News Providers are Embracing the iPhone

To mark another iPhone milestone (1.5 billion app downloads in a year), I checked our iTunes app store data warehouse. I was expecting the Books category to continue to register the fastest-growth but was instead greeted by an explosion in News (and to a lesser extent, Navigation) apps. News content providers increasingly need to have a strategy for delivering content to the iPhone and similar mobile devices. At least for the iPhone, many news organizations have done just that: during the week ending 7/12, there were over 1,500 News apps. http://bit.ly/2Bm97l

Developers Create Unofficial Find My iPhone API

The iPhone is correctly credited with bringing location services to the consumer. It started at launch with Google Maps. It kicked into hyper-drive with the launch of the App Store (there are now over 2800 location-enabled apps - via Skyhook). However, there is still a step to go, the iPhone needs the ability to share your location in the... http://bit.ly/12awMm

Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World

Even professional writers are prone to infrequent accidental plagiarism. But in the world of novels, newspapers, and college exams, there are rules about bootlegging others’ work that are well-established - most everyone agrees on what behaviors are unacceptable and what the consequences are. In bantamweight publishing, however, the rules are not so clear. In order for the British Army to... http://bit.ly/1b9qXk

Ignite Show: Greg Elin on Hackers in Washington

The Obama Administration has taken broad steps to open up the government. It's created Twitter accounts, launched data portals, and released spending dashboards. Even with these steps Washington D.C. can seem a strange place to geeks. Greg Elin (@gregelin) is a hacker living inside the beltway working with government officials to help with the process of opening up. In... http://ping.fm/BIRQl

Making Government Transparent Using R

With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can't bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She'll be talking about R and Open Government at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, OSCON. http://ping.fm/MlaGs

Four short links: 14 July 2009

Twenty Questions about GPLv3 (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- twenty very challenging questions about the GPLv3. foo.js is a JavaScript library released under the GPLv3. bar.js is a library with all rights reserved. For performance reasons, I would like to minimize all my site’s JavaScript into a single compressed file called foobar.js. If I distribute this file, must I also distribute... http://ping.fm/ORmrH

Recovery Mapping: ARRA Spending Across the US

GIS is the killer app for data.gov -- @mikehogan paraphrasing Spatial Sustain To really understand economic and government data you need a map. This is especially important to remember right now with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending. There's a lot of data out there and it's when you see can see the relative concentration of funds... http://ping.fm/8QjLb

Citizen Engineer: Open Source Hardware Hacking Zine

Over at Adafruit, Limor Fried and Phil Torrone have put out the first issue of Citizen Engineer. It's a zine devoted to open-source hardware, electronics arts and hacking. Some details from the site: Citizen Engineer volume 01 is now a comic book/zine! Volume 01 of Citizen Engineer is available as a limited edition full color 32 page comic "SIM... http://ping.fm/pTP2m

Sequencing a Genome a Week

The Human Genome Project took X years to fully sequence a single human's genetic information. At Washington University's Genome Center, they can now do one in a week. But when you're generating that much data, just keeping track of it can become a major challenge in itself. David Dooling is in charge of managing the massive output of the Center's herd of gene sequencing machines, and making it available to researchers inside the Center and around the world. He'll be speaking at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, on how he uses open source tools to keep things under control, and he agreed to give us an overview of how the field of genomics is evolving. http://ping.fm/sUVYl

Cloud computing perspectives and questions at the World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum started a
research project
at Davos 2009 concerning cloud computing.
I've put up a

discussion forum as a wiki.
http://ping.fm/qcSKZ

Four short links: 9 July 2009

Ten Rules That Govern Groups -- valuable lessons for all who would create or use social software, each backed up with pointers to the social science study about that lesson. Groups breed competition: While co-operation within group members is generally not so much of a problem, co-operation between groups can be hellish. People may be individually co-operative, but once... http://ping.fm/McCp0

Open Gov Is a Dialogue, Not a Monologue

At last week's Personal Democracy Forum I had a conversation with someone working for a city (I won't say which city), who was tasked with opening up that city's data. We were talking about the Apps for Democracy contests held recently in Washington D.C., and he explained his feeling about them: "There were some interesting apps in there, but... http://ping.fm/wKzen

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot

Web technologies often allow you to scale things that weren't scalable before. Unfortunately, that list of scalable things includes spam. From unsolicited phone calls to unwanted emails to unnecessary tweets, it can seem like we're getting progressively overloaded with information we don't necessarily want. One group blamed for the increase in online spam are Twitter bots - Twitter accounts created... http://ping.fm/sxKr8

Open Source is Infiltrating the Enterprise

There's a persistent perception that open source software is being ignored in the enterprise, that they fear it and it ends up being more costly to deploy than proprietary solutions. That's certainly the perception that some major software vendors would like you to have. But it's Jeffrey Hammond's job to dispel those perceptions, at least when they aren't accurate. As an analyst for Forrester Research, Hammond covers the world of software development as well as Web 2.0 and rich internet applications, so he sees how open source is being used on a daily basis. He'll be speaking at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, talking about the true cost of using open source, and he gave us a sample of what's going on in the enterprise at the moment. http://ping.fm/XX9Cp

Four short links: 7 July 2009

Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them -- Tests done since 1933 show that people who talk about their intentions are less likely to make them happen. Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed. I have noticed this myself. It must be balanced... http://ping.fm/7I0du

Four short links: 6 July 2009

Offline Mapping App for iPhone -- carry Open Street Maps maps with you even when you're not in 3G/wifi range. (via Elisabeth) My dentist used an in-office CAD & CNC mill to produce a new tooth for me today (Nat Friedman) -- hello, future! New version of Scratch released -- Scratch is an excellent way to teach kids how... http://ping.fm/VR5D5

Four short links: 3 July 2009

OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter) James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain. Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last, reminds me of Saul Griffith's heirloom design riff. When... http://ping.fm/Zl8jV

Ignite Los Angeles on 7/21! Submit a Talk

Ignite is coming to LA! As always speakers will get 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. We're going to be holding the geek event at Cinespace in Hollywood on 7/21. Submit a talk now. This will be the first Ignite in Los Angeles; it is co-hosted by LA Geek Dinner. The LA G33k dinner was kind enough to... http://ping.fm/tODKn

Twitter Approval Matrix - June 2009

A quick refresher, the matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter, or related sites such as hashtag.org, tweestats.com, etc. For this post, I've limited the data and activity to the month of June. http://ping.fm/HNNai

Patrick Collison Puts the Squeeze on Wikipedia

Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browser and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or as defined by AT&T coverage...) Collison will be presenting a talk on how he did it at OSCON, O'Reilly's Open Source conference at the end of July, and he spent some time talking to me about it recently. http://ping.fm/LMnrT

In Defense of Social Media (At Least Some Of It)

Scott Berkun just posted a great rant titled, Calling Bullshit on Social Media. I suggest everyone read it. Berkun raises good points - and I agree the hype around social media warrants taking a critical look. Despite being in general agreement, there are a few areas I can't abide, starting with this statement: social media is a stupid term. Is... http://ping.fm/AHIbp

Velocity and the Bottom Line

Velocity 2009 took place last week in San Jose, with Jesse Robbins and I serving as co-chairs. Back in November 2008, while we were planning Velocity, I said I wanted to highlight "best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company's bottom line." Much of my work focuses on the how of improving... http://ping.fm/ATmQE

Four short links: 1 July 2009

The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away! -- wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who... http://ping.fm/XzxPs

Everyblock's Code is Open-Sourced

The code for Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock has been released. The open-sourcing of the site's system were apart of the Knight News Challenge Program. Everyblock is very impressive site that aggregates and geocodes local data -- news, crime, fire, restaraunt inspections and reviews - and then lets users define their interests down to the block-level. Adrian made the announcement on... http://ping.fm/a4P03

The Hacker Ethic - Harming Developers?

Is the hacker ethic harming developers? We don't think so, but maybe the idea resonates a little bit? http://ping.fm/SAYCI

The US Online Job Market Was (still) Down Big In June 2009

Updating my post from early June, the U.S. online job market† still hasn't shown signs of recovering from steady declines that began in September of last year. Compared to the same period last year, there were 50% less job postings in June 2009. An alternate view highlights the start of the downward trend, as well as the smaller than expected... http://tinyurl.com/nhj928

Let them eat tweet

Does Twitter dumb us down or simply reveal our innate goofiness? That's the question that's been flittering about my skullcage after reading Gideon Rachman's column on the popular microblogging service in yesterday's Financial Times. In reviewing John McCain's vigorous tweet stream, Rachman observes that "some of the senator’s tweets make him sound like a peasant." He quotes one: “Meeting with Dr Kissinger – the smartest man in the world.” I have this picture in my mind of McCain and Kissinger sitting in comfortable armchairs in a well-appointed governmental office, a couple of aides hovering in the corners, and McCain is... http://ping.fm/AfTjm

Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard

Today, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York, Vivek Kundra, the US national CIO, unveiled the new IT spending dashboards at usaspending.gov. The dashboards are designed to help Vivek and the CIOs of individual government agencies get a handle on the effectiveness of government IT spending. At the top level, the dashboards provide a view of spending by major... http://ping.fm/ctSVp

Four short links: 30 June 2009

Military Open Source Software Conference -- 12-13 August 2009 in Atlanta. Govloop -- a "Social Network for Gov 2.0". Gov 2.0 could easily become the intersection of talk radio and social media consultant inanity. As with the Web 2.0 lunacy, when everyone who could spell wiki tried to sell one, you should cultivate the art of identifying and sidestepping... http://ping.fm/iCWMp

Bing's Sanaz Ahari on System Feedback (2 of 2)

