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A collaborative map has been produced for the new Santa Barbara fire that details the evacuation area, shelters, power outages, school closures, traffic control, etc.:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=1133503991741932...

Way to go community!

Santa Barbara experienced another fire yesterday.

We covered Twittering and other social media coverage of the Tea Fire in November 2008.

But my has Twitter grown. We don't have data from November's Twitter activity, but my eyeball estimation shows that there are a lot more users.

This is the tracking for the term "Santa Barbara" on Twitter this week with a big jump when the fire started.

In early April, 2 Domino's Pizza employees at a North Carolina franchise uploaded a troublingvideo to YouTube that did not bode well for Domino's.

ReadWriteWeb posted some survey results about consumers' reactions to the video and to Domino's official apology.

A University of Melbourne study found that workers who engage in ‘Workplace Internet Leisure Browsing’ (WILB) are more productive than those who don’t. “People who do surf the Internet for fun at work - within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office - are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” the author says. This is because “short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a days work, and as a result, increased productivity.”

Today is our Changemakers Design Charrette.

This is the schedule of events (Pacific Time) and we'd love to have you follow us on Twitter, #changemakers.

The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of shutting down its public computer labs to shave costs, citing 99% laptop ownership (4 of 3,117 entering first-year students not owning a computer) for incoming 2007 students.

Specialty computer labs will still be available. UVA found that the majority of student activity related to web browsers and other activities utilizing free software.

Is this an innovative step to save money or will this hurt the campus?

The New York Times has proclaimed the death of voicemail, for some users at least.

Over 30 percent of voice messages linger unheard for three days or longer and that more than 20 percent of people with messages in their mailboxes “rarely even dial in” to check them. However, 91 percent of people under 30 respond to text messages within an hour, and they are four times more likely to respond to texts than to voice messages within minute. Even adults 30 and older are twice as likely to respond within minutes to a text than to a voice message.

The Inside Higher Ed blog and NPR have stories about the use of clickers in the classroom. Clickers are handheld gadgets, which look and work a lot like TV remote controls, to respond to classroom polls and quizzes without ever raising their hands or voices. Using special receivers connected to their laptops, instructors are able to instantly gather responses.

ARSTechnica reports on a recent USDA study:
"Both urban and rural Internet use have soared in the US over the last few years, but some new number-crunching from the US Department of Agriculture puts a number on the urban/rural gap: 9.3 percent. 72.6 percent of urban Americans use the Internet somewhere (though not necessarily at home), but among rural residents that number falls to 63.3 percent."