The Amur Adonis spotting the grounds along the Ladies’ Border are a shock of sunlit color.

• After footage of a tense city council meeting  in West Branch, Iowa  was posted on YouTube, City Administrator Matt Mucker suggested a rule that would have required the public to secure mayoral permission to record meetings. This measure would would have violated the state’s open meetings law. After this breach of the law was pointed out to Mucker, he argued that would “ rewrite the rule to exempt the media.” Gregory Norfleet, editor of the West Branch Times, noted the law was not written for the media’s benefit.  “It’s for everybody,” he said. Furthermore, Mark Tomb, director of membership for the Iowa League of Cities, warns, “It is important to remember that nearly anyone can bring an action against the city for violating the Iowa Open Meetings Law. Each member who participated in the violation may be assessed damages of not more than $500 or not less than $100. These penalties increase to no more than $2,500 or no less than $1,000 when the member knowingly participated in the violation. Ignorance of the law is not a defense.” For the whole story, check out Matthew E. Marquardt’s post on North Iowa Today.
• After a disgruntled employee took to Facebook to air his grievances, Jackson, Mississippi  was forced to come up with a policy regarding social media and public entities. The city itself is now developing a policy. In the meantime, the fire department has released their own policy: “The Department’s memo encourages employees not to: publicly discuss issues that might be detrimental to the Department or that might conflict with the duties and ethics of a firefighter; to air personal grievances; and clarify that their opinions are their own and not those of the Department.”  According to Jennifer Peet of Local Open Government Blog,“ For public entities, the tool is useful for broadcasting to a growing Internet audience, but allowing feedback and conversation can be a risk. Like the Jackson Fire Department, every government entity will need to have a conversation about the inherent conflict between an individuals free speech rights and the government’s legitimate right to protect the government service.”

In continuing with the “Google Reader is Still Relevant” meme (read Parts I and II here) I wanted to make a quick note on how I’m seeing extended value in Google Reader after integrating it with IFTTT.  Google Reader has morphed from a somewhat useful curation channel to an incredibly useful one.  On its own, Google Reader provides a number of ways to share content, including Google Plus, email and Send to:

In your Reader Settings, you can customize the services you want to use and manually add any that aren’t included (here are few a services you can add yourself):

While I find the options provided by Google useful, they seem somewhat limited in comparison to what you can both add and automate through IFTTT.  With the addition of Recipes to IFTTT, you can see the clever examples of how users are tying one service to another (although with a bit of redundancy).

If you click through to IFTTT and filter by Google Reader, you can sort by popular Actions or Triggers to see how others are using the service. Triggers will show you various ways to stream content into Google Reader, while Actions offer methods for curating and sharing content from Google Reader to other sites.

Some of the more popular Trigger recipes include sharing feed items to Evernote, Instapaper and Read It Later, which are great for personal consumption but you will quickly find ways to automatically share interesting posts and pieces to Delicious, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

By starring items, pushing new items from a tag or folder or by using the Send to feature, you can begin to add content to your Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, Delicious and Pinboard accounts, to Storyboard, Tumblr and Posterous, to name a few quick examples.

Of course you aren’t limited to just those services.  If you look at the available channels to push and pull content from, you find that you have plenty to begin working with:

I would love to hear what you come up with and if you create any public recipes.  We’ve created a handful of recipes that you can find here.

On Isla Gordon, Bill finds mosses in unusual places.

Caribbean weekends continue with photography workshops, salsa dancing, and entertainment for the kids.