A couple of weeks ago Bing had a small search summit for analysts, bloggers, SEO experts, entrepreneurs and advertisers. It was held in Bellevue; they put us up in the hotel and fed us. While there we received demos from Bing project teams. I was able to snag an interview with Sanaz Ahari, Lead PM on Bing. She led the... http://ping.fm/GhW2o

Books for the times

The Big Switch gets a nice recommendation from Newsweek. It's #4 on the magazine's list of Fifty Books for Our Times. Here are the top ten: 1. The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope 2. The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright 3. Prisoner of the State, by Zhao Ziyang 4. The Big Switch, by Nicholas Carr 5. The Bear, by William Faulkner 6. Winchell, by Neal Gabler 7. Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc 8. Night Draws Near, by Anthony Shadid 9. Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely 10. God: A Biography, by Jack Miles... http://ping.fm/E2xCA

Personal Democracy Forum conference: initial themes

The first day at the Personal Democracy Forum conference revolved
around the freedom to experiment, necessary infrastructure, and the
need to change. http://ping.fm/3bxI1

Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt

Even with an improving economy, there's still a lot of developers out there who are looking for work. And though it may make seasoned Open Source hackers cringe at the thought, one quick way to find employment may be to go over to "the Other Side" and become a Microsoft SharePoint developer. I recently attended the SPTechCon conference, and talked... http://ping.fm/GG49h

Bing's Sanaz Ahari on Query Level Categorization (1 of 2)

A couple of weeks ago Bing had a small search summit for analysts, bloggers, SEO experts, entrepreneurs and advertisers. It was held in Bellevue; they put us up in the hotel and fed us. While there we received demos from Bing project teams. I was able to snag an interview with Sanaz Ahari, Lead PM on Bing. She led the... http://ping.fm/LKFzd

?Silicon Valley?s First Phone Company? -A conversation with Ted Griggs

Ribbit bills itself as “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company.” Recently I sat down with Ted Griggs, Ribbit’s CEO to talk about that tag line, Ribbit’s business and what’s behind their recent acquisition by British Telecom. It will be interesting to see how the telecommunications industry is going to handle the coming disruption as the public becomes accustomed to near-free calling... http://ping.fm/rkpzq

Sivilized

Michael Chabon, in an elegiac essay in the new edition of the New York Review of Books, rues the loss of the "Wilderness of Childhood" - the unparented, unfenced, only partially mapped territory that was once the scene of youth. It is by now an old theme, but he gives it a vigorous workout: As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked. At the same time they have become fetishes,... http://ping.fm/OVzgL

The sour Wikipedian

Forget altruism. Misanthropy and egotism are the fuel of online social production. That's the conclusion suggested by a new study of the character traits of the contributors to Wikipedia. A team of Israeli research psychologists gave personality tests to 69 Wikipedians and 70 non-Wikipedians. They discovered that, as New Scientist puts it, Wikipedians are generally "grumpy," "disagreeable," and "closed to new ideas." In their report on the results of the study, the scholars paint a picture of Wikipedians as social maladapts who "feel more comfortable expressing themselves on the net than they do off-line" and who score poorly on measures... http://ping.fm/x16Vg

How Active is Twitter Now? Tweespeed

As of Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 1:10PM PST Twitter is pumping out 13,574 tweets per minute. I know from TweeSpeed, The Twitter Instant Speed Meter. The auto-refreshing application averages the last five minutes of Twitter's public timeline to get its figure. The simple app was built using" Java (JSP), uses the Twitter Java API, and runs on Google... http://ping.fm/NtpgF

Scott Berkun on Why You Should Speak (at Ignite)

A lot of people feel that Ignite is great training for speakers. The strict format and auto-advancing slides can really solidify your self-confidence. Scott Berkun, the author of Making Things Happen and of an upcoming book on public speaking, did a talk on just that at the last Ignite Seattle. We've edited that talk and made it this week's... http://ping.fm/vWuaY

Apple, the Boomer Tablet and the Matrix

I have written here, here and here about Apple’s inevitable assault on the Tablet market. What I hadn’t factored until recently is how symbiotic such a device would be for Baby Boomers. Why Baby Boomers? Well, for the same two reasons that this demographic is unlikely to embrace the palm-sized iPhone en masse. One, such a bookish-sized tablet device –... http://ping.fm/3goVr

Naming an Emerging Movement

There's a movement going on around the world. We don't have a name for it, though. Gov2.0, e-gov, e-democracy, open gov--these are all names that get applied to what is happening. And they are great for describing a certain aspect of this movement, the aspect that actually deals with government. What's really going on right now is much bigger than... http://ping.fm/RU9Or

Four short links: 25 June 2009

How an Indie Musician Can Make $19,000 in 10 Hours Using Twitter -- as Zoe Keating pointed out: "cash made by @amandapalmer in one month on Twitter = $19,000; cash made by @amandapalmer from 30,000 record sales = $0". The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics (Wired) -- And not only can we... http://ping.fm/wPsja

Case Study: Twitter Usage at Wordcamp SF

One of my many hats is as an events organizer. Twitter has become an invaluable tool for me to gauge the mood of the attendees. Are they excited by the current speaker? Bored or excited at the latest news? Are they having a good time? And most important, are they making connections? Pathable, an events social networking company, has... http://ping.fm/PR9id

Banished

Do not ask for whom the Google tolls. It tolls for me. I woke up this morning to discover that I no longer exist. The entire contents of this blog has been erased from Google's index. Every post. Every last bon mot. Gone. Without a trace. Here, by way of illustration, is what you'll get if you google the word "google" and restrict the search to the roughtype.com domain: Now I know how Adam and Eve felt after God kicked their sorry asses out of Eden. I'm on my knees. Please, Google, I beg of you, let me back into... http://ping.fm/5qJme

Jonathan Heiliger on Web Performance, Operations, and Culture

We were honored to have Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of Technology Operations, as our opening keynote speaker at Velocity. Jonathan is one of the most accomplished leaders in our field, and is a master of the craft. Here is his keynote in it's entirety... http://ping.fm/bPI0d

Four short links: 24 June 2009

The Digital Open -- The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers. Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian's Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment -- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like... http://ping.fm/zj3Lt

My 140conf Talk: Twitter as Publishing

I spoke at Jeff Pulver's 140conf a few weeks ago. My subject was the continuity of what I do, from publishing through conferences through my presence on twitter. I tried to draw the connections, and to explain how "social media" means drawing from, curating, and amplifying the voices of a community. I suggest that the role of an editor and publisher is analogous to the role of a point guard in basketball, handing out "assists" and improving the performance of his or her teammates. After all, I point out, I couldn't possibly tweet enough to cover all the topics I am interested in. But by using my retweets to build the visibility of others, I can create and foster a community that cares about the ideas, trends, and people that I care about. http://ping.fm/DZgPn

Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: adaptive legislation can respond to action in the agora

If legislatures could rely on public participation during the
implementation of the law, they could write laws that embrace such
input.
http://ping.fm/9dny9

App Growth, PalmOS vs iPhoneOS

There's a chart I've been meaning to put together for a while to explain why I'm expecting the iPhoneOS to be the dominant mobile platform for at least the next decade. I've been thinking of the role third-party applications played in helping Palm maintain its mobile platform dominance for about that same period, from 1996 to 2006. If you believe... http://ping.fm/TQiPY

Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users

Today representatives of Google Search and Microsoft's Bing teams, Jake Brutlag and Eric Schurman respectively, presented the results of user performance tests at today's Velocity Conference. The talk was entitled The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search. These are long-term tests were designed to see what aspects of performance are... http://ping.fm/5TV7f

Four short links: 23 June 2009

Easter Eggs for Real Life (Neil Gaiman) -- ok, I know easter eggs are already part of real life, but this is still cool. Gaiman recommends a restaurant run by a friend, and the friend has set up a special phrase that to mention to the server, at which point something good and special will happen for them to... http://ping.fm/l6xL9

A Manifesto on Health Data Rights

As a medical patient, I've always assumed that my medical records were something that I had a right to - after all, they are about me, and my freedom to share them with a second doctor, or see them myself so I can understand my own medical situation, seems self-evident. It was only the fact that so many of these... http://ping.fm/i7F5R

Before and After Shots of Google's Iran Maps

There many places in the world where it is not possible for larger companies to map them. These can be for economic reasons as is the case for Black Rock City (the temporary 40,000 person home for Burning Man). Or for political reasons as is the case for Iran and countries such as China. As I mentioned the other... http://ping.fm/rHIjF

Where are the learners?

I tend to browse around Flickr a lot, and came across this image: So what's missing here? Well, it would seem obvious... except to many technical book authors. See, for most folks, the obvious answer here is, "There are no students!" But for the average technical book author -- and to be clear, I'm one of that crowd, so I'm... http://ping.fm/oIutf

Velocity: The Art of Web Operations

Two years ago, at the 2007 O'Reilly Open Source Convention, a group of web operations professionals, led by Jesse Robbins and Steve Souders along with O'Reilly editor Andy Oram, asked for a meeting with me. Their message: "We need a separate conference for our community." That community: the web operations professionals who keep sites up and running. They knew I... http://ping.fm/ocWXb

Four short links: 22 June 2009

Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years -- to put it another way, the half-life of friendship is 7 years. (via zephoria on delicious) Crowdsourced Car Design -- an interesting approach, and I can imagine it being described as "threadless for cars". (via timoreilly on Twitter) Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce -- The Aussies are getting their Gov 2.0... http://ping.fm/midRr

The Benefits of a Classical Education

As some of you may know, I got my undergraduate degree in Greek and Latin Classics. So when Forbes asked me to do an interview on the subject of how my Classical education had affected my business career, I agreed. The result, part of a special report called Power, Ambition, Glory, used only a small part of the interview I... http://ping.fm/fkeyU

Health Care Costs: Am I missing something? Or is there a lot of flimflam going on?

