private-label a download space for podcasts. It provided an application for higher education to communicate within itself. However, in the digital world things have away of taking on a life of their own – and iTunes U did exactly that.

In the intervening four years several trends converged:

• The nature of education took a turn as some schools started to think about ways to extend and increase their brand and visibility.
• On the information-yearns-to-be-free front, the concept of public courseware began to catch on fire.
• The iTunes store became mainstream.
• Mobile devices sprouted like so many traveling weeds.

The result? In early September iTunes U reached 600 million downloads of material representing more than a thousand schools around the world — and Jazz Insights from Dr. Gordon Vernick, Associate Professor of Music at Georgia State University landed in my library.

Like Apple says in its current promotion: learn anything, anytime, anywhere.

Many lessons lie within iTunes U (ooh, that’s a pun that I couldn’t resist!) Seriously, take a few minutes to traverse these digital hallowed halls of downloadable learning at http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/ and you’ll find not only courses, but also a crash course and what does and doesn’t work in this format.

First off, check out the breadth – both in source and topics. This isn’t about big name US Ivies. Community colleges and schools and from multiple countries appear.

Lesson notes: If you thought education meant a handful of institutions, a few minutes with iTunes U quickly reminds you that education comes from a diverse and global universe.

Yup, there’s the expected Stanford and UC Berkely and MIT and Harvard … but there’s also Jefferson Community College (Watertown NY) and Madison Area Technical College (Madison WI) as well as Trinity College in Dublin Ireland, Universite de Lausanne, and Univerisida Rey Juan Carlos.

Some schools use the space as a way to channel internal communications and marketing – one of my favorite titles Brown is Green – turned out to be a pitch for one of Brown University’s programs. I love that schools actively use lots of different channels to reach prospective parents, students, and staff, as well as alumni.

However, to see what makes iTunes U more than just an interesting application for schools, take a browse through all the courses, lectures, and presentations posted here. For you. For free.

A few quick examples …

• Utah Valley University (Orem UT) takes a stab at distance learning with classes like POLY 420 – State Legislative Process
• Oxford University records its Critical Reasoning for Beginners course.
• MIT, through its OpenCourseware project, has a huge suite of courses including Professor’s Marvin Minksy’s The Society of Mind
• Harrisburg Area Community College (PA) podcasts lectures like HIST 101, World History: Becoming Human with Professor Richard Moss.

And of course, there is the aforementioned Jazz Insights from Georgia State University. But don’t stop at these. I liked the currated collections as a gateway to cool stuff: Entrepreneurship. For History Buffs. Economic Insights. Physics for All. The Middle East. 101: Intro College Classes. Noteworthy.

It turns out that not all materials present equally well – and in that lies a lesson about how to prepare for the media.

For example, although the OpenCourseware materials cover amazing ground, their format of a microphone in the lecture hall alone … well, let’s just say that listening to Professor Minsky through iTunes U feels a bit like sitting in the hall outside the classroom straining to hear thorugh the closed door. Great material, but not the ideal way to experience it.

Lectures recorded as podcasts specifically, like Professor Moss’ history lecture, provide a strong audio experience. I felt like I was getting the voiceover to a power point, but at least I moved from the hall back to the same room with the class.

Production expertise clearly makes a difference. For example, both the jazz series and Harvard’s excellent Justice series were co-produced by radio and television partners. The jazz series combines music, voice, and a keen sense of pacing into a clean produced package. The Justice series uses well-recorded video to produce – but not over-produce – Professor Michael Sandel’s lectures at Sanders Theater.

Some schools take the step of combining the audio with online workbooks. Want to learn Russian? Check out UCLA’s Beginning Russian, which combines short lectures and actual spoken language examples with a web-based workbook – http://www.russian.ucla.edu/beginnersrussian/.

The audio tutorials, tied into interactive website and a recommended text really do combine to make you a student in the class. Well, expect for that grade and credit thing!

Of course, as well all know, the teacher matters. Check out the Holloway Poety Series from UC Berkley or Whats New in Poetry – Readings from the Poetry Council at Emory University, where each session is as good or, well, as less good, as the poetry reader.

Education has long reached back into the community. I guess that’s one reason I smiled when I spotted BackYard Farmer. The University of Nebraska/Lincon has been producing Backyard Farmer since 1953. But time hasn’t stopped — and Nebraska, along with its production partner, rebroadcasts the 2011 edition of show in iTunes U, turning its panel of insect, turf, and other experts into a digital export.

I also take it as a sign of hope for the world – and yes, with 60% of its audience international in nature iTunes U does reflect the world — that digital multimedia can actually mean more than YouTube’s latest-cute-dog or current-gruesome-unmentional-actstop 20. The iTunes U collection doubled its download volume in the past 12 months. Maybe this learning thing is catching on!

OK, class, your turn now. Tap your way to check out the physics of football, overview of autism, intermediate French, the fall of the Roman Empire, or climate modeling … and meanwhile I’m going back to GSU to learn about Lester Young.