At the Frontlines of the Global Transition
Here’s a great example of how to deploy Internet technology and interactivity to conserving farmland. The Michigan Land Use Institute just posted the latest version of our Taste The Local Difference Web site, which links buyers of local farm products to sellers. Here’s a new facet of the site that enables wholesale suppliers and buyers to connect very quickly on the Web, an online wholesale market as it were.  Just great work by the Institute’s …
If you’re plugged into Google Earth then check out how the Jane Goodall Institute blogs. Talk about moving people towards a subject. Just click on the “blog entry” link to each post. This is a terrific application of online reporting and experiential graphics. We’re looking into how to emulate it here at Mode Shift.
Not long after he earned a graduate degree in journalism from Northwestern University Carl Ganter made a name for himself here in Traverse City, his hometown, as a young writer and photojournalist with an unerring grasp for great stories, and a superb eye for color, light, character, and drama. He could make an ordinary windmill, its blades lit against a dramatic dawn sky, look like the most exotic piece of energy technology ever invented. His wife, Eileen Ganter, …
Flip, you may recall, is this blog’s effort to call out particularly good applications of interactive multi-media to the exquistely difficult work of reshaping America’s resource-wasting and demoralizing patterns of development. To an extent that is at once stupefying and aggravating most American communities have zoned themselves into corners of the 20th century — stressing separateness, division, car dependence, racial purity, and income stratification — that make no sense fot the mashup that is the 21st century. Put another …
[youtube]V6MKYnBULyg[/youtube] The work to make the nation’s metropolitan regions greener, cleaner, and more energy efficient is too often impeded by the overly earnest language of the movement. Sustainlane.com is trying to break through the wall of techno-legal-political speak with its Unsustainables, an animated series broadcast on the Internet. According to the Sustainlane.com’s editors, the Unsustainables “depicts the lives of a blended family in a modern urban environment. Each segment centers around our characters who, like …
If you’re interested in what happens beyond the borders of the United States, then you also know that an awful lot of what’s reported as foreign news is distilled through the filter of government to government action, diplomat to diplomat negotiation. A different kind of communication is now available on the Internet, which fills that huge space between the conversation among international elites and the conversation occurring at the grassroots. Few Web sites are doing that …
The Center for American Progress, a centrist left policy think tank in Washington, prepared this very useful and nifty online compendium of how 2008 presidential campaigns are using the Web. The NetTrends ’08 matrix is a one stop shop for Republicans and Democrats, and anybody else for that matter, to stay abreast of trends in online campaigning. NetTrends ’08 also is the best example I’ve found of how politics, communications technology, and the Internet have converged to make it much simpler …
I can see already that one of the principal activities of Mode Shift is to make a difference in the 2008 presidential campaign, not by convincing readers to vote for a particular candidate but by helping to make the case for public priorities that deserve to be treated seriously. Resource conservation, public transportation, metropolitan patterns of development, global climate change, healthy food, and land conservation merit attention. And it’s our responsiblity as writers to frame the issues in a way …
The Los Angeles Conservancy, the largest local historic preservation group in the United States, produced a terrific online multi-media exhibit of Wilshire Boulevard called Curating the City. Using motion graphics, mapping, text, photographs, and digital hotspots, the program explores the history and geography of one of the nation’s iconic roadways, the West Coast equivalent of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue or Philadelphia’s Broad Street. What’s so cool about this example of multi-media storytelling is how quickly it loads …
Ryan Burke is a student at the University of North Carolina who until Valentine’s Day this year rolled through his undergraduate career in a veil of unmistakable obscurity. But this is the age of social media, when ubiquitous video cameras, email, and the Internet can vault creative instinct to unimaginable heights of notoriety. YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and legions of video file-sharing sites have enabled young people to reveal, expose, share, and broadcast every aspect of their lives. Social media is responsible for …