So if you’re up for a little digital community engagement, let’s use Googles own tools to show them we’re serious about the future in Worcester.

Listening to NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday, I caught Ben Berkowitz, the co-founder of seeclickfix.com talking about his company and how they plan to revolutionize the reporting of crime and grime issues to municipal agencies via smartphones. SCF uses the GPS on your smartphone to tag everything from potholes to prostitutes, ensures the city is aware of the problem, mashes all the data up in google maps and issues “Civic Points” for your efforts creating a sort of city wide competition.

Interested, I hopped on over to the site to poke around and it seems that not only have a handful of Worcesterites been using the site for about a year, but it looks like the Worcester DPW is already linked into the service and apparently receiving complaints and issuing work orders through the site. Which is excellent, but a little strange considering it was only last July that Councilor Rushton was requesting we create just such a service for Worcester. Guess we can skip the RFP on this one…

So if you like the idea of bugging municipal employees while on the go, seeclickfix.com currently has apps available for the iphone, blackberry and android.

Update: I threw a SCF widget up on this page so people could see how the local data looks in action.

What is Google doing and what does it seek to achieve?

Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web, and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York. Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3D video of a university lecture. Universal, ultra high-speed Internet access will make all this, and more possible. We’ve urged the FCC to look at new, and creative ways to get there in its National Broadband Plan – and now we’re announcing an experiment of our own.

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City officials had been talking about looking into installing a temporary system to make and maintain ice so the skating oval could be used this winter, but nothing materialized.

Back when I was a kid they called that temporary system “winter”.

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Millions of copies will be sold of a book written by someone who can’t write, intended for an audience that doesn’t read, about the thoughts of a person who doesn’t think. God is dead.

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Disaffected youth of Worcester, bookmark this video for use next time Worcester Officials try and tell you skateboarding is a crime. If it’s good enough for a congressman, it’s good enough for you.

The whole clip is pretty great, but for the extra excellent Worcester Rep on wheels skip to the 5:20 mark.

In 1979 the American Antiquarian Society purchased a small hard-covered account book containing a daily log from January 1, 1869 to June 2, 1870.  Clues of the anonymous diarist’s identity began to reveal themselves in his cursive scrawl: a young blacksmith apprentice from Stow, Massachusetts working in Medfield.

That diary is now coming back to life in the form of a blog with each entry represented by a new post.
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From the American Antiquarian Societies new Past is Present blog.