The map below depicts geo-tagged tweets posted between May 4-5, 2013 in the New York City area. Over 36,000 tweets are posted on the map (click to enlarge). Since less than 3% of all tweets are geo-tagged, the map is missing the vast majority of tweets posted in this area during those 24 hours.
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These visuals are screenshots of Harvard’s Tweetmap platform, which is publicly available here. My colleague Todd Mostak is one of the main drivers behind Tweetmap, so worth sending him a quick thank you tweet! Todd is working on some exciting extensions and refinements, so stay tuned as I’ll be sure to blog about them when they go live.
As technology advances quickly, so do security concerns. It stands to reason that new technologies open up new vulnerabilities. But open source is working to combat those challenges in an agile and cost-effective way. Read the latest on the topic in IT World Canada in their story, “Open-Source Project Aims to Secure Cloud Storage.”
The article begins:
“The open source software project named Crypton is working on a solution that would enable developers to easily create encrypted cloud-based collaboration environments. There are very few cloud services that offer effective encryption protection for data storage, according to Crypton. Security has always been the top concern for many enterprise organizations when it comes to cloud services and applications.”
It is reasonable that enterprises are concerned about security when it comes to cloud services and storage. For that reason, many prefer on-site hosting and storage. However, some open source companies, like LucidWorks, build value-added solutions on top of open source software and guarantee security as well as support and training. And while LucidWorks offers on-site hosting as well, those who venture into the Cloud can have the best of both worlds with cost-effective open source software and the support of an industry leader.
Speaker A: My friend is creating a wide-area radio network for Afghanistan.
Speaker B: Afghanistan has no infrastructure — including radio stations. Although radio is popular, it is mostly shortwave, with a few local FM stations for the local Iman. And electricity for radio stations is spotty at best including in Kabul.
Speaker A: Well, I can build really cheap, “ultra” cheap, radio receivers.
Speaker B: As long as you are doing that, why not give them OpenBTS cell phones running on ambient energy, and include a radio app? Then get someone else — Google, Virgin Mobile, the Chinese or India — to focus on all-purpose cellular towers and tethered ballons?
Part 4 of 6: Avaaz – Be the Change the Global Elite Want
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 3rd, 2013
In 2006 another ‘democracy’ project made its debut throughout the world. The organization is called Aavaz. According to its website:
Avaaz—meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.
Avaaz empowers millions of people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. Our model of internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force.
Gearóid Ó Colmáin is a political analyst based in Paris. He is a frequent contributor to Russia Today, Radio Del Sur and Inn World Report. His blog can be reached at Metrogael. Read other articles by Gearóid.
I read “How Can I Pass the String ‘Null’ through WSDL (SOAP)…” My hunch is that only a handful of folks will dig into this issue. Most senior managers buy the baloney generated by search and content processing. Yesterday I reviewed for one of the outfits publishing my “real” (for fee) columns a slide deck stuff full of “all’s” and “every’s”. The message was that this particular modern system which boasted a hefty price tag could do just about anything one wanted with flows of content.
Happily overlooked was the problem of a person with a wonky name. Case in point: “Null”. The link from Hacker News to the Stackoverflow item gathered a couple of hundred comments. You can find these here. If you are involved in one of the next-generation, super-wonderful content processing systems, you may find a few minutes with the comments interesting and possibly helpful.
My scan of the comments plus the code in the “How Can I” post underscored the disconnect between what people believe a system can do and what a here-and-now system can actually do. Marketers say one thing, buyers believe another, and the installed software does something completely different.
As big data analytics begins picking up steam, we are seeing more and more interesting outlets to learn about different platforms to choose from. Not just catalogs and boastful corporation sites, but insightful criticism. One such recent stop was when we came about the “About” story of Bamboo DIRT.
According to the site:
Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT is an evolution of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.
One look at its tips for analyzing data and we were sold. Here we were turned on to such intriguing companies as 140kit and Dataverse. The user-supported recommendations were the best. About Dataverse, it said: “Researchers and data authors get credit, publishers and distributors get credit, affiliated institutions get credit.” Concise and giving all the needed vitals, this type of crowdsourcing recommendation site could really catch on as the world of big data analytics keeps growing beyond most users’ capacity to keep up.
Internet Society Launches Questionnaire on Multistakeholder Participation in Internet Governance
02 August 2013
Part of broader dialogue on open and multistakeholder governance for a sustainable Internet
[Washington, D.C. and Geneva, Switzerland] — The Internet Society today announced the launch of a survey to gain greater insights into multistakeholder governance perceptions and processes at all levels – national, regional, and international. The questionnaire, http://goo.gl/dGW1tv, is open to all interested participants and is available until 30 September 2013.
The survey is one component of the Internet Society’s broader initiative focused on the open and sustainable Internet. While the Internet has proven its success from economic, development, technological, and societal perspectives, its continued growth as a multistakeholder platform cannot be taken for granted. The Internet Society strongly believes that to ensure a sustainable Internet, the Internet must maintain its core characteristics of open, global and interoperable technical standards for innovation; open access and freedom of expression for all users; openness for business and economic progress; based on a collaborative, inclusive, multistakeholder governance model.
