Second Chance Trees

Oh, I love this. Another great example of how Second Life can help spark conversation, and foster real-world progress... in this case on the issue of reforestation. (from 3pointD)

Greening the urban fabric

Check out this post in BLDG on the New York Bike-Share Project. A fantastic idea—both convenient and human-scale. I'd love to see someone do this here in San Francisco.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas @ TED

Holy cow.

Memory lane

Also in Underwire this week, Edwin Tofslie's super cool poster showing the evolution of Apple product design from 1976 to the present.

SL Challenges Real World Bureaucracy

A great story from Underwire, suggesting how virtual worlds and, for that matter, contests, can enable positive social change:

"Frustrated with the lack of movement and community involvement with a plan to build a new garden in the central Halles area of Paris, local residents started a competition within Second Life to come up with possible designs for the real world location. While the association knows that the winning design (whose creator won 275,000 Linden dollars) won't be implemented because it doesn't consider real world conditions, they're hoping the competition will put pressure on the mayor to move this project along. It's been in talks since 2004."

Imagine if SL had existed a few years ago, while closed-door groups were debating what to do with Ground Zero...

Outside.in widget

I often tell clients that the two most exciting areas for innovation, across industries, are extreme local and global interconnectedness.

I've been working on an extreme local digital media report for awhile now, covering the latest platforms for networking and community building, only to discover repeatedly that Outside.in is already investing in many of the principles and features I've been looking for.

And this morning, thanks to my neighbor Sexy Widget, I see that Outside.in is opening up its site, with a widget that displays and accepts local news tied to the user's zip code:

"This widget has important implications for Outside.in for a number of reasons. On the distribution side, by freeing up its content so that it can show up anywhere, Outside.in has just sweetened the pot for local content publishers in terms of potential distribution reach. This is a big deal, as unlike Google News, Outside.in is not a crawler driven business. It relies on content that is manually and explicitly submitted via its site, and only after a registration.

There are also benefits on the marketing side. While the widget serves as a distribution platform for Outside.in content, it also serves as a marketing tool to attract more consumers and producers of local content." (Sexy Widget)

I'll be installing the widget myself and giving it a whirl later this week. I'll let you know what I think.