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Sunday, March 12, 2006 |
Commercial Databases Are Not the Internet.
Chicago Tribune: Internet blows CIA cover. The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet. When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.
It is not thanks to the Internet. It is thanks to commercial data-mongering, for the most part, that this information is available.
The fact that they are accessible via the Net is correct. But they were accessible via direct, dial-up modems earlier.
This is a genuine story, but blaming the Internet is like blaming the phone company when criminals plan a crime on a voice call. Sheesh. [Dan Gillmor's blog]
11:08:58 PM 
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Web 2.
I have been asked to put together a short (15 minutes) presentation next week on Web 2.0 for an offsite meeting. Borrowing liberally from Tim O'Reilly's excellent primer and with some images from Dion Hinchcliffe's Flickr slide show on the subject, I put together the following:-
First off, Tim's list (apparently brainstormed with John Batelle) comparing the two webs:
Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication
Then his six principles:-
1.The Web As Platform
[Netscape vs. Google] [Akamai vs. BitTorrent] [Double Click vs. AdSense]
2.Harnessing Collective Intelligence
[Britannica vs. Wikipedia] [Amazon vs. Barnes and Noble]
"Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era."
The Long Tail
3.Data is the Next Intel Inside
The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
Operations must become a core competency
Users must be treated as co-developers (Carl Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr, recently revealed that they deploy new builds up to every half hour)
5. Lightweight Programming Models
- Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems
- Think syndication, not coordination
- Design for "hackability" and remixability
Innovation in Assembly – mash-ups
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
i-Tunes, TiVo, Google search
7. Rich User Experiences (AJAX)
standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
and JavaScript binding everything together
(quoted from Jesse James Garrett, Adaptive Path, the man credited with inventing the term "AJAX" )
List of interesting Web 2.0 sites:-
Writely online word processor and collaboration site (just bought by Google)
Google Local - mainly for the AJAX drag and drop maps
Flickr - world's biggest photo site - just passed 100 million images, now owned by Yahoo!
Del.icio.us - first and best social tagging or "folksonomy" site
Wikipedia - world's largest online encyclopedia - entirely written by volunteers
Digg - fairly new collaborative news sites; users votes determine what makes it to the top of the page
Housingmaps - a mashup between Google maps and Craigslist
Memeorandum - ranking blogs of popularity and providing RSS and web interfaces to the result
Technorati - blogging services site which has a range of search and analytical tools which help keep tabs on the blogosphere.
[Inflection Point]
11:08:39 PM
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Alex: Understanding Infrastructure: Pulling Back the Curtain – Information and Knowledge Resources
 If you want to understand the secret lives of cities, you have to look at the infrastructure that supports them. Infrastructure may not exactly be urban destiny, but the sunk costs we've invested in roads, sewers, pipes and wires exert tremendous influence over the kinds of urban innovations (like smart grids) we in the developed world can, in any realistic way, adopt. In other ways, the lack of established infrastructure in developing world cities both restrains and enables new possibilities.
One of the barriers to change here is that infrastructure is often hidden from our eyes, by choice or inattention. Because of this, resources which open our eyes to the systems which support us are inherently worldchanging. Explaining infrastructure is a form of making visible the invisible.
Geoff Manaugh has posted two excellent pieces illuminating New York's water system and the (heavily engineered)workings of the San Francisco Bay. I've been the San Francisco Bay Hydrological Model he profiles in the second post, and, while I am admittedly a geek for this stuff, I found it both riveting and revealing in a way that many digital tools sometimes are not. GIS-based mapping is obviously a wonderful tool for grokking systems, but there's something about physical models which appeals in a deeply visceral way.
Both posts are worth reading. Any other suggestions for insightful explorations of urban infrastructure?
(Thought this had posted earlier, but something foo'd it. It's at WorldChanging, doncha know.)
11:13:24 AM
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Iran's women revolting.
When he visited Iran a couple of years ago, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas said the next Iranian revolution would be a women's revolution - and we are now seeing signs of that, writes Hossein Derakhshan.
While young men have become ever more apathetic, partly because of the high rate of unemployment, young women have a vital social and political cause to fight for.
The battle is for equal gender rights and opportunities, from all-encompassing issues to smaller ones such as the right to watch matches in a football stadium.
There are no laws banning women from the football stadiums, but a ban is effectively enforced - maybe because it has not been challenged by enough women over the past two decades. Now some are trying to change all that.
Please keep reading on the Guardian's News blog
[Editor: Myself (English)]
10:13:29 AM
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STAMPS.
"STAMPS is a little program. It can run on your Mobile phone. Using this program you can see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map. You can write for instance: "this is my preferite pizzeria!", to offer advice to your buddies. All the messages left in the system say something about the city where you live: what are the sport locations, the place to eat, the meeting spots. After a while, we want to use all these information to help the users to navigate the city. You can ask the system, for instance: "where is a pizzeria near by?", and the system will search for other people's messages which refer to the term pizzeria to give you an advice."
STAMPS or System for TAgging Messages, Post-Inferential Semantics is an academic research project of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. The goal of this study is to develop modeling schemas that enable to integrate spatial information, as embedded in maps, with the textual information produced through computer-mediated communication.
More information >> STAMPS Project and Mauro Cherubini's Blog. [Smart Mobs]
10:11:59 AM
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