Category: Advanced Cyber/IO

6 inconvenient truths about Smart Cities

I’ll explore six “inconvenient truths” in this article to describe why I think that’s the case; and what we can do about it:

1. The “Smart City” isn’t a technology concept; it’s the political challenge of adapting one of the most powerful economic and social forces of our time to the needs of the places where most of us live and work.
2. Cities won’t get smart if their leaders aren’t involved.
3. We can’t leave Smart Cities to the market, we need the courage to shape the market.
4. Smart cities aren’t top down or bottom up. They’re both.
5. We need to tell honest stories.
6. No-one will do this for us – we have to act for ourselves.

I've used Netvibes as an RSS reader for years. I particularly how easy it is to sync my attentional priorities to my on-screen info-flow by dragging higher priority tabs to the left and positioning the most important feeds at the top of their tab pages. If I am more pressed for time, I can just skim the headlines in the leftmost tab and/or topmost row of feeds (of course the actual way one positions feeds and tabs is arbitrary — the point is to pay attention to your priorities and go through the actions of rearranging your information flows to match. It's a tool for taking control of both the screen-side and mind-side aspects of infotention. This new service appears to be an expansion of the dashboard capabilities to include something similar to (and Netvibes claims more powerful than) IFTTT — which I confess I have not done more than dabbled in.

A Dashboard That Lets You Easily Connect Web Services, From Email to Twitter

Internet Communication Company Launches Groundbreaking Language Translation Software

Real-time, $39 a month, Basque and Bengali to another 78 languages.

Press release full text with links below the line.

Continue reading “Antechinus: Real-Time Language Translation”

This is a great curated collection of tools for journalists hand-picked by top communication and publishing professionals.

Phi Beta Iota: This is so useful we have extracted all tools from all journalists and list and link them below the line. Categories include Cartography/Geospatial, Google Apps, Research, Smart Phone Apps, Twitter Apps, Workspace I – Apps, Code, Visualization, Workspace II – Storage & Substance.

Continue reading “Robin Good Enhanced: Top Journalism Tools”

Trust Chain: Low (Media), Medium (Search Engines), High (Human)

It is only a matter of time before trusted aggregators and human curators will become the main sources of reliable information for most people. In fact, the January release of the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that for the first time ever, the informed public trusts more search engines – aka Google – than traditional news and media outlets. Even more interesting is the fact that “Seventy-two percent trust information posted by friends and family on social media, blogs and other digital sites, while 70 percent trust content posted by academic experts.” as it highlights the fact that Google and search engines may be only an intermediary step in the journey toward a news ecosystem that will see trusted human editors, experts and curators for individual subjects who aggregate and curate content from multiple sources as the key reference points for news. This is must-read data for anyone interested in seeing where the future of news and search are headed. Enlightening data. 9/10

Intellectual Property and Trust in the Age of Digital Media