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.

My friends in San Francisco, I am now telling you what events you should attend, for the SF Weekly. My first calendar preview runs in this week’s issue, for a discussion featuring novelist Ben Greenman at City Lights Books. Should be a good event; check out the details and the preview here.

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?

A profile for the Santa Cruz Weekly on former Santa Cruz resident Emily Jane White, whose sophomore album, Victorian America, is excellent:

There’s a unique confidence to Emily Jane White’s songwriting: it’s at once sympathetic and tough-minded, reflective and unsentimental. Her work has been described as folk, which is reductive, considering how orchestrated her full-band arrangements are. While the music creates a contemplative space reminiscent of folk, White’s subject matter and musical touchstones transcend the woman-with-acoustic-guitar label that is inevitably applied to women with acoustic guitars, whether or not it fits.

Read the article at santacruz.com

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.

I’ll be live-chatting about the most important news item of the week (the LOST finale) on Wednesday, May 19 at 12 noon (central) on WBEZ/Chicago Public Radio’s Vocalo blog. Follow the chat and add your own comments here.

Last night I performed a new short story, “This One’s A Classic”, for 2nd Story at Morseland in Rogers Park, with musical accompaniment by Elvis Bride. A hilarious tale of personal failure, about the ill-fated Mule Train Pacific Northwest tour of 2005, which ended in a Wal-Mart parking-lot in Yreka, CA. Due to technical difficulties with the video-camera, this was shot on an iPhone, so it’s not the best-quality video or sound but still comes across quite well. Enjoy!

(Note: the first line of my performance was cut off in this video; so just imagine me yelling “This One’s A Classic!” in boastful old man voice before watching.)

I’m performing a brand-new short story for 2nd Story this Wednesday, April 28, at the Morseland. It is about the ill-fated Mule Train Pacific Northwest tour of 2005, which ended in a Wal-Mart parking-lot in Yreka, CA.

Here’s a teaser of the story:

“This one’s a classic,” Old-Timer Al said to us, sternly examining our VW Bus parked across three spaces in the Wal-Mart lot, yellow in the sun as a sea lion carcass. Tendrils of rust crept from the wheel wells. It was far from a classic.

“Sure is,” Kevin responded.

“All we need to do is sign over the title and it’s yours,” Cody said.

“I couldn’t let you boys do that,” Al said to us. “How much do you want for her?”

“Seriously, you can just have it for free if you take over the title.” All we wanted was to be rid of this damned bus, which we’d bought off an acquaintance a month earlier for $800. Still, Al wanted to haggle.

“Okay, how about $300″ Cody said.

“$150″ Al responded. “It’s a deal.”

We’d finally found a taker. Stuck in the tiny town of Yreka, ten miles south of the Oregon-California border, we were selling our only form of transportation for $150, and it was the best news of the day.

Also performing are Darwyn Jones and Andrew Reilly, and there will be musical accompaniment by Elvis Bride. Doors at 7:00, music at 7:30, stories begin at 7:45. Tickets are available online here, and you can RSVP on Facebook.

* actual dead bus pictured, taken moments after it died!

I’m writing articles and also blogging for Shareable.net, a “nonprofit online magazine that tells the story of sharing. We cover the people, places, and projects that are bringing a shareable world to life,” as they describe it. I’m very broadly covering the technology, social media and Midwest beat for them in my weekly blog posts. It’s a great site with an interesting take on community-building and affecting social change, and I’m excited to be working for them.

The latest article is about Chicago’s Gabriel Levinson and his book bike. In short, Gabe rides his bike around Chicago during spring and summer weekends, stopping at public parks and distributing donated books to anyone who approaches him.

I’ve also got a number of blog posts up on the site:

The Unconsumption Un-Manifesto: About Rob Walker’s unconsumption blog/wiki/movement, an attempt to get people to reconsider what they’re consuming and what they do with unwanted products

Wisdom of the Swarm: ThinkTank collects the knowledge of your online community: covering Gina Trapani and ExpertLabs’ ThinkTank app, that aggregates responses to questions posed on social networks

Video Games as a Force for Social Good: a follow-up to the DEMO Magazine article about Mindy Faber’s work with Open Youth Networks to use video games as a tool for social good and community outreach

An essay for Utne Reader about what independent publishers can learn about Apple’s iBooks store from the experiences of App Store developers and independent music labels:

…as I navigate the iBooks store and learn about the submission process, I’m concerned that independent publishers will suffer many of the same issues that App Store developers have faced. 150,000 iPhone applications have been released in the App Store since 2008. And for some of those developers, the App Store has been a goldmine: there are many apocryphal stories about coders toiling in their basements in off hours, building their own successful app business. But for every success story, there are countless developers whose work is buried deep in the App Store, never to surface. After a few days with iBooks , which borrows much from the App Store in organization and interface, I have to wonder: will this new platform empower independent and self-publishers, or will they similarly be hidden in the dark recesses of an online store?

Read it at Utne Reader