With the growth of the 99 Percent movement and occupations all over the world, a large number of citizen journalists and activists have turned to real-time video casting services such as livestream, ustream, and justin.tv. Live streaming offers a compelling way to experience a protest on-the-ground as it's happening – and it has even trickled up to more traditional media services. Time.com published the live feed from The Other 99 on its front page last night during a 2000+ person strong general assembly in Liberty Plaza, NY. And CBS published a live stream of Bloomberg's morning address in which he explained the city's motivations for evicting protesters.

Between the Bars has been busy in the last six months:

• We now have over 300 writers, and are regularly receiving 100 letters per week
• We've published over 1500 blog posts and profiles.
• We now have a paid part-time staff person, thanks to the Center for Civic Media's support, to help us with operations
• We've accrued a wait-list of over 500 additional writers in prison who want to blog - and we're working on growing our capacity to publish them as well.

This is still a far cry from the 2.3 million people in prison right now. So clearly, we have our work cut out for us!

So it is with this in mind that we're delighted to announce some major changes to the Between the Bars website! View them here: http://betweenthebars.org

Something that has been echoed by many of the speakers at today's Knight Civic Media Conference is the importance of considering who participates in the design of a technology. Sasha Constanza-Chock spoke about the importance of using open technologies and open data when developing tools for communities. Chris Csikszentmihalyi spoke about how those with power producing technology tend to make technologies that reinforce their power. The Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, one of this year's grant winners, emphasized the importance of community participation and ownership in the collection of scientific data. But why is this important? Don't closed systems like Twitter or Facebook have the potential for great social good?

The moment we've been working towards for over 3 months has arrived: Between the Bars is back online! We have a selection of new posts from new authors, as well as old posts from long time authors. As we continue to receive permission from the writers to republish their posts, we'll bring more of the classics online.

We've been thrilled with the response we've gotten since announcing the restart of service - we'll have our work cut out for us keeping up with the influx of mail. Monday we will be sending our first printouts back to the authors in prison, so now is a great time to leave some comments. Since we have made some changes to the site, there's a chance that there'll be new bugs - don't hesitate to bug us if you encounter any unexpected behavior.

We'd like to send a very big thank you to all the supporters who have kept us going over the past few months, and look forward to setting ourselves up for the long haul as we continue to grow and evolve.

Today, Google Maps is rolling out bicycle directions:
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/03/google-maps-for-bikes

There are a number of existing bike map providers, many of which have grown through community-provided, crowd-sourced data. One could argue that these projects have struggled to garner sufficient participation to really take off:

• http://www.bikely.com/
• http://www.nycbikemaps.com/maps/nyc-bike-map/
• http://opentripplanner.org/
• http://www.opencyclemap.org/

Now, all at once, Google is offering bike maps in 150 cities with relatively comprehensive routes. As the Wired article states, "No longer do [bikers] have to rely upon paper maps or open-source DIY map hacking...."