Driving home from work, listening to NPR's story about health care costs, I couldn't help but be struck by a couple of numbers. The Obama health plan will cost a trillion dollars we're told. A TRILLION sounds big enough to end the debate, doesn't it? Then I hear, almost as a footnote, that that trillion is over ten years. That's... http://ping.fm/y7iEd

The Web

2: it's Exponential, but is it Contracting or Expanding?

Announcing: Spike Night at Velocity

Guest blogger Scott Ruthfield is a Program Committee member of the O'Reilly Velocity: Web Performance & Operations Conference.  Web Operations is not for the casual observer: it's for a particular kind of adrenaline junkie that's motivated by graphs and servers spinning out of control.  Jumping in, on-your-feet analysis, and experience-based-experimentation are all part of solving new problems caused by unexpected user and machine behavior,... http://ping.fm/dstev

Dramatic Increase in Number of Tor Clients from Iran: Interview with Tor Project and the EFF

The Tor Project produces an anonymous proxy services which allows users to evade surveillance. In this interview, Andrew Lewman talks about the Tor Project and discusses some statistics that show its increased use from with Iran. This article also includes some questions and answers with the EFF about the legal implications of running an open proxy server. http://ping.fm/oImhX

Personal Democracy Forum: Politics in the Web 2.0 Era

In the past year or so, I've been urging people to work on stuff that matters. The world is faced with serious problems, and we in the technology community have a unique contribution to make, as the tools we've created help us to collaborate and organize at an unprecedented scale outside of industrial-era top-down organizations. One area where technology and real world concerns meet is in the challenge of remaking democracy in a Web 2.0 world. http://ping.fm/hHcPQ

Four short links: 19 June 2009

Inside-Out Multiplication Table -- very cool way to view the patterns of factors. Math is beauty with subscripts. High-Speed Camera -- capture 100 frames at up to 1M frames/second. The sample videos, of a bullet liquefying on impact and a shotgun string boiling past, are stunning. The Makezine high-speed photography kit is the cheap amateur version. Open Source Energy... http://ping.fm/ZOrtG

Twenty-five hundred years of Government 2.0

New practices in government transparency are just intensifications of
things democracies have done for a long time: public comment periods,
expert consultation, archiving deliberations, and so forth. So let's
look back a bit at what democracy has brought to government so far.
http://ping.fm/9OsYo

Facebook Adds Million of Users in Asia

Since my previous post on Facebook users by country, the company has grown rapidly in Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook grew 90% in Asia going from 11.4 to 21.7 million active users. With a Market Penetration of only 0.6% in Asia, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in the region. The company also gained 11.3M users in Europe... http://tinyurl.com/nx6gsy

Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter

In this 10 minute interview, Sarah Milstein, co-author of The Twitter Book, discusses Twitter's impact on the Iranian protests, the emerging relationship between Twitter and breaking news stories, and she addressed the fear of inadvertent transparency within immediate social messaging communications media. http://ping.fm/6QEaq

Geolocating Your iPhone Users via the Browser

Hallelujah! Geolocation is available in the iPhone's browser. I was thrilled to finally have this app ask to use my location. This is only true for the new 3.0 version of the browser (oddly, geolocation is *not* available in the Mac version of Safari 4). Adding the ability to geolocate users via the browser opens up a whole new range of web apps. If you're eager to start catering to the legion of iPhone users ready to tell you where they are, Adam DuVander (the fellow behind the Portland Wifi Finder among other things) has written up an excellent post on how to access their location. The iPhone is using the W3C Geo-Location spec. http://ping.fm/ggGh5

The Next Wave of iPhone Apps

This is the biggest week of the year for iPhone users, as Apple released iPhone OS 3.0 on Wednesday and will be launching the new iPhone 3GS on Friday. The iPhone OS 3.0 Software Update provides a significant number of enhancements to the operating system including spotlight search, cut, copy, & paste, voice memos, support for landscape keyboard usage in Mail, Messages, Notes, and Safari, MMS and tethering for carriers that support these features (AT&T late summer for MMS, tethering TBD), and dozens of other improvements. http://ping.fm/DASNF

Four short links: 18 June 2009

Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) -- Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyright protection, it seems, has benefited society." This is consistent with the authors' view that weaker copyright is "uambiguously desirable if it does not lessen the incentives of artists and entertainment companies... http://ping.fm/KbhX0

Want a Map of Tehran? Use Open Street Map or Google

All eyes are on Tehran right now. As the center of the Iranian election protests the city has become increasingly important to websites this week. To keep their site up-to-date with this latest crisis area Flickr switched out the Yahoo road Map with Open Street Map. When I heard about this I wondered how other major mapping sites faired.... http://ping.fm/pyR6r

Four short links: 17 June 2009

NY Times Mines Its Data To Identify Words That Readers Find Abstruse -- the feature that lets you highlight a word on a NY Times web page and get more information about it is something that irritates me. I'm fascinated by the analysis of their data: boggling that sumptuary is less perplexing than solipsistic. Louche (#3 on the list)... http://ping.fm/fIbgE

ARhrrrr! : Augmented Reality Zombie and Helicopter Game

Augmented Reality is going to be coming to a phone near you very shortly. All it takes is a decent processor, a camera, a compass and a GPS -- all of which are becoming increasingly common on smart phones (Android phones and the iPhone 3GS qualify). It's going to be used primarily for games and geo-oriented apps. ARhrrr! is... http://ping.fm/vDqCL

Interesting Questions Raised by Iranian Twitter Activism

Development (4:10 PM CST): The State Department has been in contact with Twitter to make sure that the service remained available for protestors in Iran. (reuters) Last Friday, Twitter started to digest the Iranian election results, and the tool became a powerful vehicle for protest and coordination for student protestors within Iran and interested parties outside the country. American Twitterers... http://ping.fm/WR7rk

Walking the Censorship Tightrope with Google's Marissa Mayer

Google sometimes finds itself at an difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. I recently had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, who started at Google as their first female engineer, and has now risen to the ranks of vice president in charge of some of Google's most critical product areas, such as search, maps and Chrome. We talked about some of Google's future product directions, and also about how Google makes the decision as to when information has to be withheld from the users. Marissa will be delivering a keynote address at the O'Reilly Velocity Conference next week. http://ping.fm/5IYZL

Four short links: 16 June 2009

Dealing with Election Results Data -- taking the raw UK European election data into Google's Fusion Tables to try and make sense of it. More cloud-based tools for the data scientist within. (via Simon Willison) Time for an Open 311 API -- "311" is the US number to call for non-emergency municipal services. There have been a lot of... http://ping.fm/mWga9

Personal Democracy Forum ramp-up: from vulnerability and overload to rage, mistrust, and fear

The grand vision for government/public collaboration is a set of
feedback loops that intensify the influence of the collective will on
government policy. But will the White House have the time and
resources to establish a foothold for a solid and lasting open
government program?
http://ping.fm/MdkLc

Hands-On with the iPhone 3.0 OS; Search is the Winner

The iPhone 3.0 OS is going to be released this Wednesday. It will be available to all iPhones (for free) and iPod Touches (for a small cost). The iPhone 3GS will ship with it. The new OS became available last week to those willing and able to try it out a bit early (see Gizmodo for details). This is... http://ping.fm/9UEBc

Jeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design conference

Jeff Bezos is very quotable. Listeing to Steve Levy interview him at the Wired Disruptive by Design event in New York, I was furiously taking notes. Here are the quotes I managed to capture: "We've co-evolved with our tools for thousands of years," he says, explaining how ease of Kindle buying changes behavior. "Reading is an important enough activity that... http://ping.fm/G8gEK

Four short links: 15 June 2009

More Talk Less Chalk -- wordy slides that duplicate what the speaker says make it harder to learn. [R]esults indicate that participants exposed to lexically sparse slides had better recall of thematic content, suggesting that deeper encoding occurs when working memory demands are reduced, and that this may be achieved simply by minimising the number of words on the... http://ping.fm/jWWWZ

The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System

Everyone is talking a lot about open government and transparency these days. It's exhilarating stuff, and it's even more exciting to see governments get behind it, creating sites like data.gov in the U.S. for the public to access government information via APIs. But every time I hear someone say something like "our organization is really into transparency" (which is often)... http://ping.fm/vtPaJ

XKCD on the Future Self

This morning's XKCD, Latitude, spells out one of the reasons people will be weary of setting up continuous location trackers: the future self. The future self forgets that they are sharing their location and then act as if no one knows where they are going. In this case Megan's friend tracks her stops at a sex shop, toy store,... http://ping.fm/gbtex

Four short links: 12 June 2009

New Media Challenges: Legal and Policy Considerations for Federal Use of Web 2.0 Technology (Center for American Progress) -- report on the issues around Web 2.0 use in Government, which include privacy, security, Public Records Act, advertising, etc. See also It's Not the Campaign Anymore: How the White House Is Using Web 2.0 Technology So Far from the same... http://ping.fm/2dE0C

Search for Developers

Diagnosing Technical Issues With Search Engine OptimizationView more OpenOffice presentations from Jane Robot. Vanessa Fox just posted her slides from her talk Diagnosing Technical Issues With Search Engine Optimization. They are packed with handy SEO/SEM suggestions, checklists and resources. It's worth going through at least once.... http://ping.fm/N2xEW

Mechanical Turk Best Practices

Last night, Dolores Labs hosted what was billed as the first-ever Mechanical Turk meetup, and I was fortunate enough to have been able to squeeze into what turned out to be a great series of presentations. While Amazon was the pioneer and remains the largest provider in the space, other services like Dolores Labs and Nathan Eagle's txteagle have emerged... http://ping.fm/ojQ0P

Programming Contests, Community, and Business

Attending the TopCoder Open, the final in-person rounds of an intense programming competition, in support of the TopCoder Cookbook, showed me possibilities that go way beyond programming or books into business models and community I came expecting to see a competition, but found a much more inclusive (and compelling) business model which builds and applies an international community of dedicated developers. http://ping.fm/mXRfs

