Hello Readers,

If you happen to subscribe to this blog through RSS, you’ll notice that we changed our feed from a summary view causing you to click to see the whole story to a full post feed. This was changed due to input we had that people hated the summary. The feed address remains the same as does the subscription mechanism. Hope you enjoy the change.

Mike

Do you know a dead spot in your mobile phone network’s coverage? If so, here’s a chance to share it with the world. Signal Map Beta (their tag line is “Beta is an understatement”) allows you to see network coverage as reported by users superimposed on a Google map. You can zoom it, select all carriers or a single carrier, and add your expertise to the map (you are encouraged to do this, it’s easy and kind of fun.)

This is one of the more useful mashups I’ve seen.

And therein lies the problem with faith-based leadership. We need many more philosophers and could stand to lose a few of the others…

Originally posted at Montara Energy Ventures:

In the past few days, North Carolina and Illinois have joined the 21 other states (and the District of Columbia) in adopting renewable portfolio standards. The basic idea behind an RPS is that a certain percentage of electricity must be delivered by renewable resources within some time frame. The California RPS for instance dictates that 20% of the state’s electricity must come from renewable sources by 2010, presently it’s 14%. Utilities, Municipal Districts, and Direct Access providers are tasked with ensuring the percentage is met and will be fined $50 per MWh for non-compliance up to $25M per entity per year.

North Carolina’s RPS targets a 12.5% RPS by 2021. An interesting twist is that NC is looking to achieve 40% of that through conservation and efficiency. Illinois is a more standard RPS targeting 25% by 2025 with milestones along the way every few years.

Yesterday I got an email from Herb at Me.dium, it turns out we have a connection in common. Herb wanted to let me know about Me.dium’s new widget release. A few months ago I tried the widget in Firefox on a Mac and it was pretty unstable, thus I had it turned off. Herb’s note prompted me to try it again and lo and behold, it’s much better behaved and pretty interesting.

What is Me.dium? It’s a community browsing widget that associates users in real-time on a visual pane on the browser side panel. Practically, that means that as you browse, others who are browsing similar content show up on the panel, conversations can ensue, and recommendations about other interesting content can be shared. It’s pretty cool. The screenshot below shows a full Firefox window with Me.dium side panel active:

Since that’s a big screen shoved into a small area, I’ve captured some closeups as well. The image below shows the visual users panel (what you don’t see is that this is constantly moving and changing as your browsing proceeds and as associated users move from content area to content area.)



Concerned about privacy? I am to some extent, particularly when I access password protected content. Herb & Co. have thought this through and protect you automatically. See an example below when I visited my Google Webmaster Tools account:



Overall, I think this is a pretty cool tool. Now that it’s stable in my browser, I’ll try it for an extended period and report back anything I find interesting. I have to wonder if a Me.dium-vision ala Twittervision is in the works. I could imagine a virtual map of the web where bits and pieces move, grow, contract, connect, comment as the Me.dium community browses in real time. What value does this have? I don’t know, but it would be fascinating to watch!

Download the Me.dium widget and give it a whirl.