Now in case you’re unfamiliar with the O’Reilly’s Ignite concept, here’s the basic gist:

• Activity – A handful of local presenters are given 5 minutes and 20 slides to talk about whatever they wish. Topics are varied, kept secret until the time of the event, and range from comical to weighty. (Simple, right?)
• Objective – Learn something new, connect with local professionals, and have fun. (Ahhh, refreshingly simple indeed!)

“This wasn’t what I was expecting”, someone enthusiastically babbled next to me. Without realizing it, that person had just summed up the reason for the event’s success.

Randomness seems to be that one multifaceted seasoning in life that brings about entertainment, curiosity, creativity, beauty, ideas, and so on. The Ignite events use it in a disciplined fashion to expose ideas that may otherwise never the get the day of light (like a presentation on peanut butter and jelly), and to cross-pollinate them with other completely unrelated subjects.

Culture and business is hungry for opportunities like these. In a world where everything has become so cookie-cutter and defined, innovation/ideation/creativity/[you fill in the blank] has become a rare premium indeed.

Try something new and unexpected and prepare to be surprised, entertained, bettered, even inspired. The point is to get out of your comfort zone, be challenged, and glean something because of it – what you do with it is up to you. You could perhaps start by researching the origins and cultural relevance of peanut butter and jelly.

Wordpress is a very powerful and flexible content management system (CMS) for blogs, and is among the first choices for anyone looking for a way to include dynamic content on their web sites. When using Wordpress to power a news or blog section of an existing web site, authors will often want to display a list of headlines or the latest post on the front page of the site, outside of the Wordpress-powered section. Using a bit of PHP and the Wordpress API, this is easy to do.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Besides terrific content, the hand lettered simplicity of the presentation is a terrific example of good design overcoming stylization. via

Simply put, crowdsourcing is the use of services provided by a willing and participating audience — they’re not your employees, nor are they bound to you by an agreement. And to boot, their currency isn’t even direct monetary compensation, but rather acknowledgment, props, and self fulfillment.

You’ve already seen some of their products: Linux, Wikipedia, js code libraries (anything open-source for that matter), nonprofit and not just for profit organizations, even things as simple as information from discussion boards, education from user groups, and innovation from coworking events.

So how does this relate to New Urbanism? Well, crowdsourcing is especially potent when there’s a healthy and open culture of conversation and relationship. While the internet helps accomplish this on a virtual level, New Urbanism aids on a physical/”real life” level.

And of course, this makes sense. We all know that the most innovative cities have many planning properties that resonates with and inspires New Urbanism.

Ironically, I discovered the term from http://www.cooltownstudios.com while searching for WIFI hotspots to cowork from in Santa Monica, which inspired me to create this artifact of user generated content called a blog post. =)