Four short links: 11 June 2009

Trending Topics -- full source code for trendingtopics.org, Wikipedia trend analysis. Rails app running on the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution on EC2. (via mattb on Delicious) Graffiti from Pompeii -- I can't help but read these as Tweets. Herculaneum (on the exterior wall of a house); 10619: Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here (see also olde... http://ping.fm/o94NF

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

I've been resisting the temptation to write about Android. But after reading some of the blogs about Android netbooks, I can't keep quiet. Aside from being a Really Cool Idea, I don't have a lot to say about netbooks themselves. I've got an Android phone (thanks, Google), and I like it, and it would be nice to see the operating... http://ping.fm/hKMaP

Clarke and the Continuous Location Update

I love the idea of Fire Eagle, Yahoo's under-supported location-brokering service. However until recently I found myself unable to use it. I had no mobile service that I could consistently rely on to update Fire Eagle. Enter Clarke. Clarke (named after Arthur C. Clarke) is a small tool that runs in the background on my Mac. It updates my... http://ping.fm/xLOy3

Four short links: 10 June 2009

Apple's Cool Matrix-Style App Wall (TechCrunch) -- a huge collection of icons for many of the apps available in the App Store, arranged by color. Apparently, when someone purchased one, that app’s icon would pulsate. An App Store version of Google's search globe. Information visualization makes activities meaningful, beautiful, and useful, but not necessarily all at the same time.... http://ping.fm/DXh7i

John Viega Talks About Beautiful Security

John Viega is the co-editor of Beautiful Security, the latest in O'Reilly's "Beautiful" series. He recently talked to me a bit about what makes security beautiful, and what demands modern security problems place on end users and administrators http://ping.fm/b1tlp

Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform

Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is "participating in the conversation" or some version of that. I myself am guilty of using this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with... http://ping.fm/5exeb

Twitter Approval Matrix

This matrix shows four quadrants used to describe tastes found on Twitter, or related sites such as hashtag.org, tweestats.com, etc. The Y-axis is partly analytical and shows popularity (mostly through scraped numbers) or perceived popularity (in the future nominated by you). The other part of the grid is more curated and subjective. The X-axis has been plotted based on my personal opinion. http://ping.fm/YSd1e

What the iPhone 3GS and 3.0 OS Means for Geo Devs

Yesterday's announcements around the iPhone 3GS and new 3.0 OS were significant to consumers and developers. Here are some of the changes that will make geo devs happy. Google Maps Views (Mapkit) - Developers can now take advantage of Google Maps within their apps. This means that you no longer have to building your own mapping system for your... http://ping.fm/QVkw6

Scripting Comes to Android

Google is bringing scripts to Android. The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) will make development accessible and easy for devs who don't want to build a full-fledge application. As Google provides these details: Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Lua and BeanShell are currently supported, and we're... http://ping.fm/FcAmD

Vanessa Fox's Search Developer Summit - 6/12 in SF

Vanessa Fox, search expert at large, is running a Search Developer Summit this Friday in SF. As she describes it: A site’s technical architecture is crucial for its success in search engines. If you are an entrepreneur building an online business, a web developer who is looking to add valuable skills to your resume, or a CTO or engineering... http://ping.fm/QwD20

Ignite! comes to San Jose June 22nd - Submit your talks now!

Ignite! is coming to San Jose on Monday June 22, 2009 at 8:00 pm, attached to the Velocity Conference. Admission is free, open to all, and there will be a cash bar. The deadline for talks is May 11th, so submit your talks now! As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15... http://ping.fm/GP9nu

Four short links: 8 June 2009

How to Project on 3D Geometry -- the fine art (and math) of distorting an image so that it looks undistorted when projected onto a non-flat 3D surface. Confused? See the images below. (via straup on Delicious) ZinePal -- Create your own printable magazine from any online content. (via warrenellis on Delicious) What The Government Doesn't Understand About The... http://ping.fm/UV1km

When do your beliefs become knowledge?

I've been reading a lot of philosophy lately -- Kierkegaard and Dawkins, Lewis, Hume, Calvin and Augustine, you name it -- for a class I'm taking, as well as for my own enjoyment. One of the interesting things about philosophy is that it's a discipline that takes the understanding of understanding seriously. As a teacher, that's fascinating to me; has education -- specifically, the way we in 2009 are trying to educate -- really examined what knowledge is? Have educational systems considered what the wealth of literature says about knowledge, and responded to it responsibly? http://ping.fm/uOeNB

CrisisCamp is June 12-14th in Washington, DC

CrisisCamp is an unconference to bring together domain experts, hackers, makers, developers, and first responders to improve technology and practice for humanitarian crisis management and disaster relief. This is the first event in what I hope will become a movement, and it's happening on June 12 - 14, 2009 in Washington, DC. Across the world, everyday people can find... http://ping.fm/ow34z

Four short links: 5 June 2009

Visual Programming Environments for Kids -- detailed writeup of the research and coding done by Shone Sadler to build a visual programming environment for robots, so simple that kids can use it. (via steveweiss on Twitter) The Nation's CTO Lays Out His Priorities -- it's still not entirely clear how the CTO and CIO's roles differ, as both are... http://ping.fm/ioOIj

FBML, YML, OSML oh my! HTML, meet Social

Given how quickly the Social Web is coming together, I believe that HTML will need to support social elements someday soon. It's great to see this type of innovation by Facebook running in the wild, but the web itself ultimately evolves best when multiple competing approaches come together. Just as OAuth brought together the best practices from AOL, Flickr, Google, Yahoo! and others, there is a similar opportunity to bring together FBML, YML and OSML along with the client-side benefits of XFBML. http://ping.fm/eXSq8

The World's (Phone) Reactions to Obama's Inauguration

On Obama's Inauguration Day the world watched... and called each other. And those calls were voluminous and corresponded to parts of his speech. To see just how the world reached out to each other MIT's Senseable City Lab and AT&T teamed up to analyze the call records of that day. In honor of Obama's 100th day in office they... http://ping.fm/fKcvP

3D Glasses: Virtual Reality, Meet the iPhone

A light flickers from two distinct points in time. As a child in the early-1970s, one of my toys was a View-Master, a binoculars-like device for viewing 3D images (called stereograms), essentially a mini-program excerpted from popular destinations, TV shows, cartoons, events and the like. Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream. I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0. http://ping.fm/RG7he

OSCON 2009 Highlights

OSCON 2009 is just around the corner, this year in San Jose, California. When I spoke at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group last night, they asked me for a few highlights. It's tough to pick from over 200 sessions, all the best-of-the-best out of 800 submissions (and there were at least 100 more I wish I could have fit... http://ping.fm/r8Ihj

TOSBack: EFF's Much-Needed Terms of Service Tracker

The EFF just launched a service for tracking Terms of Service changes of 44 major sites including Google, Apple and recursively the EFF. TOSBack provides a feed of changes. In the screenshot below you can see a comparison of Facebook's privacy policy, which has been updated to Facebook's new address. The full set of companies at launch are: Amazon,... http://ping.fm/CB60f

Ignite Show: Veronica Belmont on the Do's and Don'ts of Making Memes

At Ignite SF on 4/1 Veronica Belmont shared some do's and don'ts on businesses and their attempts at viral marketing campaigns. Her advice is simple (Don't be a jerk, Don't try too hard, Be funny). Vanessa's examples run the gamut from one of the best (Subservient Chicken) to the recent and risky (Skittles). You can get the Ignite show... http://ping.fm/9NJyD

Google Squared is an Exponential Improvement in Search

One of the things I've learned about Google is that the most amazing things will come out of them with barely a whisper of fanfare. Such is the case with Google Squared, a new Google Labs tool that was released today. What does Google Squared do? It organizes and tables information from searches for you in a way that makes it much more useful. http://ping.fm/UkSSU

The Economic Crisis and the US Online Job Market

In my previous post, I noted that despite the large decline in total number of job postings, the number Hadoop/MapReduce job postings increased by 49%. What is the current state of the online job market? The financial crisis that began in the Fall of 2008 has had a lasting negative effect on the U.S. online job market. Since late 2008, there have been significantly less jobs posted online. http://tinyurl.com/rcam5w

Four short links: 3 June 2009

Tinychat -- very simple web-based take on videochat. Pro members get higher resolution, more rooms, and privacy. (I like the "free = public, charge for private" business model) One Click Orgs -- One Click Orgs is building a website where groups can quickly create a legal structure and get a simple system for group decisions. We think social enterprises,... http://ping.fm/hFmDL

Mapumental: Time & Scenicness in Maps

MySociety has given us a sneak peak at Mapumental, a map app that lets you pivot on travel-time, "scenicness", and house-price in the London area. Just enter a postal code and if you're looking for a home in the area Mapumental should be very helpful to you. It is an update to a previous foray into temporal maps (you... http://ping.fm/2ddDY

Four short links: 2 June 2009

TypeKit -- Jeff Veen's new startup, making typography on the web fail to suck. Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. While it’s technically quite easy... http://ping.fm/s4242

Loki's Net

Every culture has its Trickster myths because Trickster lives on the edge of what the rest of us perceive as "real." He crosses boundaries so often and with such ease, not to mention panache, that our own boundaries expand because of him. Trickster is "the doorway leading out, the spirit of the road at dusk" (Lewis Hyde) that doesn't belong to any town but is in-between all towns; the province of thieves and spies. Here's an updated version of an old Trickster tale that I think is particularly relevant to the topic of this post--the national security risks associated with a more open Government in general and social software in particular. http://ping.fm/uH0K5

