integrated service-/product-/interaction- design ecosystem

Regrettably commerce-oriented, but otherwise absolutely right-on. "Inhabit the city as though it were your house." NB There's no reason why the plug-in services here specified as commercial ventures couldn't be swapped out for free or non-cash-economy alternatives.

Not precisely sure what's going on here, but I like it.

Via Berkman, an interesting comparison of municipal attitudes toward transit data. (Broadly: East Coast cities see such data as IP to be, urgh, monetized; West Coast cities perhaps unsurprisingly treat it more like a public good.) Will want to start authoring legislation mandating that such data be held in the public trust and made freely and universally available for the common good of all.

Rain points straight at the elephant in the room: Kindle *is* Whispernet; service trumps object. This is a point I've tried to make at Big N, to no avail. There will be further pain for competitors when the nicely-resolved Kindle 2 rolls in a few weeks. (Via Timo.)

I don't always wind up agreeing 100% with what Mike puts out, but this certainly bears some mulling over: "[S]ervice design is what links cloud computing and ubicomp. It meets industrial/interaction design at the device/service interface."

Nate Hill's making lemonade.

Service design consultancy

Very interesting: highly local information via mass service scraping.