A quick roundup of writing for the SF Weekly and Shareable.net, where I blog about social media, green tech, government 2.0, and guerrilla community building.

I’ve been previewing a lot of literary and arts events for the SF Weekly, including authors David Mitchell and Tony O’Neill, and street artist David Choe. Over at Shareable, I’m working on a series of posts about social news sites, and have posts up about the iPad app Flipboard and Google Reader’s new social features. I’ve also written recently about the intersections between crypto-forestry and guerrilla gardening.

New post for Shareable: Demanding Ethical Gadgets

Many of us share a creeping sense that our gadgets fund atrocities and injustices on the other side of the world. We read about suicides at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, or about the conflict minerals in our devices that have funded genocide in the Congo, register a brief sense of disgust, and move on. Every major technology company uses the same supply chain, sourcing conflict materials that are hewn into hot gadgets by people working in conditions that would be familiar to Upton Sinclair. The market solution would be to vote with our dollars, but that’s difficult when there isn’t really a choice.

Read the rest here

There’s a pretty fascinating thread about Facebook and the difference between how geeks vs. regular users experience it over on my Buzz feed. If such topics interest you, you should check it out.

A couple new previews for the SF Weekly: a reading by novelist T Cooper and the art opening for So Many Products, So Little Time: The Junk Mail Show.

Makeshift Lending Libraries: Building a more shareable urban community doesn’t necessarily require years of planning and grand initiatives. It can be as simple as turning defunct newspaper boxes or pay phone booths into community lending libraries.

Significant Objects: The Secret History of Products: Can an unwanted, discarded item of consumer kitsch be imbued with new value by the simple act of telling its story? And what if that story was completely fabricated? This is the question that Significant Objects poses.

Crowdsourcing Disaster Response: As oil continues to pour into the gulf, many of us feel overwhelmed, unable to respond usefully in the face of such devastation. Much has been made of the power of social media and mobile phones to organize people and spur fundraising efforts during times of crisis, but SMS donations only go so far.

Community Solutions to Food Deserts: One of the most confounding issues confronting urban planners, activists, and health food advocates in recent years is the Food Desert phenomenon: low-income urban areas in a city where fresh food is difficult to obtain.

Some new posts over at Shareable, where I’m blogging once a week:

Gadget Lust vs. Good Enough: When last year’s blazing tech becomes today’s e-waste, rendered obsolete by an ever-shortening hype cycle, when will we ever have enough?

Open Cities, Open Data: How do we get closer to a more shareable future? One promising route is the Open Data movement, initiatives to leverage the sheer bulk of data collected from city institutions and services and make them available to citizens who will leverage that data in innovative ways.

Is American Exceptionalism A Myth? Conventional wisdom states that individualism is coded within the very DNA of the American people. Since Ralph Waldo Emerson’s exceptionalism manifesto "Self-Reliance," the American character has defined itself by its iconoclasm. But are Americans actually uniquely individualistic in practice?

Some recent posts on Shareable.net, where I’m blogging on a weekly basis:

Can Diaspora* Take Down Facebook? With over 500 million users, Facebook isn’t merely ubiquitous–it’s the connective tissue that binds you to your friends, family, professional contacts and once-forgotten acquaintances. It’ll take a compelling challenger to take down Facebook. Four NYU students are stepping up, announcing Diaspora*, a fully open-source, privacy-minded alternative.

The Ecological Footprint of eBooks: As the iPad and Kindle become a growing concern, the debate over the environmental effects of print versus digital are again coming to the fore. The argument in favor of digital books makes intuitive sense: compared to a stack of dead trees printed upon using toxic chemicals, e-books must be greener. But in truth, things are a bit more complicated.

48 Hour Magazine: A Shareable Publication: A group of online media mavens resurrect the all-hours crunch of print publishing, while re-imagining the process for a shareable digital age.

Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus, Spring 2010: iPad eBook Preview from Paul M Davis on Vimeo.

I bought an ipad this weekend, and I adore it. This usually-reflexive-cynic is blown away. It makes reading digitally–be the source the Internet, an eBook, or Instapaper–a totally tactile, pleasant, satisfying reading experience. Unlike reading on a browser at a desktop, which I’ve always found vaguely dissatisfying and frustrating.

Totally pumped, I began work on an ebook anthology of work from Is Greater Than. This is a preview of the first Is Greater Than Digital Omnibus, an eBook designed for the iPad and other ePub-compatible eReaders. This is a very rough draft of what I hope to have submitted to the iBooks store and other eBook outlets by the end of the week. It will include features, art, comics, creative nonfiction, humor writing and fiction by myself, Brigid J. Barry, Jeff Severns Guntzel, Deb R. Lewis, Thomas Mundt, Carrie Sieh, Megan Stielstra and more.

I didn’t know a single thing about authoring epub ebooks before this weekend; it is ridiculously simple. Here’s a post I just wrote for Shareable.net about how you can make your own epub books (which, for the record Cory Doctorow et al, are as easy to drag and drop into iTunes and sync with the iPad, DRM-free, as mp3′s have been with every iteration of the iPod and iPhone since version one.) Read it here.

The new zinemaking is how I see it. Fuck yeah.

This post written on my iPad.

Just got back from a group workshop meeting for 2nd Story. If you’re not familiar, 2nd Story is a theater collective I’ve been working with that produces readings at wine bars around Chicago. The process is what sets it apart from other reading series: 2nd Story pull actors and directors from the theater world to workshop pieces of short narrative nonfiction with writers, to craft the stories and their performances into something that people at a wine bar will actually want to engage with while imbibing.

It’s challenging for me: frustrating, rewarding. All of my prior performance experience comes from playing in bands, where the only verbal interaction with the audience was short quips in-between songs. While performing the songs, the guitar served as a crutch separating myself from the audience, and I was performing practiced, relatively polished songs with a group of other people. We were delivering loud, complete products with clearly delineated beginnings and ends, barreling over chatter and indifference with unnecessarily loud amps.

Click here to read more »

View Full Album

I’m often amused, tickled, etc about things I come across while walking around Chicago, IL. This is a collection of pics I’ve too-long kept hidden on the private Facebook.