TroySchneider.com

We've been playing with TileMill at New America as we do more with mapping and data visualization. Much of this work has been spearheaded by the good folks at DevelopmentSeed, but this sample below is entirely home-grown. (We're learning!)

As Thursday’s congressional hearing and the Army’s own investigation have made clear, the dysfunctions at Arlington Cemetery go much deeper than the antiquated record-keeping. Yet that lack of a real tracking and mapping system clearly contributed to the errors detailed by Washington Post reporters -- and the fact that 11 years, 35 contracts and $5.5 million have failed to produce a usable database is appalling in its own right.

OK, this is ridiculous. In the interim since my last post, I could have had a baby -- except, y'know, for that whole being-male thing.

So this post is to officially shame myself into re-thinking and re-tooling the site. Either start posting again, or change things around to pull in my updates from elsewhere. Or maybe both.

I did a quick interview yesterday with Etopia News Now on feed-in tariffs and the event New America is convening Friday in partnership with the Washington Monthly:

Quite possibly the coolest visualization ever* -- showing edits to the OpenStreetMap project during 2008.

Click here for details on the project itself. H/T to Eric & Jeff for the link.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

* I was going to say "the coolest visualization of open source ever," but a) that may not be a very high bar, and b) that sounds ridiculously geeky, even for me....

1. Market a line of dog products that ostensibly "feature the newest, toughest, and lightest materials to help keep your dogs (sic) beds and accessories lasting for years," and use the tag line, "Just try to chew through this."

2. Sell products that, in actuality, are remarkably easy for dogs to shred.

The New America Foundation, like half the sites on the web, makes extensive use of embedded YouTube videos. We long ago made the decision to use YouTube as our de facto video hosting service -- both for the added exposure it offers to New America events, and for the simple reason that the cost of storing and streaming our hundreds of hours of video was more than the organization could afford.*

This evening, though, I hopped over to NewAmerica.net and was greeted with the unpleasant surpise of YouTube search boxes plastered atop every one of our embedded videos. Apparently this "feature" was unveiled last month, but must have been rolled out gradually -- because at 6pm, our homepage looked like this:

and at 11pm it looked like this:

Such is life when you're relying on free web services and third-party APIs, but it's definitely not the look we're looking for. And the effect was even worse on our event pages, where the video search box appeared almost directly below our site search box -- making things confusing as well as clunky.

Luckily, Google is pretty good about making this stuff optional -- it'd be nice if such "improvements" were opt-in rather than opt-out, but it's an easy fix.

The New America Foundation -- the think tank that signs my paychecks -- is hosting an event next Tuesday with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, focusing on tech policy, the economy and open government.

Schmidt, who chairs New America's board of directors and is also serving on President-Elect Barack Obama's Transition Economic Advisory Board, will be speaking at 1pm at the Ronald Reagan Building. From the official announcement:

Schmidt will explore the ways in which technology can help the new administration and Congress address two of the biggest challenges ahead: generating the kind of short- and long-term economic and job growth that can help pull the nation out of financial distress, and restoring public trust in government. He will offer specifics on such topics as the need to build a 21st Century Infrastructure, support for research and innovation, repairs for our education system, and ways to make the government more open and responsive.

The event will be webcast live, or you can RSVP to attend in the flesh at http://www.newamerica.net/events/2008/eric_schmidt. Should be a good discussion...

Over on CapitalGainsandGames.com today, Andrew Samwick makes the case for increasing the gas tax -- and pairing that hike "with a reduction in the payroll tax rate that fully offsets the revenue increase." As he puts it:

At a very basic level, you get less of what you tax and more of what you don't. Looking at our long-term energy needs, every little bit of energy conservation helps. Looking particularly at our short-term macroeconomic needs, we would like to increase the returns [on] work. Both the payroll tax and the gas tax are thought to be regressive, so on balance, we are not doing much.

... from the Media Future Now lunch discussion on the state of the (online) economy.