Google

Watch Streets Evolve From Car-Focused to People-Focused

- Adam Clare

they-keep-tabs-on-urban-transformation-blogs-and-architectural-projects-so-they-know-where-to-check-on-google-street-view

Streets were for people, then cars took over and ruined cities. For the last hundred years cities transformed themselves from walkable places to sprawling buildings which were designed for heavy car use. Now, cities have seen how that’s a mistake.

A design firm, Urb-i, has used Google street view to catalog how cities are making themselves good places to be. Hopefully this trend of making cities human-focused instead of car focused continues!

In São Paulo, Brazil — which boasts over 10 million residents — a third of the people travel by car, another third takes public transit, and another walks. Yet cars take up a majority of the roads and public spaces.

Seeing that, a Brazilian urban planning collective called Urb-i set out to demonstrate that imbalance and show off examples of more people-friendly design. They scoured Google Street View images to find the most stunning public space transformations from around the world. The results give us hope that our cities are becoming more beautiful places to live.

See more.

Ecosia: A Search Engine That Plants Trees

- Adam Clare

Ecosia is a search engine that is trying to make the world better. Every time you search the net on their site a good percentage of ad revenue is used to pay for planting trees in Brazil. Their goal is one million new trees in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest by August 2014 (as of posting they are at 219,695 trees planted).

It’s another Google competitor with a good focus. There is also Duck Duck Go which prides itself on its privacy policies as a reaction to Google’s pervasive reach.

Hopefully Ecosia and Duck Duck Go will encourage other Google competitors or perhaps even Google itself will modify its operations.

Google Launches Deforestation Watch

- Adam Clare

Global Forest Watch is a new project from Google to highlight the deforestation that has been happening around the planet since the year 2000. Google is working with a lot of organizations to bring this information to light (including the World Resources Institute).

Global Forest Watch’s most valuable feature, developers say, is that it can be updated with new information every month, detecting “changes in forest cover in near-real-time.”

“Now that we have the ability to peer into forests, a number of telling stories are beginning to emerge,” Google said in a blog post.

The tool could change the way forests are managed, said Andrew Steer, president and chief executive of the World Resources Institute, in a statement.

From the LA Times.

Google to Catalog Languages

- Adam Clare

The Endangered Languages Project is a new initiative run by Google to catalog languages that are threatened because of globalization. As nice as it is that the people on the planet are finding more languages in common, we still need to encourage people to embrace languages that aren’t as popular.

“We have so many languages which are in danger of dying, and though there has been work done by linguists to document these languages, there are nowhere near enough linguists to do that,” said Anthony Aristar, professor of linguistics and co-director of the Institute for Language Information and Technology at Eastern Michigan University, which helped create the site.

“It’s not just a matter of documenting the languages, it’s also a matter of revitalizing them if we possibly can.”

As part of the effort to revive dying languages, the website will use video, audio and social media tools to connect speakers with each other and with those who want to learn their language.

Read more.

Why We Went Down Yesterday

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

Yesterday you probably noticed that most of your favourite websites were down yesterday or had a notice up warning you about two bills in front of the American government. Those bills are SOPA and PIPA and essentially if these bills pass the internet would be all but dead to American citizens and beyond!

Here’s a video by the Kahn Academy explaining the bills:

So why is this on a website dedicated to good news? Here’s why:

Never forget that when people work together stupid policies and backwards thinking from old corporate powers (who are being replace by new and better technical solutions) can be stopped! Just look at how people also stopped the Keystone XL pipeline!

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