MapEcos is very interesting — an application that superimposes location and emission data on Google maps. Go to a location and see where the local polluters are. Click on one of them and up pops date from the EPA database.
It works only for the US at present, but it’s a really neat application of Web 2.0 tools.
Marc Andreessen has written a terrific analysis of Facebook as a ‘platform’.
Interesting CNET interview with the guru himself:
For years I used to say, “We shouldn’t have to adapt to technology, it should adapt to us.” I now believe that’s wrong. We shouldn’t have to adapt to arbitrary technology. On the other hand, so much of our modern life has been a major adaptation to the technology surrounding us, whether it’s heating systems, lights, telephone, or television.
If you’d asked me to predict texting I’d have said, “No, it’s really too hard. Jeesh, you need to type three times to get a ‘C.’ That’s ridiculous.” Not only did people learn it, but (they) learned it so well…So, there’s an adaptation for you.
Now, just as an aside, I think it has not to do with the age…I think it has to do with how you live your life…In my case, it was easy because I grew up helping develop the technology so I learned it as it was developed. For many, it suddenly sprung on them and it’s true, it’s hard to keep up.
As people, we should not care about the technology. We should care about the benefits it gives us.The issue is not how tech-savvy you are, or how quick you pick up to it. I believe these are things that often take many hours to master…You just didn’t want to spend the next 20 hours of your life mastering it. But a lot of the kids, they have that kind of time to devote to it…
This morning’s Observer column…
It’s the end-of-the-book story again. Last week, Amazon launched its Kindle electronic book reader, amid corporate hopes that it would become the ‘iPod of e-readers’. Strange, isn’t it, how everyone now aspires to create the ‘next iPod’?
The Kindle is a neat gadget that is the size of a paperback book, weighs 10.3 ounces and doesn’t beep. Its display gives a good approximation of the clarity of print on a six-inch screen. Of course it relies on battery power, but Amazon claims that you can get up to 30 hours of reading before having to plug it in for a two-hour recharge. It can hold up to 200 books. In sleep mode, the device displays tasteful images of ancient texts, early printing presses and classic authors like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen….
Well, well. Skype encryption stumps German police – Yahoo! News
WIESBADEN, Germany (Reuters) – German police are unable to decipher the encryption used in the Internet telephone software Skype to monitor calls by suspected criminals and terrorists, Germany’s top police officer said on Thursday.
It’s only a matter of time before Gordon Brown announces that Skype is to be banned in the UK.
Today marks the 30th anniversary of the first TCP/IP message exchange between three networks. It was orchestrated from this van.
The exchange took place between SRI International, Menlo Park and the University of Southern California via London, England. The networks involved were the ARPANET, the Bay Area packet radio network, and the Atlantic packet satellite network.
This inter-network transmission among three dissimilar networks is generally regarded as the first true Internet connection. It was also a major milestone in packet radio, the technology behind WiFi and other kinds of wireless internet access.
On November 7, the Computer History Museum and the Web History Center held a special celebration of the moment with contributions from Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Donald Nielson.
Hmmm… This Newsweek.com piece has made me wonder if I’m right to dismiss Amazon’s Kindle gizmo as just another e-reader to add to the pile of earlier attempts to supplant the printed book.
Later: Having read Nick Carr’s piece, I think I’ll just add it to the heap.
Later still: Martin Weller is less critical.
Interesting graph from Hitwise.
For the first time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services. As the chart below illustrates, our custom category of the top 25 social networks, which includes Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, compared to 4.98% for Computers and Internet – Email Services, which includes Hotmail; Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, amongst others.
Tim O’Reilly has put his finger on it…
If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.
And data mobility is a key to that. Syndication and mashups have been key elements of Web 2.0 — the ability to take data from one place, and re-use it in another. Heck, even Google’s core business depends on that ability — they take data from every site on the web (except those that ask them not to via robots.txt) and give it new utility by aggregating, indexing, and ranking it.
Imagine what would have happened to Google maps if instead of supporting mashups, they had built a framework that allowed developers to create mapping applications across Microsoft, Yahoo! and Google as a way of competing with MapQuest. Boring! That’s the equivalent of what they’ve announced here.
Would OpenSocial let developers build a personal CRM system, a console where I could manage my social network, exporting friends lists to various social networks? No. Would OpenSocial let developers build a social search application like the one that Mark Cuban was looking for? No.
Set the data free! Allow social data mashups. That’s what will be the trump card in building the winning social networking platform….
Andy Oram has a good idea…
The idea of micro-elites actually came to me when looking at the Peer to Patent project. There are currently 1611 signed-up contributors searching for prior art on patent applications. But you don’t want 1611 people examining each patent. You want the 20 people who understand the subject deeply and intimately. A different 20 people on each patent adds up to 1611 (and hopefully the project will continue, and grow to a hundred or a thousands times that number).
Even Wikipedia follows this rule in some cases. There are some subjects where everybody in the world holds an opinion and a huge number actually know some facts. But other subjects would never see articles unless a couple of the few dozen experts in the world took time to write it.
A corollary of the micro-elite principle is that one of the best ways to help a project requiring a micro-elite is to find the right contributors and persuade them to help out. We should also examine the rewards that such projects offer to see whether they offer enough incentives to draw the micro-elite. The key prerequisite for good writing is good writers.