Justin.tv is live-streaming the Democratic Rules Committee hearing on seating of the Michigan and Florida delegrates. Clinton mouthpiece Harold Ickes is berating the committee right now, with Clinton's yahoo supporters in the crowd cheering him on. "Mrs. Clinton has instructed me that we reserve our right to take this to the credentials committee" at the convention.

Meantime, this is pretty apt today: Young Hillary Clinton, on FunnyorDie:

LA Times: Sun staff and executives hang out in Second Life.

Sun Microsystems, which
makes computer servers and software, owns seven islands in Second Life,
two of which are open to the public. The rest are used for training
sessions and meetings. During its biggest event, a 12-hour corporate
meeting held in April, 14 of Santa Clara-based Sun's top executives
hobnobbed with hundreds of employees. Alpine skiing, car racing, live
jazz and a sandbox were also part of the event. ...

Sun decided to hold the event after it acquired software company MySQL,
which tracks its corps of employees by the 110 airports they live near,
rather than their actual locations. Sun was looking for a way to
introduce the MySQL employees to their Sun colleagues, and Second Life
seemed the best solution.

San Jose Mercury News: Business is booming in virtual worlds.

Like most people, I've wasted quite a few cycles over the years trying to schedule meetings with co-workers and business contacts. Typically we'd exchange a half-dozen emails zeroing in on a time and then the last person finally weighs in says, nope, can't meet that day.

So I was delighted when Pat Aufderheide, Professor and Director of the Center for Social Media at American University, set up a conference call with me and two of her colleagues by using an online tool called Doodle at http://doodle.ch/main.html Within minutes, we had our meeting scheduled, Web 2.0 style — the way it should be.

I've been looking for something like this for years. There are others out there but none I've found that do it so cleanly and simply.

In this 8-minute video interview I conducted Wednesday at the NetSquared conference -- notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company -- founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com, a young startup that hopes to make a business in part by helping the public gain public access to public records. The company has already licensed its mapping technology to at least one news publication.

Central to YourMapper's plan is an open API, which can prove incredibly powerful when paired with the proper datasets. Schneurle even waged a months-long battle with Kentucky officials wielding only the Freedom of Information Act before the state attorney general came down on his side.

As I said in my new post at the IdeaLab, it's time to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing a gatekeeper role and releasing stories through the editorial process -- but rarely releasing the raw data itself.

News organizations ought to create their own open APIs that give users access to public records in their communities. And this is the important twist: Instead of just making the data available internally, for its staff to analyze and reinterpret, news publications ought to bring readers and users into such efforts.

As I said in Tuesday's post, this is all about enlisting users in a collaborative effort to tap into rich sources of information about what's happening in local communities. Political contributions, birth records, neighborhood crime, housing sales -- data is cool and interesting when interpreted and presented in an engaging way.

Call it data jockey crowdsourcing. I'll wager we'll see scores of such efforts in the coming years.

NetSquared contacts

Here are some of the other people I met at NetSquared:

Nick Reville, executive director of Miro

David Selsky, Democracyinaction.org

Darian Rodriguez Heyman, executive director, Craigslist Foundation

Michael Litz, CEO, US, Oneworld.net

Mike Culver, Amazon Web Services

Peter Deitz and Christine Egger, SocialActions.com

Sean Tanner, Research Director MAPLight.org

Jon Warnow, Step It Up (and its new incarnation)

Peggy Duvette, co-director, Natural Capital Institute

Jill K. Finlayson, Web marketing manager, Social Edge

Ephrat Bitton, founder, iCare

Cesar Castro, research director, The Institute for the Future

Wendy Turner, General Manager, Vocalo.org

Holly Ross, executive director, NTen (Nonprofit Technology Network)

Ben Rattray, founder & CEO, Change.org

Bobby Fishkin, CEO, Reframeit.com

Despite the growing availability of other formats for reading-such as
online or with an e-book reader or PDA, the vast majority of readers
still like to read the old-fashioned way: 82% said they prefer to curl
up with a printed book over using the latest in reading technology, a
new Random House/Zogby poll shows.

Here's a free 13-page PDF report by Zogby on the Reading and Book Buying Habits of Americans.

The Google blog asks, What makes a site Googlely? And offers these top 10 tips:

1.    Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2.    Every millisecond counts.
3.    Simplicity is powerful.
4.    Engage beginners and attract experts.
5.    Dare to innovate.
6.    Design for the world.
7.    Plan for today's and tomorrow's business.
8.    Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9.    Be worthy of people's trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Terry Heaton riffs on how broadcasters are missing the target. Excerpt:

Media websites were designed by traditional media types concerned about maintaining their brand in a multi-platform world.

Personal media software was designed by web people concerned about the Web, communicating, and the creation of new brands.

At PBS MediaShift, Mark Glaser takes a look at newspaper print veteran Andrew Malcolm's rebirth as a political blogger at LATimes.com with Top of the Ticket.

From the citizen media site GroundReport comes this interesting March 28 panel on politics, technology and the 2008 election, moderated by Jeff Jarvis with  Arianna Huffington, Jay Rosen, Micah Sifry and Lisa Tozzi. Don't like the website, though. Where's the place for conversation?

It's hard to keep up with all the updates from your Twitter friends, right? (I'm at twitter.com/jdlasica.) Here's an application that makes it easier: Twhirl. Several of my Twitter friends have recommended it, and I'm liking it better than Twitterific, another desktop client for Twitter.

You may not have heard of Adobe AIR, but SheGeeks offers a list of cool, lightweight AIR applications -- including Twhirl, WebKut, Shrink O'Matic and others -- that have the potential to tubocharge your productivity. Or your fun quotient.