Adam Holland mentioned today that it’s getting harder to write predictive science fiction  because time between invention and adoption has decreased massively in the last 100 years.

Dan Levy’s copy of the WSJ had an article on tracking migration patterns with cellphones. How many people = one phone?

Whack-a-mole: a viable methodology for dealing with serious problems.

Like many power companies in the area, Consolidated Edison played whack-a-mole to keep up with power failures, though it said it had plenty of slack capacity. (nyt)

Backyard Post is a city directory edited by… editors that are paid moneys. Not as automated as EveryBlock, not as text-heavy as ArborWiki. William Hartnett’s “glorified spreadsheet“.

Alternative newspapers are being read by suburbia sez some (probably methodologically unsound) report.

Rob Curley responds to a WSJ article on his “‘Hyperlocal’ flop” — that geeks can and do know neighborhoods.

A different response: the failure is in the business model, not in real journalism. On the folly of local-local.

Andrea Calderaro of Caltech is using European and other demographic information to map the digital divide worldwide, the first such project. Follow up is asking how this will affect bottom-up political participation. All work is quantitative, based off survey  questions he didn’t write; he’s not actually asking people how they use technologies or investigating how they don’t. I wonder how much of the Real will be reflected in his report; excited to read it, in any case.

Big Pictures from Boston.com