- The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version — Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh)
- Screens in Context — ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, it’s a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers at the coal face of web and mobile encounter every day. Everything can be considered in context, be timely, reactive, and data-driven. I’m going to try to outline some dimensions to think about, with some incredibly quick, simple, off the cuff dumb ideas [...] The technology to achieve some of these may be over and above what is possible now, but the biggest step – installing powered, networked computers in the real world – is already being taken by advertising media companies.
- Interactive Network Map of Lobbying Patterns Around Key Senators in Health Care Reform — fascinating visualization of political activity, via timoreilly on Twitter)
- The Doers Club — How DIY design gave a teenager from Malawi electricity, and can help transform Africa.
ENTRIES TAGGED "politics"
Four short links: 1 October 2009
Objectivity Be Gone, Public Screens, Lobbying Patterns, DIY Africa
How Alan Turing Finally Got a Posthumous Apology
There's a long tradition in the UK of direct democracy, with citizens
petitioning the Prime Minister themselves. Typically, thousands of
signatures are collected on paper and then delivered directly to the
Prime Minister's home at No. 10
Downing Street in London. The petitioners arrive at No. 10 and
hand the signatures through the open front door.
But the British government has made great strides to bring many
aspects of government relations into the electronic age. Through the
non-profit MySociety.org the
government has created web sites for
citizens to interact with local and central government offices. One such web site is the No. 10 Downing Street petitions page.
Four short links: 16 Apr 2009
China, databases, storage, and git:
- China’s Complicated Internet Culture (Ethan Zuckerman) — summary of Rebecca McKinnon’s talk at the Berkman Internet Center. Democracy is complex and hard to transition to, online democracy doubly so. Rebecca questions the widespread but unjustified belief that the Great Firewall of China is all that separates Chinese citizens from the empowered liberty of the West, and lays out the tangled state of affairs in China’s political Internet. Despite the rise of web video, “no one has managed to organized an opposition party on the web,” Rebecca points out. “There’s no Lech Walenza, no religious movement – Falun Gong has been squished pretty thoroughly.” (via cshirky’s delicious stream)
- Drop ACID and Think About Data — Bob Ippolito‘s talk from PyCon about the things you can do easily when you foresake the promises of ACID. More in the ongoing reinvention of databases for the needs of modern web systems. (via cesther’s Twitter stream)
- The Pogoplug — The Pogoplug connects your external hard drive to the Internet so you can easily share and access your files from anywhere. We’re accumulating terabytes of storage at home, where it’s very useful to all the computers in the home. This offers an easy way for non-technical civilians to make these drives useful outside the home as well. There are many possibilities for Interesting Things in the massive storage we’re accumulating. (via joshua’s delicious stream)
- Gitorious — open source (AGPLv3) clone of github. (via edd’s delicious stream)
Four short links: 10 Feb 2009
Happy Monday! Kid coding and web-powered political transparency form the artisanal wholewheat organic bread slices around a sandwich filling of meaty (or tofuy) web travel APIs and blogly angst:
- Art and Code — conference on programming environments for “artists, young people, and the rest of us”. Alice! Hackety Hack! Scratch! Processing! And more! March 7-9 at CMU. Want! (I’ve written before about my ongoing experiences teaching kids to program)
- TripIt API — clever, they’re building a single point where hotels, airlines, travel agents, mobile apps, etc. can access your integrated booking (use case: flight delayed, which hotel and mobile car rentals learn and react to by not assuming you’ve bailed on them) (disclaimer: OATV has invested in TripIt).
- Organically Grown Audiences (Danny O’Brien) — good point from Danny that I’ve been thinking about for a while: maintaining an audience is hard work, and the audience isn’t necessarily comprised of people you’d choose to hang out with. Perhaps the answer is to grow the audience slowly, but I’m not convinced. I’d say that unreciprocated intimacy from your audience is a sign that you’re doing things wrong, but it’s how fame works: the things people say to people in the public eye, on and off the web, are astonishingly presumptuous and familiar. Then again perhaps I should retreat back to the British Isles from which my frosty social distance comes and tend my tweed elbow patch farm until I die from bad teeth, bad beer, or a surfeit of Benny Hill.
