We’re pretty stoked about the latest release of our Wagn software. It takes a big step in the direction of making Wagn feel less like a nifty nerdy data tool and more like a living website.

Check out user profiles or release notes on Wagn.org or browse around company profiles on Hooze.org and you’ll see what I mean.

Check out these notes on Wadget that I included from Wagn.org just by entering a few lines of code into my blog entry:

or, how to become a piece of a pixel.

If tax season and spring cleaning got you too focused on the nitty gritty, and you’re wanting a step back, here’s a lovely route out: The Home Galaxy offers some of the most stunning images (both static and movies) of our planet and well beyond I’ve ever seen.

Not one of the most serene offerings on the site (there are many), but I liked Tornadoes on the sun.

Hooze.org contributor, Friend-of-Grass-Commons, and all-around-groovy-person Bronwyn Ximm has started a new blog on ethical purchasing and related topics at WalletMouth.com. Check out her take on what’s being done now and can be done in the future to bring a deeper consciousness of our impacts to bear on our daily economic choices. Only complaint so far: we want more owls.

Finally! Heartstrings! We aren’t planning any emotional promotional videos any time soon, but after all our talk of data and economics and infrastructure, we welcome a little sympathetic resonance:

Green Schools. Healthy children. Healthy buildings that foster healthy children. Kids learning about sustainability, and even using online tools to judge the greenness of the buildings and communities they spend their days in. All of this accelerated by collaboration, sharing, and cooperative education.

This is the passion of Grass Commons director Shari Aaron. And now, thanks her efforts and a grant from the Connecticut Green Building Council, we will be starting work on a Green School Toolbox: a Wagn website devoted to means, methods, and metrics for helping schools lead the way towards a developed world that reflects developed wisdom.

Great thanks to Shari and CTGBC for their foresight.

Wagn 0.5.0 was released into the world a few days ago. You can try it out online or download it and try it out on your own server. We've already found a few bugs, but you can help us out by reporting others; if your exploration sparks any feature requests we'd love to hear about those too.

New features since 0.4 include datatypes, a new look, permissions, improved administration, and much more. Read on for the details...

Grass Commons turned three today, and supporter Erika Lunkenheimer surprised us with a cake to celebrate! Lewis is visiting the San Francisco Bay Area, so we called and sang happy birthday to him, and promised to save him a piec-, uh, pictures. One’s visible to the right here, and we took a few more.

Almost in time for this celebration, we’re working full steam ahead on Wagn 0.5 and expect a release within a couple of weeks. It’s always good to have more reasons to celebrate.

So wouldn’t it rock if while you were reading online about carrot gloves you could see they’re on sale a few blocks away at Wabbitmart for $4.50 — 3 pairs left on the shelf? Not the sort of thing that sounds ridiculous these days (product aside), but it’s not close yet. Certainly not among anyone other than large retailers, and even they haven’t deeply integrated their online and offline stores. Why not? Why are the two worlds so far apart?

Well in part because brick and mortar retailers aren’t wild about signing up for direct comparison with e-commerce. And in fact, they’re already finding their role in comparison shopping unsavory.

Sometimes programmers, at least us pathetic ones, feel little parental about our programs. After the pregnancy of design and the labor of mock-up, there’s the moment when you get the first little glimpse of your code doing what it’s ultimately supposed to do. Programmers with emotional problems, if you’ll excuse the tautology, have reported hearing the sound of a baby crying.

Well young WagN has given its parents considerable joy recently by reaching a number of milestones. Most importantly, the kid’s getting to be fun.

We’ve been using the WagN for keeping track of contacts, minutes, agendas, todo lists, bugs, and goals (in addition to researching companies and products), and it’s way better of a time than any of those things should be. The neat part is that you can essentially structure and restructure information organically, which is where all the unintended uses are coming from.

Buy local?? Isn’t that like mercantilism? Haven’t you nutters ever heard of comparative advantage? Frankly, nobody’s ever asked us that, but the rationale for buying local can make for a good dig. And the bone worth digging for contends that there are good reasons for local purchasing, particularly of raw goods, that anyone but the most devout worshippers of price can respect.

Saying “the rationale” is already a feint, since reasons abound from all over of the political spectrum, especially the extremes. NAFTA made pillow partners of Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader, and many of the same sentiments have hippies and ultraconservatives dancing around the same buy-local may cross. Is “buy local” just a happier, less riot-to-mind-calling way to say “anti-globalization?” Well, no not just.