Pranks with a Purpose:
In Los Angeles, Heavy Trash, a coalition of anonymous architects, designers and urban planners, have erected orange viewing platforms outside the gates of three upscale LA neighborhoods to protest what they see as a disturbing proliferation of gated communities.
via WorldChanging.

Jeffery Veen writes about his recent experience evaluating free content management systems over at (the very useful) OpenSourceCMS.com. He concludes:
The experience cemented a theory of mine: Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
While I […]

Richard Florida has been getting a lot of play around these parts since his ideas inspired the Governor’s Cool Cities campaign, attempting to cater to Florida’s “creative class.” Over at WorldChanging, Jaimais writes about the Greening of the Creative Class. He notes the significant overlap between Florida’s “Creative Index” cities and cities on […]

Some nonprofits offer localized versions of the SocialExplorer tool I linked to earlier. The New York PIRG offers CMAP and UCLA offers Neighborhood Knowledge California. NKCA, in particular, has a really nice interface.

Erica writes about a prank today at Cornell. Someone put a disco ball on McGraw tower. Cornell, like other schools, has a long history of campus pranks. Umich doesn’t seem to have this kind of tradition.

mousemusings links to an article that reminds us that May 1st is the real labor holiday. Map Room systems also writes about May Day today, with a little dose of history and some local tie-ins.