- Promoting Open Government (Economist) — state and central governments are making expenditure public, in varyingly useful ways. Links to Missouri Accountability Portal and ReadTheStimulus.org (the former as well-designed, the latter as crowd-sourcing).
Four short links: 5 Feb 2009
Dearest Reader, for today’s compendium of brief pointers to the writings of the world’s greatest minds features language not suitable for children. So please stop reading this blog post to your child. Please. Think of the children.
- Don’t Work for Assholes (Derek Powazek) — sound advice that we all have to learn, then relearn.
- Broadband Stimulus Package Explained by Yochai Benkler — understanding the state of the bills in House and Senate, what each proposes to spend, where, and why. I, like many, were surprised to learn that the House’s bill gives half the money to the Secretary for Agriculture to spend. There is no sarcastic comment I can make about the Secretary of Agriculture that the Internets have now not already made. (via BoingBoing)
- The Web In The World — Slideshare presentation by Timo Arnall. Good intro to pervasive computing. “I think the hyperlink is a flawed model for physical interaction. (via Liz Goodman)
- Offshoring, Does It Ever Work? — very interesting responses to this question on Stack Overflow. As far as “does it EVER work” concerned: it does. It doesn’t work well though. Most people can run, doesn’t mean that most people can run as fast as Usain Bolt.
Four short links: 23 Jan 2009
Potty mouth, piracy, pointers to the future of the web, and Presidential technology woes, all in today’s link roundup.
- F*ck the Cloud – Jason Scott’s brilliant (and profanity-strewn) rant about cloud computing and the things people throw away without thinking about. Jason, an Internet historian, has a unique perspective and I think what he says makes a lot of sense. “[I]f you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service”.
- Pirating the Oscars – Andy Baio summarizes online piracy of the Oscar-nominated movies, as he has done since 2003. It’s interesting to see what’s new this year: movies are taking longer to leak, but more of them are being leaked.
- Webkit Owns Mobile – Alex Russell lays out the case that Webkit “has mobile all sewn up”. I’ve been saying for the last umpty years that the Web is at a Windows 286 stage of development–we need 3.1 to come along and standarize the widgets that presently everyone reinvents. I recognized that in this line from Alex: “If we look at the APIs of Dojo, Prototype, or jQuery as a set of suggestions for the APIs that the web should expose, then it becomes pretty clear that we’ve still got a long long way to go”.
- New Staff Find White House Tech in Dark Ages – they’ve gone from a startup to The Enterprise (not Star Trek, alas, just a big company) and now are learning the pain of IT rules that are bigger than they are.
Software for Civic Life: An Interview with Mike Mathieu of Frontseat.org
In this interview Mike Mathieu, founder of Frontseat.org, discusses how he is helping to build “software for civic life”. Using publicly available data and web services (many of their applications use S3 and EC2) Frontseat creates simple, highly functional tools like Walkscore (rating neighborhood walkability) and Countmore (helping students in the recent elections decide which state to cast their…
It's Not Over: We are "the change we need."
Like a lot of people, I was feeling a bit of post-partum letdown after the election. Those of us who were really engaged, following the polls, making calls to undecided voters, arguing out the merits of the candidates, experienced a bit of a vacuum after the election. Doonesbury summed it up pretty well: "I've been on a constant news drip…
Technology, Politics and Democracy
Recently I spoke with Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO and co-founder of Blue State Digital about how technology is affecting politics and democracy in the U.S. Blue State Digital was born out of Jascha's experience helping Howard Dean’s seminal run for the White House in ’04. and is the technology and strategic services company powering Barack Obama (and many other Democratic leaders…
Newsweek Repackaging Candidate Coverage for Kindle Bios
Newsweek will aggregate its coverage of John McCain, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin and Joe Biden into four Kindle-only biographies. From Amazon's Kindle Blog: The book-length biographies contain archived reporting and commentary from Newsweek's coverage of the candidates from the magazine's award-winning political correspondents. Each biography takes readers through the lives of the candidates, from their personal beginnings to their…
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