I wrote a guest blog on HTML5′s Drag & Drop for Sitepoint.com. It’s a very simple example that builds a little Scrum Planning Board using a bit of CSS and the new Drag & Drop API. You can view the sample code up on github.

In the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden after being discovered in Abbottabad, Pakistan, I have been thinking back to the weeks I spent in Karachi and Lahore in 2004.

To this outsider and visitor, it seemed to me to be a country with a very wealthy class, a very poor class, and little in between. There were fancy shopping malls in Karachi and slums that lined the roads to the beach. There was a bomb blast while I was there, and I remember being surprised at how little it seemed to jar anyone but me. This seemed, to me at least, to be a place where the presence of extremists was accepted as an unfortunate reality.

While alcohol was illegal, it could be found, in private, if you knew the right people and where to go. I remember feeling nervous when pulling off the side of the road in a fancy car. My host, in his fine suit, approached a band of rural people who sold him several live fish, then killed and gutted them before us. But they were friendly and full of smiles. It seemed a delicate balance.
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Three hundred people have died in the storms that ravaged the Southern part of the US this week. The pictures and personal videos emerging show the extent of the destruction.

You’d think now would be a time for kindness and charity. A time for companies, if they were to say anything at all, to offer to lend a hand.

But not SEARS! No, Sears looked across the south at all this devesatation, and you know what they saw? Big, fat dollar signs! So they sent me, and who knows how many thousands of other idiots that bought something from them once and receive their SPAM ever after, this email: “Affected by the storm? Sears can help you clean up.”

And here’s a handy graphic:

Yesterday, I was treated to the amazing article “Startup America needs to look more like America: The Minority Led Startup Gap” by Kalimah Priforce.

But Kalimah didn’t stop with the article. Instead, he took to twitter, where he issued a challenge, and was met with a few challenges back, from serial-entrepreneur Jason Calacanis:

Let’s sidestep for a moment the “I lived on the B train” comment (as tempting as it may be to question “what exactly is THAT supposed to mean?”), and focus on the positive: Jason’s willingness to engage and even change the panel given a list of “qualified black judges.”

Jason, to save you some time and research, I wanted to elaborate a bit on the suggestions I made, so you can get busy.
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Peter Greenaway is a filmmaker, an artist, and a firebrand.

He is known for his fierce views on modern cinema. He has said that “most people are visually illiterate” and that “Our educational system teaches us to value text over image. And that is one of the reasons we have such an impoverished cinema.” — Greenaway in Rembrandt’s J’Accuse…!

Now, you may think, here is a filmmaker lamenting the fact that people do not see films. But, Greenaway is quite the critic himself of the cinema.

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It Begins with a Story

In many ways, the most powerful thing we have is our stories.

In 2006, Majora Carter blew the roof off with her TED Talk on Greening the Ghetto. Why? She told a very small piece of her story, her truth as a Black woman in America. One of the stories she shared was what happened to her neighborhood, the South Bronx, from the time her father first bought their home in the late 1940s, to 2006. In 2006, the South Bronx was home to:

• 40% of New York’s solid waste despite having just 16% of the city’s population
• 100% of the Bronx’s waste facilities
• Two sewage-treatment plants
• Four power plants
• 60,000 trash trucks passing through every week
• One of the lowest ratios of parks to people in NYC: 0.5 acres per 1000 people

Carter asks, and answers, the important question: how did it get this way? She details, through the experience of her own family, the reality of many Black families in the 1940s: redlining.

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There has been a ton of lip service this year paid to the lack of women in technology. There have even been those who have questioned, “why do we even NEED more women, or diversity, in tech at all?”

For the answer, look no further than the four women engineers behind sOccket. A soccer ball with a magnetic slug inside it, that collects power as you kick it.

Fifteen minutes of play can generate three hours of light from the ball. In the developing world, 25% of children do not have electricity. It’s even worse in Africa, where up to 95% of the population lives without access to electricity, according to a 2006 World Bank Millennium Goals Report.
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Leymah Gbowee, mother of six, began a journey that would lead to nothing short of a revolution when she was working as a a trauma counselor in Monrovia. The backdrop? Fourteen years of bloody war in Liberia, the death of 200,000 people, the displacement of 1 in 3 people in the country, and the regular use of rape as a weapon of war.

The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace group, led with spirit and dynamism by Gbowee, stood outside in the fish market, united by simple white shirts and placards, in a place Charles Taylor drove by each day. What followed was two-and-a-half years of protest, led by women united across religions. Their motto? “Does the bullet know Christian from Muslim?” This movement finally brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003.

These are the facts. The passion, the fierceness of Gbowee though, is best seen in the film, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” which documents the movement and the monumental changes it managed to effect.
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“Best Of” lists for 2010 are usually disappointing. They are filled with people you already know, rehash stories you’ve already read. I wanted to compile a list of eleven people you may NOT have heard of, but deserve your attention in 2011.

These are voices that would do the world great good to hear, and yet are drowned out by those we watch instead: those who shock us with crassness, or comfort us by making the grooves of our biases deeper, or entertain us by playing to our fantasies of obscene wealth and escapism.

I have tried to curate a different kind of list. A list that will challenge your biases, expand your notions, ignite your curiosity and move you to TRY. I know none of them, but feel indebted to all of them.

Here is the full list. Links will follow as I write up individual blogs for each person.

1. Leymah Gbowee: How to Fight a Dictator, and Win
2. Jessica Lin and
3. Jessica Matthews and
4. Julia Silverman and
5. Hemali Thakkar: Kick a Ball, Light a Room. Four Women Engineers Set out to Make a Difference in Africa.
6. Majora Carter: What does Home(town) Security have to do with Storytelling?
7. Peter Greenway: The future of Art is the Painting. But Different.
8. Janette Sadik-Khan: What happens in NYC happens in the rest of the country 10 years later
9. Jeri Ellsworth: How many self-taught electrical engineers do YOU know?
10. Cassandra Lin: Are you doing more for the world than this seventh grader?
11. Bill Hammack: How do you teach science in a new media world?

I hope you enjoy the list. Compiling it has been a gift. I encourage you to make your own lists, and to share any people you think are helping make a better world in the comments.

Time recently named Mark Zuckerberg their “Person of the Year.” The film “The Social Network” has grossed $192 Million worldwide thus far. Everyone you know is on Facebook, including your mother, and HER mother. A visualization of Facebook’s social graph shows you what it looks like to link 500 million people around the world in a single place.

To this, I say, Facebook is dying. Its zenith has been reached in terms of its power and social capital, and it is all downhill from here.

My evidence is based more on allegory, hunches and extrapolation, but if Past is Preface, the evidence mounts.

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