McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: May 12th Edition

• "These are all solvable problems. Smart people, motivated to make things better, can do almost anything."
• Nest’s Tony Fadell on Smart Objects, and the Singularity of Innovation. I like his thoughts on how it takes heavily-integrated companies to provide the innovative solutions, although I suspect I've a more open approach to how they should also enable others to integrate with them.
• The Enervation Precinct. This article is about rebuilding Christchurch in New Zealand, but equally applies to almost any innovation-through-regeneration projects anywhere.
• Digital civic space – the diagram. Catherine seems to be finding some interesting subject areas and making some interesting findings. I particularly like her four qualities of digitally active citizens.
• Land of Impunity. Culture isn't what you say, it's what you do. This is the real problem in politics, fix the lack of accountability and lots of UKIP and the like's "support" will disappear.
• URLy warning and Chrome obfuscates the URLs, Google benefits. Two good blog posts about Google's Chrome browser experimenting with hiding the web address and why that is a bad move. It's moves like this that are part of the reason that Firefox remains my default browser, and why I try to limit the amount the holds Google has over my life. They are becoming too powerful, regardless of whether or not they're using that power responsibly.
• Letter [to Google] from Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer. The great Internet serendipity engine in full effect. A long, but well thought through exposition of some of my concerns from the previous list item.
• The myth of the science park economy. Not sure I agree with all of the analysis in here, but there's lots of good stuff about innovation, science parks, university technology transfer, etc.
• The question of Civic Pride and Community. A mild-mannered manifesto for being a citizen. The world needs more people like Emma.