This morning the San Francisco Chronicle ran a story on the battle to keep open fires at San Francisco's Ocean Beach. "Park Superintendent Brian O'Neill decided about a year ago that enough was enough and banned beach fires. That didn't sit well with the public, which sent more than 3,000 letters and e-mails protesting the decision," via Save Ocean Beach "The Ocean Beach Foundation took up the cause, joining Burners Without Borders and Surfrider in suggesting that local artists design fire pits." Ocean Beach Foundation and the original Save Ocean Beach are volunteer project of the CivicActions team.

Two weeks ago, we jumped in to assist the draft Al Gore movement to launch the new AlGore.Org. It went live this morning just in time for Al to get an Oscar tonight. And, our 'Dean Bat' is moving up nicely tonight. Way to go team - special thanks to Ken Jordan, Owen Barton, Doug Green and Amy Woloszyn!

7th Most Popular Amazon Tag

I ran across this post on O'Reilly about tagging - it referred to our Amazon tagging experiment with our Defective by Design campaign (for the Free Software Foundation). I ended up poking around Amazon and discovered that we are currently the 7th most popular tag now on Amazon - after one alert to our membership.

The Archimedes Movement, a project of the Foundation for Medical Excellence, initiated by former Oregon state Governor John Kitzhaber, will launch a new website on December 5th that will support their goal of changing the way that people think about and work toward universal health care. The site, designed to maximize the effectiveness of online and in-person activism taking place all over the state, includes features such as document forums where members can discuss and suggest changes to proposed legislation, and a Chapter section, where members in a defined geographic area can call and publicize meetings, post and generate dialog about meeting notes, and post stories, blog posts, photos and other content that is specific to a given area.

On saturday I attended RootsCampNYC, and unconference dedicated to debriefing on the elections with a decidedly technological flavor. I shot some video with a Samsung SC-210 digital video camera (that I am returning tomorrow because it doesn't play well with Mac despite what the box says.) The video above is a short interview with Sanford Dickert. I've got a few more videos up on YouTube.

Is it about privacy or transparency? Or just colossal failure of judgement? On Monday, AOL admitted making a 2-GB file with the search records of 658,000 people available for public download -- exactly the sort of information the DOJ sought, and failed, to force Google to provide under the guise of protecting children. Recall that AOL, MSN and Yahoo all buckled to the pressure and released the information. The AOL data represented 1.5% of the search users in May, who were identified by number and not username, but whose vanity searches and map directions give them away. Reportedly, law enforcement officials are scouring the data for potential malfeasance. The Blogosphere was aflame last night.

Couldn't be said better than a screenshot...

Thanks.

Evolve Strategies has developed a Web-based “widget� to collect and report election incidents that may require voter protection intervention. VoterStory.org is an open-source utility that can be placed on any website to feed data into a central database, which in turn alerts voter protection groups each time a new incident is reported in their district.

Free Range Graphics (makers of 'The Meatrix') have produced another great video about the dangers of PVC (aka Vinyl) in the home. Did you know that PVC, the material used in shower curtains and kids’ toys, is dangerous to our health and our environment? Free Range produced the video for the Center for Health, Environment & Justice (CHEJ). This new movie is part of a national campaign asking Target Stores to phase out the poison plastic and switch to safer, cost effective alternatives, as other retailers have done.