There was a great, inspiring article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Downtown News.  Commander Andy Smith of the LAPD was profiled in the newspaper as a ‘good bye’ from the downtown community.   Smith has accepted assignment to South Bureau Criminal Gang Homicide Group, where he should continue his string of successes.

When you have advocates for the homeless singing the praises of a police officer, you can be sure that things are going right:

“I don’t think we had [a commander] who embraced the issues of what happens on the streets with the same level of enthusiasm and open-mindedness as Commander Smith,” said Orlando Ward, public affairs director for the Midnight Mission.

Chief Bratton had the following to say:

“He is a caring, compassionate person, and in that command in particular, Central, with all of the deprivation and so many lives that are so severely impacted in a negative way, Andy just seemed to be the right fit.”

Anyway, I was inspired by the courageous story of Andy Smith, his quest to clean up downtown, and his whistle blowing on the issue of ‘homeless dumping.’  Do yourself a favor and read this article.  Then be thankful that we have dedicated people like Cmdr. Smith serving the public day in and day out.

The NY Times reports on changes underway at the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Murdoch has said that he wants to broaden The Journal’s appeal with more general-interest news. Now, the front page has shorter articles and more breaking and nonbusiness news, and particularly favors politics. The paper has set aside pages for world news and added a sports page.

It’s okay that Mr. Murdoch wants to broaden the WSJ’s appeal, but to focus more on breaking news is not an ideal business strategy in the age of free news on the net.  Breaking news is a commodity… why leave behind a valuable asset in long-form analysis to get into a commodity game?

LinkedIn, my favorite of the social networks, has rolled out an awesome new feature called Company Profiles (as reported in TechCrunch, full walk-through available here). Heretofore, I used LinkedIn as a rolodex and for competitive intelligence, but this new feature is truly game changing.

The user-supplied information, though prone to all sorts of error, gives companies a transparency previously unavailable anywhere. I typed in my company (which has a large percentage of employees on LinkedIn) and was given fast insight into a treasure trove of useful data. Some of the most interesting windows available were recent promotions, new hires, career path, top schools, median employee age, and most common job titles.

The information supplied by an individual (like age, college, company, job title, etc) is mostly meaningless by itself. But with the new Company Profiles feature, LinkedIn has managed to take an exceptionally large volume of seemingly innocuous data, and compile it into fascinating and meaningful reporting.

Comparing my company to a close competitor, the difference in business strategy is definitely noticeable. Which leads me to an important point: How will companies react to this new user-supplied transparency in the long run?

I can envision a few draconian companies launching knee-jerk initiatives to prevent personnel from putting information on LinkedIn. Companies might not be so keen on having this information readily available for curious eyes to pour over. However, in the long run, I don’t think there is much that organizations will be able to do to halt the sharing of aggregated information on themselves.

I love it – what are your thoughts?

Ever wish snow was more than just… snow? Of course you have… you always wanted that lame snowman to turn to life and become Frosty. A little winter magic was all you needed.

Well, not quite Frosty, but BLDGBLOG imagined a crazy future where cities create scented snow:

You go skiiing in Mont Tremblant – and what do you know? The snow smells like vanilla, chocolate, almond croissants. Pecan-banana pancakes. Earl Grey. Every year your dad drives you and your family out to that one town in Minnesota where the snow always smells like cinnamon buns and the hotel rooms are so warm.

I love that. You know what my snow would smell like? Donuts, because they are so frickin’ delicious. Or maybe Chinese food. I don’t know, haven’t totally decided yet.