Four short links: 1 June 2009

Spymaster -- a faux-spy game on Twitter: Each player becomes a master of a spy ring based upon their Twitter followers list. The more people that follow you and are playing characters in Spymaster, the more powerful your network will be. As a spymaster, you can perform tasks or attack other spymasters on Twitter. With each successful attempt, you... http://ping.fm/wvc4S

Most Hadoop Jobs Are In California

Given the recent buzz surrounding Hadoop and MapReduce, I was curious if employers were beginning to mention either term in their job postings. Fortunately I have access to a massive job data warehouse dating back to mid-2005. In partnership with SimplyHired and Greenplum, we maintain a data warehouse that contains most of the online job postings in the U.S. While... http://ping.fm/koqfq

Four short links: 29 May 2009

Freedom for OS X -- Mac app that disables networking for up to eight hours so you can get work done without Internet distractions. Technology workarounds for meatware bugs. (via Joshua-Michèle Ross). iPhone Casts a Giant Shadow on the Web -- 43% of mobile web traffic is from iPhone users, as measured by "the world's largest purveyor of ads... http://tinyurl.com/n8cssh

Maker Faire Opens Saturday

Maker Faire is here again, our fourth annual event in the Bay Area. Once again, you just won't believe how much there is to see and do at Maker Faire. Makers were busy today setting up on Friday. In the morning, we had 400 kids visit the fairgrounds for a backstage tour and a chance to spend time with dozens... http://ping.fm/3QM6Z

Ignite Show: Hillel Cooperman on the Lego Undrground

Some people never grow up. Some people wait to have children so that they can become kids again. When Hillel Coopermans's young ones were four he began his family's Lego collection. This led to whole rooms being devoted to the hobby, to eBay auctions, and Leog conventions. In this week's Ignite Show Hillel takes us through the Lego Underground.... http://ping.fm/JaX4r

Amazon Hosts TIGER Mapping Data

Last week at Ignite Where Eric Gundersen of Development Seed made a significant announcement for geohackers looking for easy access to open geodata. Amazon will be hosting a copy of TIGER data on EC2 as an EBS (Elastic Block Storage). Eric stated that this happened during the Apps For America contest in 2008 when they need open geo data... http://ping.fm/yAvnI

Google I/O in Pictures: Google Culture at Work

I had a few miscellaneous notes on Google I/O that I wanted to share, including a few anthropological observations best made with pictures. I thought it was really interesting that there were more registration lines for Academia than there were for general admission. Google knows the same truth as Apple, that students are the future. They are making it really... http://ping.fm/iWoqt

Ignite NYC IV & The First Ignite Film Festival This Monday

On Monday, June 1st we will be kicking off Internet Week with an Ignite at the New World Stages. Tikva Morowati and I are co-hosting. Ignite NYC IV is proudly co-presented by the team at Web 2.0 Expo, a conference and expo bringing together the best and brightest in the Web 2.0 universe to show the world how the... http://ping.fm/oFaU3

Google Wave: the Early Days

After the press conference following this morning's keynotes, I was part of a small group conversation with Lars Rasmussen, head of the Google Wave team. He told the story of how they pitched Sergey Brin on the Wave project. "We'd worked on our message," he said, "and we boiled it down to this: 'We think we have an idea that... http://ping.fm/7g9XP

Four short links: 28 May 2009

Viral Epidemics Poised to go Mobile -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else) modelled mobile phone virus epidemiology for NSF and concluded that (in accordance with experience) no single OS has critical mass for viruses to break-out. I wonder: will Android or iPhone reach that point first? (via ACM TechNews) Socrata -- formerly... http://ping.fm/470YK

Google Wave: What Might Email Look Like If It Were Invented Today?

Yesterday's Google I/O keynote highlighted the power of HTML 5 to match functionality long experienced in desktop applications. This morning, Google plans to announce an HTML 5-based application - still very much in the early stages of development - that represents a profound advance in the state of the art. Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the original creators of Google Maps,... http://ping.fm/wiciq

FCC discusses broadband: the job is a big one

Related to a
proposal
I submitted for
local forums to implement high-speed networks, the
FCC released

"Bringing
Broadband to Rural America: Report on a Rural Broadband Strategy."
http://ping.fm/DOkiO

New Geo For Devs From Google I/O

Today at Google I/O, Google has made several announcements for geo developers. To sum: Google is updating (not abandoning!) its Flash API, but it still prefers the Javascript one Google is pushing the Maps API into mobile (and performance is a big part of the push) Geolocation is going to be a part of every Google product eventually Android... http://ping.fm/DnD4T

Google I/O keynote, day 1

Just one very quick note: When Apple released the iPhone, I said that they had changed the game. Not because they had created the coolest, prettiest phone in history, but because had a phone with a real browser that suppported real HTML with real JavaScript. You can write cool apps in Cocoa, sure. But what's more important is that you... http://ping.fm/RlD5k

Google Web Elements and Google's Iceberg Strategy (Google I/O)

At Google I/O this morning, DeWitt Clinton announed Google Web Elements, a new simple interface layer to Google Ajax APIs. The goal is to make bringing Google features to other sites as easy as cut and paste. And indeed, the cut and paste functionality is impressive: Add news, custom search, conversations, maps and more to your site with only a... http://ping.fm/EOqKm

Google Bets Big on HTML 5: News from Google I/O

"Never underestimate the web," says Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra in his keynote at Google I/O this morning. He goes on to tell the story of a meeting he remembers when he was VP of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft five years ago. "We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. There was this small company called Keyhole,... http://ping.fm/wSKCG

Geeks Invade Government With Audacious Goals

Guest blogger Mark Drapeau is the Co-Chair of the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase in Sept 2009 and the Gov 2.0 Expo in May 2010, both in Washington, DC. He holds the title of Associate Research Fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University, a professional military educational school run by the Joint Chiefs... http://ping.fm/GuzRL

Last Chance: Submit a Talk for the Web 2.0 Expo

The next Web 2.0 Expo is this November 16-19 in New York City. It's our annual East-coast gathering for the web community. As always we'll have tracks and sessions for the product team (developers, ops, designers, project managers) and the business team (marketers, business development). The topics will cover mobile, ops, social media, government, geolocation, web development, RIAs, sales,... http://ping.fm/iK9XY

Four short links: 25 May 2009

China is Logging On -- blogging 5x more popular in China than in USA, email 1/3 again as popular in USA as China. These figures are per-capita of Internet users, and make eye-opening reading. (via Glynn Moody) The Economics of Google (Wired) -- the money graf is Google even uses auctions for internal operations, like allocating servers among its... http://ping.fm/EB64u

Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband); proposal open for votes

I've posted a proposal titled

Local forums to implement high-speed networks (broadband)
to a
forum on open government
put up by the White House.
Voting is currently underway.
http://ping.fm/4ODoC

Welcoming Eric Ries to the Radar Team

The Radar blog is a community of thinkers organized around the O’Reilly mission to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. Some of the folks with posting privileges on Radar are O'Reilly employees: Brady Forrest organizes the ETech, Where 2.0 and Web 2.0 Expo events, Mike Loukides, Andy Oram, Brett McLaughlin, and Mike Hendrickson are editors of many... http://ping.fm/RS4Iy

Four short links: 22 May 2009

Hiding Dirty Deeds: "Encrypted" Client-Side Code -- obfuscated Javascript from a Facebook phishing site, deconstructed and reconstructed, parsed and glossed for understanding. It reminds me of the best obfuscated Perl: Latin, string substitution, runtime and compile-time semantics ... a work of evil art. (via waxy) Kickstarter -- artistic commercial version of PledgeBank. You say "I want to do [X]... http://ping.fm/hOeX2

Social Science Moves from Academia to the Corporation

In order to control a thing you must first classify that thing -- and we are seeing a massive classification of social behavior. While that classification falls under the guise of making life easier (targeted ads, locating a nearby pizza joint using your mobile), history tells us that we should be leery of the motives driving the masters of our social data (see Captivity of the Commons). Social sciences (behavioral psychology, sociology, organizational development), whose historical lack of data and scientific method left them open to ridicule from the “hard” sciences, finally have enough volume of data and analytics and processing power (see Big Data) to make “social” much more scientific. http://ping.fm/dDktW

Time Lapse of Galactic Center of Milky Way rising over Texas Star Party

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman. According to William Castleman: The time-lapse sequence was taken with the simplest equipment that I brought to the star party. I put the Canon EOS-5D (AA screen modified to record hydrogen alpha at 656 nm) with an EF 15mm f/2.8 lens on a weighted tripod. Exposures were... http://ping.fm/fxyEi

Four short links: 21 May 2009

Us Now -- UK documentary, available streaming or on DVD, about how open government and digital democracy makes sense. It's good to watch if you've not thought about how government could be positively changed by technology, but I don't think it's radical enough in the future it describes. It's Gonna Be The Future Soon -- great video for the... http://ping.fm/efanu

The Digital Panopticon

This post is part three of a series raising questions about the mass adoption of social technologies;. Here are links to part one and two. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27. (special guest to be announced shortly) In 1785 utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham proposed architectural plans for the Panopticon, a prison... http://ping.fm/XqxWz

For whom the Google tolls

It's amazing that, before Google came along, any of us was able to survive beyond childhood. At the company's Zeitgeist conference in London yesterday, cofounder Larry Page warned that privacy-protecting restrictions on Google's ability to store personal data were hindering the company from tracking the spread of diseases and hence increasing the risk of mankind's extinction. The less data Google is allowed to store, said Page, the "more likely we all are to die." (This is a particularly sensitive issue for Page, as he's a big backer of the Singularitarians' attempts to secure human immortality.) I couldn't help but be... http://ping.fm/HEcml

Google Launches Maps Data API

The crowd at Where 2.0 was expecting an API announcement and Google delivered one. Lior Ron and Steve Lee announced their Maps Data API, a service for hosting geodata. As they describe it on the site: The Google Maps Data API allows client applications to view, store and update map data in the form of Google Data API feeds using a data model of features (placemarks, lines and shapes) and maps (collections of features). http://ping.fm/piITP

