If you’ve ever wondered about the best route for a run, a long walk or a bike ride around Decatur or Atlanta, you’d probably consider the routes where folks walk/run/bike the most.

But up until the advent of the smartphone, this was something difficult to visualize on a map for large swaths of the world.  But thanks to mapping software and smartphone apps like RunKeeper, we can begin to map the most trafficked (or at least exercised!) routes around Atlanta – and the world!

A company called Mapbox has taken the data from 1.5 million runs, walks and bike rides from RunKeeper and turned it into one giant interactive map that you can play with HERE.  The brighter the line, the most frequented the route.

As you can see above, main routes in Decatur aren’t entirely surprising.  The PATH trail, West Ponce and Oakview seem to be the main walk/run/bike corridors within the city.  But zoom in a little closer and you can see all kinds of interesting patterns.  For instance, the most popular route to take thru the Decatur Cemetery is along the western road.

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West Seattle’s Super Deli Mart might just be the exception that proves the rule when it comes to fostering the creation of local communities.

The Atlantic recently featured the convenience store in an extensive article entitled “A Postmodern Elks Club Serving Some of the World’s Best Beer”.  It’s a fascinating look into at the odd-couple money-makers at this West Seattle establishment.  This conveinence store, with its regular selection of Hostess Cupcakes, Doritos and Coors Light (it’s #1 seller) is better known around Seattle as the place to go to get some of the country’s most sought after craft beers.

Like what you ask?  According to the article, Super Deli Mart has recently tapped sought after brews such as…

• Elysian Brewing Company’s Dark o’ the Moon pumpkin stout
• Stone Japanese Green Tea Imperial IPA
• Russian River Pliny the Younger

Just to name a few.

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America loves to specialize its movements.

Some people swear by local food.  Others argue for durable local economies.  Still others see worker’s rights as the most important call to action.

And there’s little wrong with this natural evolution of American thought…just as long as we recognize that at some point, in order to realize the full potential of ANY these individual movements, they really should be integrated.  Otherwise, many of these movements could easily be phased into the very global, industrialized system they each once shunned.

Food writer Corby Kummer’s latest article in The Atlantic, is just another example of this kind of specialized focus. The piece documents his discovery of quality organic selections at a nearby Wal-Mart Supercenter, and the resulting internal struggle to contemplate Wal-Mart as a competitor of Whole Foods.

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Jimmy Carter recently offers an apology to the Jewish community and all of a sudden the race for David Adelman’s District 42 Georgia Senate seat is news on The Atlantic’s website…

Jimmy Carter wants the Jewish community to know that he understands Israel’s travails, and that this new understanding is not connected in any way to his grandson’s quest to represent a partially-Jewish district in Atlanta in the Georgia state legislature.

In a recent interview with JTA, the elder Carter said…

“Jason has a district, the number of Jewish voters in it is only 2 percent,” he said, chuckling.

District 42 Candidate Jason Carter responded to his grandfather’s apology with the following statement to JTA…

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For someone who will see his little blog pass a half -million page views today, you’d think that a post entitled “The End of Newsprint” would be a ego-stroking report on the death of newspapers and the unstoppable emergence of the much mythologized “citizen journalism”.

But its not.

Reading Michael Hirschorn’s “End Times” article in Jan/Feb’s Atlantic yesterday, which chronicles the building death-knell of the hard-copy edition of The New York Times didn’t send me out into the night, twirling and laughing at my good fortune.  Actually, it just left me feeling very unsettled.

Hirschorn’s article documents the well-known descent of the newspaper industry and talks about how the NYT must make drastic changes over the next 5 months or it could default on $400 million in debt.  His analysis concludes that the death of newsprint is inevitable…and he’s probably right.

But my own foray into “citizen journalism” hasn’t done much to placate my fears that something substantial isn’t lost when print media goes entirely online.  Yes, newspapers have had this coming to them for an awfully long time.  In its own attempts of survive, our own AJC still claims that it covers the entire metro-Atlanta area, lulling people into a false sense of security that if news happens in their suburb, the AJC will be there to cover it.  But as we’ve seen here in Decatur, cutbacks have made it nearly impossible for our hometown paper to tell even half of the relevant stories the community should know about (Was there a peep out of the AJC regarding the Fellini’s robbery?).  The success of THIS site would not be possible without the cut backs at the AJC.  My questionably-humorous anecdotes about Decatur politics wouldn’t be able to compete with a paid staff of dedicated full-timers.

If this is where the future is heading, this site is definitely on the right side of the trend.  However, I still have a couple real concerns. Read the rest of this entry »