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.

San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle: Build­ing a bet­ter box for the world’s data. Excerpt:

Libraries might store both
the hard­ware and soft­ware for play­back — like an old phono­graph that
plays wax records — a tac­tic called encapsulation.

What­ever the approach, it should have started yes­ter­day and now must
run faster to keep up with tomor­row because, as Keller said,
“everybody’s a cre­ator, everybody’s a publisher.”

That’s why I con­tinue to use Our­me­dia and the Inter­net Archive — a non­profit devoted to long-term preser­va­tion — for pub­lish­ing my videos, given that many of the 600-plus com­mer­cially dri­ven video host­ing sites will be out of busi­ness in a few years.