Yahoo! Placemaker - Open Location, Open Data and Supporting Web Services

Today at Where 2.0 Tyler Bell, the Head of Yahoo's Geo Technologies Group, launched Placemaker (this link should be live at posting). Placemaker is a webservice that takes in text and returns the locations found within via either XML or enhanced GeoRSS. The locations Placemaker returns come in the form of WOEIDs (Radar post). You might be cautious about... http://ping.fm/S2Jet

Four short links: 20 May 2009

Distributed Proofreaders Celebrates 15000th Title Posted To Project Gutenberg -- a great use of our collective intelligence and cognitive surplus. If I say one more Clay Shirkyism, someone's gonna call BINGO. (via timoreilly on Twitter) Datacenter is the New Mainframe (Greg Linden) -- wrapup of a Google paper that looks at datacenters in the terms of mainframes: time-sharing, scheduling,... http://ping.fm/zf7K9

Completing the circle on journalists and public participation

Capital News Connection
has jumped into Web 2.0 full-tilt with
Ask Your Lawmaker.
The opportunity for a virtuous cycle of public input, professional
processing, and listener loyalty--especially in a field whose death
has been predicted by many--puts Ask Your Lawmaker into an intriguing
category of its own.
http://ping.fm/zcqjU

Wolfram Alpha a Google Killer? Not... Supposed... To... Be

I'm getting tired of reading about whether Alpha is a Google-killer. I've seen Stephen Wolfram's presentations a couple of times; he's quite careful to say that it isn't. There's a fundamental difference that many people out there are just missing. Google is a search engine. Alpha looks like a search engine, but it isn't; it's all about curated data, and... http://ping.fm/tFYY7

Clothing as Conversation (Twitter Tees on Threadless)

Threadless just announced their Twitter Tees on Threadless program. What a great idea. Submit or nominate tweets, community votes, best make it onto shirts. From the two shirts they sent me in advance, I can see only one trick they are missing: the author of the tweet is on the label rather than on the shirt. As I found myself... http://ping.fm/X4D2q

Captivity of the Commons

This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27. In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information... http://ping.fm/dyrNH

MapstractionAPI Sandbox: For Trying Out Multiple Providers

For their workshops on Mapping APIs today Evan Henshaw and Andrew Turner created the Mapstraction API Sandbox on Google App Engine. Mapstraction (Radar post)is a Javascript framework that abstracts many different mapping APIs. The sandbox is no different. It will let you play with code samples from Microsoft's, Google's, Yahoo's, Mapquest's and OpenStreetMap's APIS (and many others for a... http://ping.fm/Ol1LA

More Geo-Games: Ship Simulator on Google Earth

At Google I/O 2008 the Google Earth API was released. It brought Google Earth's 3D capabilities to the web (with the help of browser extensions). Since that release they've started supporting Macs. One really nice part of the Google Earth API is the ability to create games in the 3D world. One of the sample apps was the game... http://ping.fm/ravNS

The Question Concerning Social Technology

I am an evangelist of social media and an active participant: on Linked In (business), MySpace (music) and Facebook (increasingly my online identity), I blog on several sites and I am a daily user of Twitter. I also make my living speaking to companies about the value and operating principles of these more open, participatory technologies. I have read the... http://ping.fm/oRSTu

Being a Suggested User Leads to Thousands of Twitter Followers

Ever since Twitter started suggesting accounts to new users, it was clear that those on the suggested users list were gaining thousands of followers. Setting aside the fact that number of followers is a poor gauge of influence (see our Twitter report for details), I wanted to know how many followers a suggested account gains by appearing on the list. http://ping.fm/x8UF4

Velocity Preview - The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number at Microsoft

The psychology of engineering user experiences on the web can be difficult. How much rich content can you place up on a page before the load time drives away your visitors? Get the answer wrong, and you can end up with a ghost town; get it right and you're a star. Eric Schurman knows this well, since he is responsible for just those kind of trade-off decisions on some of Microsoft's highest traffic pages. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference in June, and he recently talked with us about how Microsoft tests different user experiences on small groups of visitors. http://ping.fm/oOgiD

Four short links: 18 May 2009

Scientists Without Borders -- "Mobilizing Science, Improving Lives". mobilize and coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world. The research community, aid agencies, NGOs, public-private partnerships, and a wide variety of other institutions are already promoting areas such as global health, agricultural progress, and environmental well-being, but current communication gaps restrict their power. Organizations and... http://ping.fm/Zqenk

Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O'Reilly Titles Included)

The document-sharing site Scribd has launched a new "Scribd Store" selling view and download access to documents and books. As part of the launch, there are now more than 650 O'Reilly ebooks now available for preview and sale in the Scribd store, and all include DRM-free PDF downloads with purchase. (Scribd will soon be adding EPUB as a format, and... http://ping.fm/0J28N

Space Shuttle Atlantis during Solar Transit

In this tightly cropped image, the NASA space shuttle Atlantis is seen in silhouette during solar transit, Tuesday, May 12, 2009, from Florida. This image was made before Atlantis and the crew of STS-125 had grappled the Hubble Space Telescope. Photo Credit: (NASA/Thierry Legault) Thierry made this image using a solar-filtered Takahashi 5-inch refracting telescope and a Canon 5D... http://ping.fm/2rgXs

Four short links: 15 May 2009

Whither Sockets? -- ACM Queue article on how sockets as a model for network programming have become an obstacle to where networking is going. All of these calls have one thing in common: the calling program must repeatedly ask for data to be delivered. In the world of client/server computing these constant requests make perfect sense, because the server... http://ping.fm/WZOMU

Credit card company data mining makes us all instances of a type

The New York Times has recently published one of their in-depth,
riveting descriptions of how

credit card companies use everything they can learn about us. Almost eleven years
I wrote an

article
criticizing this trend.
http://ping.fm/ubIPr

Four short links: 14 May 2009

Open Library Book Reader -- the page-turning book reader software that the Internet Archive uses is open source. One of the reasons library scanning programs are ineffective is that they try to build new viewing software for each scan-a-bundle-of-books project they get funding for. Should Libraries Have eBooks? -- blog post from an electronic publisher made nervous by the... http://ping.fm/I48s8

Google's Rich Snippets and the Semantic Web

There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for semantic markup, and those who believe that machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which computer programs actually understand the meaning of what they see and read. Google has of course been the great proof point of the power of machine learning... http://ping.fm/Zm7Ow

Come to Ignite Where & Launchpad

Every year we kick-off Where 2.0 with a combination Launchpad and Ignite event. This year is no different. So far we've got 11 geo-oriented Ignite talks paired with 5 product demos spread across two sets. We'll be starting the show at 7PM and will conclude by 9PM on May 19th at the Fairmount in San Jose. Bar opens at... http://ping.fm/JJpwC

History of Fonts on the Ignite Show

Bram Pitoyo gave a great and informative talk on the History of Fonts at Ignite Portland 5. It's this week's episode of the Ignite Show. Enjoy! Subscribe to the Ignite Show via iTunes... http://ping.fm/zn5YV

2 Years Later, the Facebook App Platform is Still Thriving

In a few weeks, the Facebook application platform will mark its second anniversary. While it garnered lots of press coverage in the months after it launched, the arrival of the iTunes app store shifted attention away from Facebook's vibrant ecosystem. The media glow is understandable: among other things, the younger iTunes platform is adding apps at a much faster rate... http://ping.fm/jEnCJ

Four short posts: 12 May 2009

[Stealing Nat's "Four short" format again...] I went to Google and searched for a non-location-specific term today (I can't be more specific since the search was for a birthday present for my wife, but let's pretend it was "baseball cards," since that was the general form -- a noun with nothing geographically-specific about it). On the first page of results... http://ping.fm/vEXaS

Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa

On Tuesday, Google introduced a feature called Rich Snippets which provides users with a convenient summary of a search result at a glance. They have been experimenting with microformats and RDFa, and are officially introducing the feature and allowing more sites to participate. While the Google announcement makes it clear that this technology is being phased in over time making... http://ping.fm/e8ZRZ

Google Engineering Explains Microformat Support in Searches

Today, Google is releasing support for parsing and display of microformat data in their search results. While the initial launch will be limited to a specific set of partners (including LinkedIn, Yelp and CNet reviews), the intent is that very quickly, anyone who marks their pages up with the appropriate microformat data will be able to make their information understandable... http://ping.fm/wr3U3

The New York Real Times

Twitterification continues. Not only are other social networking sites, such as Facebook, scrambling to pour their members' energy into the realtime stream, but more traditional publishers are also adopting the Twitter model to firehose their content. Build your arks, my friends: The stream is going mainstream. Yesterday, it was the New York Times that took the realtime plunge with the launch of Times Wire, a twittery service that the paper describes as "a continuously updated stream of the latest stories and blog posts." The news scroll updates every minute, as fresh stories flicker into consciousness and old ones flicker out.... http://ping.fm/WllIs

Four short links: 11 May 2009

OSCAR Canada -- open source healthcare (EMR) software, akin to VistA. See linuxmednews.com for more. Instaviz -- iPhone app for mindmapping/any other blob-and-line diagram. I'm hypnotised by the correction of a fuzzy hand-drawn circle into a clean crisp algorithmic circle. Buddypress -- open source software that turns a Wordpress installation into a social networking platform. Ok, so social networking... http://ping.fm/qU17S

What is the Right Amount of Swine Flu Coverage?

