CityTracking. $400K. Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen Design, San Francisco, CA

The Cartoonist. $378K. Ian Bogost and Michael Mateas. Atlanta, GA.

Local Wiki. $350K. Philip Neustrom and Mike Ivanov. San Francisco, CA

WindyCitizen's Real Time Ads. $250K. Brad Flora, WindyCitizen.com. Chicago, IL.

GoMap Riga. $250K. Marcis Rubenis and Kristofs Blaus, GoMap Riga. Riga, Latvia.

Order in the Court 2.0. $250K. John Davidow, WBUR. Boston, Mass.

Front Porch Forum. $220K. Michael Wood-Lewis, Front Porch Forum. Burlington, VT.

One-Eight. $202K. Teru Kuwayama. Chicago, Ill.

Stroome. $200K. Nonny de la Pe–a and Tom Grasty, Stroome. Los Angeles, CA

CitySeed. $90K. Retha Hill and Cody Shotwell, Arizona State University. Phoenix, AZ.

PRX StoryMarket. $75K. Jake Shapiro, PRX. Boston, MA.

Tilemapping. $74K. Eric Gundersen, Development Seed. Washington, DC

 6/16/2010; 5:06:12 PM.   .

Just had an idea that with the new annotations feature coming soon in Twitter, we might have the means to bootstrap an Emergency Broadcast System.

Imagine if every tweet included info about where to find that users' status messages if Twitter is down. It could simply be the URL of a feed. Unless Twitter went down it would just be stored by your client. But if Twitter should go offline, at least you know how to find out what's going on with at least some of your associates.

The point is that with annotations we have the ability to create new ad hoc flows of information, and can possibly use it to make Twitter more reliable.

It's like having a place to meet your friends after a ballgame, or part of being prepared for an earthquake (I just landed in SF). You arrange for a meeting place if the normal lines of communication go down. You use the normal lines to transmit the place you will be found in cast the line goes down.

I guess it's something like DNS, where you always specify two servers and two hosts. If everything is working you only need one. But the network is designed to work even if everything isn't working.

Of course it's this line of reasoning that led me to the conclusion that Twitter should just run off DNS, and Twitter should be the Verisign of this network. But that's another story.

 6/16/2010; 10:34:02 AM.   .

From time to time people ask how I do the hand-drawn posts.

Why I do them:

1. They're fun.

2. I like to draw.

3. It's a neat way to use a scanner.

4. It's super low-tech.

5. They're eye-catching.

6. People like them.

7. They work.

Why do both lists have seven items?

1. Seven is the perfect number of items for a list.

2. Just kidding.

Dave

 6/16/2010; 1:26:32 AM.   .