Author: Rob Goodspeed

Researching My House’s History

Last summer I decided to research the history of my house in downtown Washington, D.C. The house is located on the 900 block of Q Street Northwest in the historic neighborhood of Shaw. My block is located within the limits of Pierre L’Enfant’s original street plan for the city which ended around present-day U Street. […]

Read more

Flickr Puts Pictures on the Map

I think Flickr’s launch of geotagging for photos is the most exciting development in social software since the launch of Friendster way back in 2002. If you are not familiar with the site, Flickr is basically a conventional photo-sharing website like Webshots or Snapfish rolled together with a social networking site like Friendster or Myspace. […]

Read more

John McCain Rated

I am friends with many of the people who work for the political consulting company EchoDitto. They recently asked their CEO to take a leave of absence after he announced on his personal blog he would support U.S. Senator John McCain if he ran for president in 2008. Their actions kicked off a long comment […]

Read more

DC’s Building Boom

To me, the interesting thing about Philip Kennicott’s recent architecural polemic “The Mediocre Mile,” isn’t his architectural criticism but the sheer volume of construction he’s writing about. The Post’s Dana Hedgpeth described the construction in the Mount Vernon Triangle (its southern boundary is Massachusetts Avenue) in this story from April: “120,000 square feet of retail, […]

Read more

Lassiter Interviewed

Ann Arbor blogger Homeless Dave recently posted this interview with University of Michigan professor Matt Lassiter. The interview notes he recently made tenure. Here’s a taste: ML: Yeah. So you’re against sprawl, right? And you can think of that in terms of being a good environmentalist, and you’re against big developers coming in and messing […]

Read more