Via approxamately 30 million emails:

The folks over at RyanIsHungry, bring us Worldchanging‘s Jamais Cascio on nanomanufactoring, global warming, changing public discourse and the open source future. (Video Link)

It’s a quick video and it doesn’t say much that we haven’t touched on here, but it’s succinct and it touches on a variety of transfigurative technologies, both mechanical and political.

But wait, there’s more! Since we’re talking about Worldchanging, they also recently posted a cool article on Information Visualization. Of particular interest is Oakland Crimespotting, an information aggregator and visualization tool that pulls local crime data together into an explorable map with many different ways to integrate and explore the accumulated data.

In the words of the site itself:

If the local papers didn’t report a rash of car break-ins in your neighborhood, how would you know? The web opens up opportunities to find information without having to rely on which stories make it to the front page of the newspaper, or the lead story on the evening news. We need to be able to explore public information, to draw connections, and to see new possibilities for questioning. Crimespotting enables us to do more than search for the things we already know.

We believe that civic data should be exposed to the public in a more open way. With these maps, we hope to inspire local governments to use this data visualization model for the public release of many different kinds of data: tree plantings, new schools, applications for liquor licenses, and any other information that matters to people who live in neighborhoods.

This project is a work in progress; a way of discovering what kinds of questions we can ask.

That statement hits close to home for me, especially in its acknowledgment that one of the fantastic end results of being able to experience the information clouds around us in new ways is the ability to formulate new questions to ask.