Zack Rosen (of Civic Space Labs) offers advice for the News & Record's impendingonline rethink: "... look to Kos. He has a real community..."
In the comments to Jay Rosen's repost of his nephew's advice, Dave Winer takes exception to Zack's suggestion and champions a system that is closer to my take on the subject: "Zack proposes a centralized system, had Jay asked me I would advise as decentralized a system as possible..."
Uncle Jay came back in and asked Winer for his advice for my local newspaper, "...I am, in fact, asking you. What do you think Greensboro should do?"
This seems to be going pretty well so far, don't you think? Us Southerners learned how to make the white-washing of a fence sound pretty appealing many years ago. Pass me a another beer John and Lex, they'll be through soon enough and the fence will look just fine.
From the City of Greensboro's communications department to my inbox this morning:
"No garbage, recycling, bulk trash, yard waste, and appliance services will occur on Friday, December 31.Friday collection will take place on Thursday, December 30 and Thursday collection will take place on Wednesday, December 29."
Same as last week, which many households missed, which this week caused several neighbor's already full cans to now be over-flowing, then augmented with spare trash cans to accomodate the after-Christmas inundation of paper, packaging, beer cans and so forth. Tonight it will be piled high on the curb and the garbage collector's job will be harder because we didn't pay attention last week.
We, in the City of Greensboro, probably have the finest garbage collection department in the nation. Your realization that you've probably never thought about your garbage collection much is definitive proof of my statement.
The N&R says local governments are pondering where to first utilize their new 'borrowing' powers via the recently voter-approved 'tax increment bonds' known as Amendment One. I'm sure Wharton will weigh in on this soon enough, but we here in the Aycock Neighborhood have a slam-dunk project for Greensboro's new economic development tool.
The Aycock Neighborhood Strategic Plan (PDF file) calls for the Murrow Boulevard/Summit Avenue interchange to be done away with. Our plan for the area on the eastern border of Greensboro's Central Business District is ambitious and costly, but it would add 12.5 acres of wasted, fallow publicly owned land to be developed into a tax producing mixed-use development.
The bonds issued for repayment under Amendment One are to be repayed by the incremental increase on the property tax generated by Amendment One funded projects. The Murrow Boulevard interchange property is not on anyone's taxrolls so 'incremental tax increases' would be exponential.
Because of demographics and other factors, Aycock Square, as it it is currently known, would easily qualify under the bonds' guidlines (PDF file)as I understand them and assuredly be self-liquidating as stipulated by the breed of bond they are.
PressThink has put up what he believes to be the Top 10 Ideas for 2004 or "the year in press think, as it were". He's got some good ones but the discussion found below the post is better, validating idea #4: "My readers know more than I do."
On the perception that citizens are just now gaining access to media because of the internet (bloggers as journalists, a melding of Rosen's 'ideas' 1 - 3), commenter David Crisp reminds us that the idea and practices driving weblogs are hardly new, we are simply an electronically jazzed twist on an old citizen-as-journalist tradition in the US of A... Crisp gives us a brief history lesson, then this...
"...The bland monopoly press that most of us grew up with is a relatively recent phenomenon... The internet has revved up the process to an amazing degree, but what's happening isn't entirely new. Americans are now simply reclaiming the media diversity that the founding fathers saw as our birthright." (link)
Good point and validation. Perhaps we're not all that... perhaps we're all that used to be, which is now in need of resurgence. We simply got waylayed for a spell.
