JeffreyBarke.net

A List Apart's third annual survey:

For the third year in a row, good citizens of the web, we ask that you take a few minutes to tell us about your professional skills, educational background, career prospects, job benefits, and more.

Fat Lab challenged NYC Resistor to a war! From 15 Feb—15 March we'll be tracking Web site hits, YouTube views, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, RSS subscribers, etc.! Whichever team posts the biggest gain wins! Grading to be conducted by Internet Famous Class technology.

The official war page with preliminary stats is available at http://internetfamo.us/war/.

Help NYC Resistor win!

• Sign up for the NYCR Facebook group.
• Follow NYCR on Twitter to receive frontline dispatches.
• Digg our stuff!
• Tell your friends!

Change.org is a citizen-driven effort to identify the best ideas to effect the change the Obama Administration has promised. Anyone can go to http://change.org/ideas and submit a policy idea, discuss with others and vote on the best ideas from around the country.

Just before Inauguration Day, Change.org will host an event in Washington, DC and hand-deliver the top 10 rated ideas to a representative of the Obama Administration. They'll then mobilize the collective energy of the millions of people on Change.org, MySpace and partner organizations to ensure that each winning idea gets the full consideration of the administration and the 111th Congress.

OneWebDay, the Earth Day of the internet, has submitted a proposal to make OneWebDay a national day. Please review their full proposal below, and, if you support it, vote for it at Change.org.

The idea behind OneWebDay is to focus attention on a key Internet value (universal access and digital literacy in 2009), focus attention on local Internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills) and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the Internet. OneWebDay is like an Earth Day for the Internet, celebrated every September 22 since 2006! We are building an organization that works like the Web: an open platform that supports collaboration on annual projects that educate and activate a broad range of communities about issues that are important for the Internet's future.

In recognition of President-elect Obama's deep understanding of the power of the Internet and his stated pledge to bring "true broadband to every community in America," we hope that the new Administration will recognize OneWebDay and partner with us in 2009 to organize a week of national (and global) service to bring more access and skills to communities that are still left behind in the new digital world.

Tomorrow is the deadline! Please take action and vote at Change.org now!

Standardistas and accessibilitistas: This call to action via 456 Berea St concerns a disturbing direction the next HTML specification is heading. Roger Johansson writes:

What is currently going on in the W3C HTML Working Group is very disappointing and something I never expected to see when I joined it. I was naive enough to think that everybody joining the HTML WG would be doing so out of a desire to improve the Web. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case […]

In Roger's opinion, if nothing is done, "the next version of HTML will do nothing to improve the Web," and conscientious designers will be "better off sticking to HTML 4.01 Strict."

So, if you have an interest in improving the accessibility of HTML, want more semantic and less presentational markup, and are good at arguing your case, apply for HTML Working Group membership by following the instructions for joining the HTML Working Group. Do it now.

via Donna Genzmer:

All right, this is what I like to see: power to the people, public participation style, open source applications! gCensus was built by a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford University who was fed up with the slowly rendered, crappy display of the Census Bureau's online mapping interface. His question (our question): why can't people have access to dynamic, high-resolution maps without paying the ginormous bucks for professional GIS software? His answer: gCensus

It's "an effort to make geographic data freely and easily accessible to the public, without the need for expensive GIS software packages. With Google's excellent free mapping program Google Earth, you can use this site to visualize a wide variety of data best displayed on a map. Currently, only the US Census 2000's Summary File 1 (displaying population characteristics such as race and age) is available for mapping."

Right now, though, gCensus is more proof-of-concept than ready-to-release application. It needs to integrate more datasets, and it would probably benefit from other eyes looking at the code. So, here's the flip side to radical democracy—with free software comes great responsibilities. "The student" is looking for development help and hardware and hosting donations. Contact him at gcensus [at] gmail [dot] com and let's make this happen!