Dr. Hans Rosling (Gapminder) has posted a short, but effective video comparing the coverage of Swine Flu to a more constant killer like Tuberculosis. He decries the fact that Swine flu has generated many orders of magnitude more coverage per death than Tuberculosis. Dr. Rosling has a point. The media could be said to be disproportionately covering Swine Flu.... http://ping.fm/TgTpr

Vine, Disaster Tech From Microsoft

Last week Microsoft will start inviting users into Vine, a public-service tool that will be especially useful during disasters. In case of an emergency or everyday life, Vine will be a multi-platform, ad-free method of staying in touch with networks. Once Vine is launched it has the potential to become a very powerful communication platform. Last week I had... http://ping.fm/Mscyo

Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow

I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric �friend�-based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn�t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a... http://ping.fm/RVNlv

Hacking Primes in Mathematica

If this is too esoteric, skip it. I couldn't figure out anywhere else to put it. This morning, Tim Bray tweeted about a post on prime numbers and Benford's law. To cut the esoterica short, one of the big problems in prime numbers is that people don't know how they're distributed. This post suggests that Benford's Law describes the distribution... http://ping.fm/TJxxs

Hackers wanted! Scholarships available to coders who'll come to journalism and help save democracy

It's not news that journalism is in crisis. CNN turned newspapers into first-day fishwrap and Craigslist killed the business model. Solutions are scarce, and our democracy is at risk. I don't have a chart to guide our way through the darkness to Citizenry 2.0, but there are some who can navigate the singularity. Journalism needs great hackers. Not just nerds,... http://ping.fm/3gUvQ

Velocity 2009 - Big Ideas (early registration deadline)

(tag cloud created from Velocity session & speaker information using wordle.net) My favorite interview question to ask candidates is: "What happens when you type www.(amazon|google|yahoo).com in your browser and press return?" While the actual process of serving and rendering a page takes seconds to complete, describing it in real detail can take an hour. A good answer spans every part... http://ping.fm/JCPpP

Up Close with an Enigma

At last month's RSA conference in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a vintage 1944 model of the German crypothographic machine, popularly known as the Enigma. This particular machine was owned by the National Cryptologic Museum, and was part of a larger booth hosted by the National Security Agency. The staff at the exhibit were quite friendly and it didn't take... http://ping.fm/ueQ52

Overheard: @edjez on innovation in mobile

Question: When you plug something in do you say �I�m using electricity� or �I�m using the wall socket�? Sometimes I feel the discussion about innovation in mobile tech sounds like a discussion of innovation in energy?where the discussion centers on the design of plugs & sockets. Eduardo Jezierski, in Phones Don't Change the World, People Do. P.S. It's unbelievable... <a href='http://ping.fm/AojwD'>http://ping.fm/xD529</a>

Tim O'Reilly - Why Twitter Matters for News

Twitter has been used for a lot of different purposes, and one has been to report breaking news. But there's been some criticism of how Twitter deals with news, such as the Swine Flu outbreak. With that in mind, O'Reilly Week in Review talked to Tim O'Reilly himself, co-author of the new Twitter Book, about the role of Twitter in informing the public. http://ping.fm/ewSgU

Velocity Preview - Keeping Twitter Tweeting

If there's a site that exemplifies explosive growth, it has to be Twitter. It seems like everywhere you look, someone is Tweeting, or talking about Tweeting, or Tweeting about Tweeting. Keeping the site responsive under that type of increase is no easy job, but it's one that John Adams has to deal with every day, working in Twitter Operations. He'll be talking about that work at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference, in a session entitled Fixing Twitter: Improving the Performance and Scalability of the World's Most Popular Micro-blogging Site, and he spent some time with us to talk about what is involved in keeping the site alive. http://ping.fm/8qKfK

Eat Fast Get Fat?

As someone who fights with quick hotel and airplane meals as a part of my livelihood I found this chart unsurprising. It's known that eating fast doesn't give your brain time to get the "all full" signal so you can eat more calories - especially if you are eating calorically-dense fast foods. This chart was created by Catherine Rampell... http://ping.fm/uXrHM

2 minutes ago from Tweetie

Eric Rice explains the devolution of media, with 60 characters to spare: This post is an installment in Rough Type's ongoing series "The Realtime Chronicles," which began here.... http://ping.fm/9ddjl

Ignite Show: Lisa Katayama on Japanese Gadgets and Toys

Lisa Katayama is a tech journalist and an expert on Japanese culture. She combines the two in her Ignite talk this week where she demystifies Japanese gadgets and their society's fascination with them. You've probably read Lisa's writing before. She is the author of Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan (a fun book that I got for... http://ping.fm/dGa0N

Overheard: @andrewsavikas on DRM

There are a lot of things I come across in my day that are too long for twitter, and too short for a regular blog post. Inspired by Nat's "Four Short Links", I thought I'd occasionally share great tidbits I've read or overheard. Here's the first. In a discussion on the Reading 2.0 Mailing List, Andrew Savikas uttered this gem:... http://ping.fm/zsxDD

That Was Fast: Mapme.at Uses Latitude API

Yesterday location-sharing startup Mapme.at took advantage of the Latitude API (Radar post) to get their users' location. Now you can share your Latitude-enhanced location with your Mapme friends, track your location and update Yahoo's FireEagle (which in turn can update many other services). To use the new method Mapme users have to enable the Latitude blog badge and then... http://ping.fm/jJFad

Google's Sneaky Launch of Latitude's Location-Sharing API

Google has extended their location sharing service Latitude (Radar post) with the first set of Latitude Apps. One of them is a blog badge for sharing your location publicly on a website. The other updates your GTalk status for sharing your location to your IM network. Both have to be turned on explicitly and allow you to share your... http://ping.fm/1VOx4

NiN's Rob Sheridan on iPhone Application Rejection

In this interview with Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan), Nine Inch Nails' Artistic Director, Rob discusses the experience of getting the rejection letter from Apple, and what effect it has on the band's plans to build community applications on the iPhone platform. You'll hear Sheridan express an uneasiness that Apple can act as judge and jury without providing any transparency into the approval process. http://ping.fm/fdT4V

Swine Flu Tracker

Rhiza Labs has launched Flu Tracker to enable people to clearly track the progress of H1N1 Swine Flu. On the site you can see news stories about the flu and maps based on the data of Henry L Niman. The maps show the number of Suspected, Confirmed and Fatal Cases by country: They also show the data by state... http://ping.fm/N340Y

Four short links: 4 May 2009

Old Japanese Maps on Google Earth Unveil Secrets -- Google criticised for putting up map layers showing the towns where a discriminated-against class came from, because that class is still discriminated against and Google didn't put any "cultural context" around it. Google and their maps didn't make the underclass, Japanese society did. Because they're sensitive about having the problem,... http://tinyurl.com/dmq35a

Big Data: SSD's, R, and Linked Data Streams

The Solid State Storage Revolution: If you haven't seen it, I recommend you watch Andy Bechtolsheim's keynote at the recent Mysqlconf. We covered SSD's in our just published report on Big Data management technologies. Since then, we've gotten additional signals from our network of alpha geeks and our interest in them remains high. R and Linked Data Streams: I had... http://ping.fm/5y2aA

Where Week 2009

Where Week, five days when geohackers across the world descend on Silicon Valley, is coming up. WhereCamp, the unconference put on by Where 2.0 attendees has been scheduled. This year it will happen at SocialText in Palo Alto on Friday May 22nd and Saturday May 23rd 2009. There will be unconference sessions during the day and a hackfest in the evening. http://ping.fm/uyCap

The iTunes App Store and One-hit Wonders

Thousands of sellers created the 40,000 apps that have appeared in the U.S. iTunes app store. Measured in terms of apps per seller, developer and vendor engagement has gotten stronger over time. The above average (mean) is somewhat misleading: 52% of sellers have produced just one app, and 80% have released 3 or fewer. Certain types of apps (e.g. electronic books) are easier to create, thus inflating the overall average app per seller. The disparity in complexity across categories is captured in the chart below. Aside from Books, Travel and Education apps also tend to be easy to develop and launch. The number of apps per seller also depends on whether one is interested in Paid or Free apps. http://tinyurl.com/c7te63

Jack Dangermond Interview 3 of 3: The Geoweb

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history... http://ping.fm/ynNH7

Ignite @ Google I/O; Submit Your Talk

Ignite is coming to Google I/O later this month. On May 27th, the first afternoon of the conference, I'll be hosting an Ignite at the Moscone Center. As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. We'll be looking for talks that geeks will like.... http://ping.fm/WhXAG

Is Twitter making us stupider?

