Category: Design

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Robin Good: Supermap of Over 400 Content Curation Services

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Education, Governance, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Software, Sources (Info/Intel)
Robin Good
Robin Good

If you are looking for your ideal content curation toolkit here is my new completely updated supermap, listing in over 30 categories all of the tools and services you may need to curate any content, from video to news.  This new supermap includes all of the tools and services that were already listed on NewsMaster Toolkit, with the addition of 25 new tools and with a much better organization of categories and labels.  My choice for organizing and recreating this supermap has now fallen on Pearltrees, the only content curation tool that can easily handle most of my key requirements for such a large collection of tools.  Nonetheless there are over 400 tools listed in this supermap, Pearltrees makes it a breeze to navigate through them, and to add new ones to the relevant branches.   The supermap is now being updated daily.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

P.S.: I already feel the need for having a PRO account, which could allow me to further edit the pearls collected, to preserve original web pages saved, and to add images to pearls that weren't able to capture one from the web.

Enjoy the new supermap here: http://bit.ly/ContentCurationToolsSupermap.  Try it out and let me know what you think.  (*and if you think I am missing some tools or can improve with my taxonomy, feel free to send me in your suggestions!)

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Robin Good: Google, Yahoo, Others Fear RSS, Locking It Down — We the People NEED an Autonomous Internet with Open Source Everything!

Autonomous Internet, Design, Software, Sources (Info/Intel)
Robin Good
Robin Good

Marco Arment the creator of Instapaper, has an excellent and provocative piece on why Google is closing down all of its RSS appendages (they just closed also the RSS feeds in Google Alerts) and the logic behind this strategy.

Lockdown

He writes: “Officially, Google killed Reader because “over the years usage has declined”.1 I believe that statement, especially if API clients weren’t considered “usage”, but I don’t believe that’s the entire reason.

The most common assumption I’ve seen others cite is that “Google couldn’t figure out how to monetize Reader,” or other variants about direct profitability. I don’t believe this, either. Google Reader’s operational costs likely paled in comparison to many of their other projects that don’t bring in major revenue, and I’ve heard from multiple sources that it effectively had a staff of zero for years. It was just running, quietly serving a vital role for a lot of people.”

“The bigger problem is that they’ve abandoned interoperability. RSS, semantic markup, microformats, and open APIs all enable interoperability, but the big players don’t want that — they want to lock you in, shut out competitors, and make a service so proprietary that even if you could get your data out, it would be either useless (no alternatives to import into) or cripplingly lonely (empty social networks).

Google resisted this trend admirably for a long time and was very geek- and standards-friendly, but not since Facebook got huge enough to effectively redefine the internet and refocus Google’s plans to be all-Google+, all the time.4”

Read full post at Marco.org.

Continue reading “Robin Good: Google, Yahoo, Others Fear RSS, Locking It Down — We the People NEED an Autonomous Internet with Open Source Everything!”

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Patrick Meier: Global Heat Map of Protests in 2013

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Data, Design, Geospatial, Governance
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Global Heat Map of Protests in 2013

 My colleague Kalev Leetaru recently launched GDELT (Global Data on Events, Location and Tone), which includes over 250 million events ranging from riots and protests to diplomatic exchanges and peace appeals. The data is based on dozens of news sources such as AFP, AP, BBC, UPI, Washington Post, New York Times and all national & international news from Google News. Given the recent wave of protests in Cairo and Istanbul, a collaborator of Kalev’s, John Beieler, just produced this digital dynamic map of protests events thus far in 2013. John left out the US because “it was a shining beacon of protest activity that distracted from the other parts of the map.”

Read full article with multiple graphics.

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

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Jean Lievens: Rachel Botsman – How We Treat People Will Craft Our World – Collaborative Consumption and the Sharing Economy

Access, Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Design, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, P2P / Panarchy, Transparency
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

Rachel Botsman: How We Treat People Will Ultimately Drive Our World

Rachel Botsman advocated the advantage of reputation capital at Wired Money in London yesterday. She noted that an economy based on reputation is incredibly empowering, and will take us away from a financial world “based largely on faceless transactions and moving us to an age built on humanness that we [have] lost.” The reputation economy has already begun to take effect—Airbnb user Kate Kendall used Airbnb reviews to secure an apartment lease.

Rachel Botsman
Rachel Botsman

A reputation-based system will take time to establish, but has the potential to revolutionize the financial sector. This type of credibility adds “context, cause and character” to currently anonymous transactions. “How we treat people and how we behave will ultimately drive our world,” Botsman says.

Continue reading “Jean Lievens: Rachel Botsman – How We Treat People Will Craft Our World – Collaborative Consumption and the Sharing Economy”

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Patrick Meier: Using Twitter to Map Blackouts

Crowd-Sourcing, Data, Design, Geospatial, Governance
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Using Twitter to Map Blackouts During Hurricane Sandy

I recently caught up with Gilal Lotan during a hackathon in New York and was reminded of his good work during Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record. Amongst other analytics, Gilal created a dynamic map of tweets referring to power outages. “This begins on the evening October 28th as people mostly joke about the prospect of potentially losing power. As the storm evolves, the tone turns much more serious. The darker a region on the map, the more aggregate Tweets about power loss that were seen for that region.” The animated map is captured in the video below.

. . . . . .

In sum, creating live maps of geo-tagged tweets is only a first step. Base-maps should be rapidly developed and overlaid with other datasets such as population and income distribution. Of course, these datasets are not always available acessing historical Twitter data can also be a challenge. The latter explains why Big Data Philanthropy for Disaster Response is so key.

Read full post.

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Patrick Meier: Big Data Sensing and Shaping Emerging Conflict

Data, Design, Governance
Patrick Meier
Patrick Meier

Big Data: Sensing and Shaping Emerging Conflicts

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and US Institute of Peace (USIP) co-organized a fascinating workshop on “Sensing & Shaping Emerging Conflicts” in November 2012. I had the pleasure of speaking at this workshop, the objective of which was to “identify major opportunities and impediments to providing better real-time information to actors directly involved in situations that could lead to deadly violence.” We explored “several scenarios of potential violence drawn from recent country cases,” and “considered a set of technologies, applications and strategies that have been particularly useful—or could be, if better adapted for conflict prevention.”

. . . . . . . .

This explains why Sanjana is right when he emphasizes that “Technology needs to be democratized […], made available at the lowest possible grassroots level and not used just by elites. Both sensing and shaping need to include all people, not just those who are inherently in a position to use technology.” Furthermore, Fred is spot on when he says that “Technology can serve civil disobedience and civil mobilization […] as a component of broader strategies for political change. It can help people organize and mobilize around particular goals. It can spread a vision of society that contests the visions of authoritarian.”

In sum, As Barnett Rubin wrote in his excellent book (2002) Blood on the Doorstep: The Politics of Preventive Action, “prevent[ing] violent conflict requires not merely identifying causes and testing policy instruments but building a political movement.” Hence this 2008 paper (PDF) in which I explain in detail how to promote and facilitate technology-enabled civil resistance as a form of conflict early response and violence prevention.

Real full post.

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