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