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.

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.

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.

One of great volunteers, Judith Osborn, is a former owner of Sundance Natural Foods (cool place) here in Eugene. She’s planning a move to Brooklyn, where she hopes to open some natural food stores — not a crowded market in those parts.

After Will Lana showed her a cool diagram of corporate players in the organic marketplace, Judith got the idea of posting the diagram in organic markets around town — lots of those in these parts.

So we’re putting some flyers together, laminating them, and slapping them up on walls.