As you well know, the web makes it possible to promote and/or coordinate any interest or effort. Case in point: a Puget Sound-based map of families who support the Green Halloween movement. Looks like this wave, which asks people to "think outside the candy box" according to this Seattle Times article and this KPLU report, hasn't made its way to Pierce County in time for this year's trick-or-treating. Oh, well. Maybe next year.

Happy Halloween!

I won't even pretend to have played a hand in it, but it looks like my request to provide wifi access to those serving jury duty is a few short months from becoming reality.

That's according to Bruce Moran, Deputy Court Administrator, who I met today. Turns out he's been looking for a way to provide the service since he came to Pierce County six months ago. His former stomping grounds in Okanagon County provided it, so he was surprised when he arrived in Tacoma and didn't see a sea of laptops in the jury waiting room.

To pay for it, Moran says the county might tap into the donation pool for the $10 pay that jurors receive per day for serving.
(King County uses its jury donation pool to fund a daycare - another good option that might help improve the turnout for jury duty.)
For folks like me, that's easy. I'm on salary so I get paid by the TNT while I'm here. But I still have to get my work done, so I'd gladly give up the $10/day to be given Internet access.

I'm sitting in the jury room at City-County Building in downtown Tacoma as I write this. Hours ago, the room was packed. Now, about a dozen people are still waiting for an assignment (including me). This is, to say the least, a trying experience for anyone who has a boss back at the office wondering how unproductive a certain employee is today.

A fellow juror-in-waiting and I are both using our laptops and trading stories of woe about work piling up while we're here. We're also discussing how the system might be aided with the assistance of technology, since it's difficult for many professionals to get away from the office if your employer isn't so civic-minded.

I'm lucky to have an aircard to connect to the web and keep up on email, but how many others simply get out of jury duty because of the professional inconvenience? (My own anecdotal evidence suggests plenty.) It would be helpful if there were wifi access available for those waiting to be called, making it easy for busy professionals to take their work to the jury room as they wait for the call. It might help balance the actual juries that hear cases since I assume they are usually dominated by those who are out of work, retired or stay-at-home parents.

How to pay for it? Ask people to donate their $10/day pay for serving. That's barely a dollar an hour for me today, and I haven't done anything but watch a video and go through orientation.

On a related note, Spud Goodman released his latest video and it's all about jury duty. The target of Spud's sarcasm this time around is that very concept of "peers" who are sitting on a given jury. Just imagine you or someone you know on trial. "It's really scary," is how someone here put it today.

So what do you think? Would you be more willing to serve jury duty if there were free wifi available?

A group of researchers are trying to address a topic that causes tension for many people in the Puget Sound region: transportation. They're looking for volunteers to spend 8-10 hours over four weeks prioritizing the region's needs when it comes to roads, rail and more.

The project is called "Let's Improve Transportation" and the web site is pretty interesting to visit. Outreach coordinator Kevin Ramsey said they are "particularly interested" in participation from Pierce County residents.

Here's a snippet from an email I received:

Researchers at the University of Washington are seeking residents of King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties to take part in a unique experiment in participatory democracy.

Participate at your own convenience wherever you have access to the Internet. No experience with transportation planning or prior knowledge about transportation issues is necessary.

This is similar to an award-winning interactive project The TNT did several years ago called "Fix Your Commute." That was actually a project I started while working for the Everett paper and talked my current employer and KIRO-TV into participating in. You can read more here.

Wright Back At Ya is a great example of how any organization can use a blog to disseminate information in a functional manner. While many people still think of blogs as personal journals containing opinion, a blog is really more similar to email; it's a tool of communication that is completely agnostic. You can't blame email for all the spam you receive (blame the sender) and you can't blame the blog format for any blogger who bores you, annoys you or otherwise is doing something you don't agree with.

The CW blog is updated frequently with newsy items in a conversational tone and many of the posts include art. It's exactly the same recipe we're trying to apply here at the TNT to many of our blogs.

There's also a podcast by Charles Wright fourth-graders. Isn't technology great?

I visited Andrew Fry's class at UW-T last week and had fun playing show-and-tell and answering questions. As a follow-up, Andrew posted on his blog and asked his students to chime in as well (look for the links under the heading TINST 207 Fall 2007 on Andrew's blog).

His touched on a concept we have discussed inside our building for a while now: producing a regular video installment that would fill the vacuum we currently have in the South Sound without a local TV news operation. When I asked the 20 or so students in the class if they would watch such a thing online, more than half raised their hands affirmatively.

Reading the comments to his post also led me to request from Erik Emery, who asks that I do an interview with the Tacoma Gnome. (If you haven't checked out that blog yet, I highly recommend it. Lots of fun.) TG is apparently operating incognito, which is cool, but I'd still like to hear from him or her.

Hey, Gnome, send me an email.

We launched (yet another) blog on the world this week. But this one's a little different. It's called Word on the Street and is written by Scott Fontaine, a converted sports reporter, who has been given the task of serving as the newspaper's first mobile journalist.

What does that mean? Partly that he will not work here in the office. He'll be out in the community, reporting and writing on a laptop. His office number is a cell phone. He's armed with a camera for photos and video and even has a voice recorder.

We're not sure what, exactly, this will produce for us. But the assumption is that the news stories Scott finds will be different than the ones we hear about in the office.

And the blog? That's Scott's vehicle to communicate what he's seeing and hearing - as he sees and hears it. You can read his take on this experiment here.

A monthly staple here at OSS, I offer the top 10 most popular stories from the month of September on thenewstribune.com.

1. Guns drawn, through the door they come (Santos)
2. Wallace too tantalizing to waste (McGrath)
3. A different kind of catch (Mayor)
4. 12 new counts in teacher sex case (Mulick)
5. Ruskell shakes up Hawks again (Hughes)
6. Crackdown on Pacific Avenue (Mulick)
7. Quick descent from starter to third string (Beene)
8. Boulware, Greene are gone (Hughes)
9. Practice squad set; defender on the way? (Hughes)
10. Life of luxury on sergeant's salary (Lynn)

And, this month, the top 5 photo galleries:

1. Lincoln High School
2. Mission to Mexico
3. Puyallup Fair
4. Maldonado trial begins
5. Surfing at Westport

We added a new blog and upgraded our weather information over the weekend. Both additions should be really helpful for online readers with South Sound ties and/or interests.

We're a little late to the game with our politics blog, Political Buzz, but that doesn't mean we won't be able to break a lot of news and cover local, state and national politics from a South Sound perspective better than anyone else. (That's our goal, anyway.)

And our weather page makeover now includes data from Weather Underground, which significantly increases the amount and types of information featured on the page. My favorite is the hour--by-hour detail (which you can find by clicking "Hour by hour" in the five-day forecast). It tells not if it's going to rain tomorrow, but when. The personal weather stations on a Google map are pretty cool, too.