InformationWeek's Fritz Nelson ponders the question, and discusses it with me in a podcast. Nelson also points to a memorable video clip that I somehow missed, in which Stephen Colbert clears up the confusion about the proper perfect-tense form of the verb "to twitter": This may well be my most multimediatastic post ever.... http://ping.fm/7540D

Tim writes a book

Tim wrote a book. The title of Tim's book is The Twitter Book. Tim didn't use a pen to write his book. Tim didn't even use a word processor to write his book. Tim used PowerPoint to write his book. Tim wrote his book very fast, as fast, he says, as he writes "a new talk." There are pictures in Tim's book. Pictures, Tim says, "are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story." Tim says he is "reinventing the book in the age of the web." Tim's book was a lot easier to write than an old-fashioned book would... http://ping.fm/yJt1h

Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web

There's a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, there's no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there's Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.) But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning. http://ping.fm/8it4g

Jack Dangermond Interview 2 of 3: Sharing Government GIS Data

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping. Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration. http://tinyurl.com/c9c5cl

Four short links: 30 Apr 2009

Ypulse Conference -- conference on marketing to youth with technology, from the very savvy Anastasia Goodstein who runs the interesting Ypulse blog on youth culture that I've raved about before. Register with the code RADAR for a 10% discount (thanks, Anastasia!). Government in the Global Village -- departing post by the NZ CIO (and Kiwi Foo Camper) Laurence Millar.... http://tinyurl.com/czdhqh

Jack Dangermond Interview 1 of 3: Web Mapping

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history... http://ping.fm/Tv5jC

Forge.mil Update and DISA Hacks Public Domain

Progress of open source initiatives at DISA. http://ping.fm/6Xivp

The fickle Twitterer

The biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter's entryway. The second biggest crowd on the web today is the one streaming through Twitter's exit. Twitter's recent growth has been explosive, even by web standards. The number of Twitter users doubled last month, reaching an estimated 14 million. This month, with Ashton's Million Follower March and Oprah's First Tweet, the Twitter flock has almost certainly swelled even more quickly. Everybody who's anybody is giving Twitter a whirl. But a whirl does not a relationship make. According to a study out today from Nielsen, most people who... http://ping.fm/bAzAx

Ignite Seattle (and elsewhere) Tomorrow, 4/29

Ignite Seattle 6 is tomorrow, Wednesday 4/29, at the King Cat Theatre. Ignite Seattle is free. We've got a great line-up of speakers. Here's the evening's schedule: 7PM - Doors Open 7:30 PM - Paper Tower Contest Begins - Build the tallest tower you can out of just 5 sheets of paper and tape (See Details) 8:30 - First Set... http://ping.fm/tmHSM

How Big Data Impacts Analytics

Research for our just published report on Big Data management technologies, included conversations with teams who are at the forefront of analyzing massive data sets. We were particularly impressed with the work being produced by Linkedin's analytics team. [We have more details on Linkedin's analytics team, in an article in the upcoming issue of Release 2.0.] At the second Social... http://ping.fm/6lvfV

Four short links: 28 Apr 2009

Flickr Users' Traces Make Accidental Maps -- David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites. (via straup on delicious) MW 2009 Wrapup (Powerhouse Museum) -- summary of the Museums and the... http://ping.fm/xLXFk

Trying to Track Swine Flu Across Cities in Realtime

John Geraci is a guest blogger and heads up the DIY City movement. He will be speaking about DIY City at Where 2.0 in San Jose on 5/20. Since early last friday, when I got a tip about swine flu in Mexico City from a health researcher, the team that does SickCity has been working to make the system something... http://ping.fm/qEkhk

Your brain really is forgetting... a LOT

I'm currently reading Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Dr. Sandra Aamodt and Dr. Sam Wang. The enormity of the title notwithstanding, I'm enjoying the book, and ran across this rather amazing quotation:

There is good evidence that we "erase" and "rewrite" our memories every time we call them, suggesting that if it were ever possible to erase specific content, playing it back first might be an essential component. http://ping.fm/2BIs2

Four short links: 27 Apr 2009

Google Server and Data Center Details -- Greg Linden reports on a Efficient Data Center Summit. Google uses single volt power and on-board uninterruptible power supply to raise efficiency at the motherboard from the norm of 65-85% to 99.99%. There is a picture of the board on slide 17. (and this is a 2005 board). Greg has left Microsoft... http://tinyurl.com/dhv7at

The unripened word

He was off by two centuries and a medium or two, but it was, nevertheless, the great French writer and bureaucrat Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine who, in an 1831 letter, foretold all: Before this century shall have run out, Journalism will be the whole press - the whole human thought. Since that prodigious multiplication art has given to speech - to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet - mankind will write their book day by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written,... http://ping.fm/k3NTg

Four short links: 24 Apr 2009

Data, fonts, transparency, and exceptions: Performance Comparison: Key/Value Stores for Language Model Counts (Brendan O'Connor) -- sort-of benchmarking for the various distributed key-value stores. One of the first efforts to systematically investigate in such a way that there can be informed comment on value and quality of the alternatives. (via mattb's delicious stream) Typographica's Favourite Fonts of 2008 -- what... http://ping.fm/ZCvDr

Locavore's Open Data

Buster McLeod is taking an "open data" policy towards his latest project, Locavore the iPhone app, by revealing the first month's stats. Locavore is a great app that helps you eat locally by showing you what produce is in season near you and what farmer's markets you can buy it at. It's a well-designed app that I look forward... http://ping.fm/FOuLf

Windows 7 Starter Pushes the Web and IE

I run XP on my netbook and I've been looking forward to running Windows 7 on it. So I've been watching news about Windows 7 with interest. There is much discussion this week that the low-priced Starter Edition will only let you run three apps at a time. If you want to run more then you'll have to pay... http://ping.fm/ROs8u

Ignite Show: Jonathan Kahan on Samurai Swords as Cutting Edge Technology

A katana (commonly called a samurai sword) is a marvel of art and technology. In this week's Ignite Episode, Jonathan Kahan walks us through its creation and usage. This was filmed at Ignite NYC 3. The next Ignite NYC will be held on 6/1. This week the show is introduced by Andrew Hyde of Ignite Boulder and Techstars. The... http://ping.fm/bjTKE

Building Bridges with the U.S. Intelligence Community

Guest blogger Jeffrey Carr is a cyber intelligence expert, Principal of GreyLogic, columnist for Symantec's Security Focus, and author who specializes in the investigation of cyber attacks against governments and infrastructures by State and Non-State hackers. Jeff is the Principal Investigator for Project Grey Goose, an Open Source intelligence investigation into the Russian cyber attacks on Georgia in August,... http://ping.fm/paTvb

Four short links: 22 Apr 2009

Government, Bayes, SMS, and distributed keystores: Government Projects the Agile Way -- Can It Be Done? (NZ Government) -- notes and audio from a workshop at the New Zealand State Services Commission looking to merge agile and government. The pullquotes are mostly generic about agile, but the important thing is that there are agile projects within government and their numbers... http://ping.fm/GjIwX

Writing for nonreaders in the postprint era

The syllabus. I'm particularly looking forward to Week Two.... http://ping.fm/b2XHy

Four short links: 21 Apr 2009

Space arrays, mobile hell, book scanners, and open source brains: Great Brazilian Sat-Hack Crackdown (Wired) -- Satellite hackers in Brazil are bouncing ham signals off a disused US military satellite array. Truck drivers love the birds because they provide better range and sound than ham radios. Rogue loggers in the Amazon use the satellites to transmit coded warnings when authorities... http://ping.fm/Fg6Bv

Clutter

Tim Bray, the software writer and self-professed "sicko deranged audiophile," is getting rid of his jewel cases. He's been ripping his large collection of CDs into digital files and tweaking his hifi setup to play music off hard drives rather than disks. "I can’t wait to shovel the disks into boxes or binders or whatever, and regain a few square feet of wall," he says. I'm with him there. The CD jewel case is the single worst technology ever invented by man. It defines, in a truly Platonic sense, the term "piece of crap." Now, Bray is looking forward to... http://ping.fm/YpREg

Where 2.0 Preview - DARPA's TIGR Project Helps Platoons Stay Alive

Soldiers on the ground need to know the territory they patrol like the back of their hand. Knowing where insurgents like to plant IEDs or that an important political leader lives in a certain house can prove the difference between success and failure. But what happens when a platoon transfers out of Baghdad and a brand new one moves in? All that experience used to go out the window. But thanks to TIGR, a map-based knowledge-base developed by DARPA, platoons can now document information they learn on patrol, as well as accessing the latest intelligence. In this interview, hear how TIGR was developed, how it is helping troops stay alive and perform their missions better, and what the realities of deploying a brand new technology into a war zone are. http://ping.fm/koqG3

The Lean Startup Talk From Web 2.0 Expo

View more presentations from Venture hacks One of our most popular talks at the Web 2.0 Expo SF was Eric Ries' The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products. I've embedded an audio version of his slides above. Eric recommends the talk for people who want to: Identify a profitable business model faster and... http://ping.fm/0T7Ph

Big iron: The ultimate cloud platform?

Get out your notepads and get ready for the mainframe resurgence. Tell your friends you heard it here. I'm not talking about a UNIVAC comeback, or Burroughs Large 2.0. I'm telling you, dear readers, that now's a good time to invest in the few remaining big iron dealers: IBM, Unisys, Hitachi, and Fujitsu, baby. Why, you ask? Because mainframes solve the cloud's impending challenges.

read more

http://ping.fm/hVnlI

Active Facebook Users By Country

Since I last posted numbers on Facebook's user base six week ago, the company has added close to 20 million active users. I've had a few requests for detailed numbers by country so I quickly assembled an update for each of the regions shown above.... http://ping.fm/4saHQ

Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO

The news has now been leaked that President Obama intends to nominate Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. The Federal CTO will be an assistant to the President, as well as the Associate Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He will work closely with Vivek Kundra, the recently-named Federal CIO, to develop... http://ping.fm/lBIbI

Four Short Links: 17 Apr 2009

Twitter (not THAT story, though), semantics, gardening, and netbook supercomputers: Retweet Radar -- the phrases showing up in heavily retweeted posts. This is another feature that should be incorporated into desktop clients. Three of the top 10 terms as retweeted by the General Public are "Ashton", "CNN", "followers"; if I wanted to read this drivel, I'd buy US Magazine. The... http://ping.fm/F8FHH

The Change We Need: DIY on a Civic Scale

I've been working a lot lately to imagine what Government 2.0 might look like. One of the most inspiring and thought-provoking stories I've read recently might not look like a Gov 2.0 story, but it is: Island DIY: Kauai residents don't wait for state to repair road. Their livelihood was being threatened, and they were tired of waiting for government... http://ping.fm/fQwIa

Hashmobs

Forget flashmobs. The new thing is the hashmob. A flashmob is, in case it's slipped your mind, "a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse." The term is, as Wikipedia continues, "generally applied only to gatherings organized via social media or viral emails, rather than those organized by public relations firms or for a publicity stunt." Flashmobs had their moment of near-fame back in the middle years of this decade. I believe they were particularly popular in Finland. Flashmobs were okay, but they had a... http://ping.fm/c05Bd