"social media" entries

Big crime meets big data

Data and social media are being used against us in creative new ways.

Marc Goodman, consultant and cyber crime expert, explains how criminals and terrorists can put data, automation, and scalability to effective use.

Can the People's House become a social platform for the people?

The combined potential of social media and legislative data took the stage at the first congressional hackathon.

Leaders of the House of Representatives met with Facebook developers and open government advocates to talk about how technology can improve the legislative process. New prototype apps hint at the future that awaits the "People's House" in the 21st century.

The future of social media at the National Archives

The National Archives described a dashboard for "citizen archivists" at a recent forum in D.C.

A recent forum at the National Archives featured a preview of a "citizen archivist dashboard" and a lively discussion of the past, present and future of social media.

Strata Week: Why ThinkUp matters

ThinkUp and data ownership, DataSift turns on its Twitter firehose, and Google cracks opens the door to BigQuery.

Data democratization gets an important new tool with the release of ThinkUp 1.0. Also, DataSift offers another way to get the Twitter firehose, and Google offers a little more access to its BigQuery data analytics service.

From crowdsourcing to crime-sourcing: The rise of distributed criminality

How criminals are applying crowdsourcing techniques.

Crowdsourcing began as a way to tap the wisdom of crowds for the betterment of business and science. Crime groups have now repurposed the same tools and techniques for their own variation: "crime-sourcing."

Strata Week: Investors circle big data

Big funding news for data startups, a new verification tool for Wikipedia, and Angry Birds takes down the economy.

This week's data news includes funding announcements from a number of data startups, a new real-time research tool for Ushahidi and Wikipedia, and calculations about the amount of work time Americans waste on Angry Birds.

Visualization of the Week: Social media and the UK riots

Did social media catalyze UK violence? The Guardian casts doubt on that conclusion.

The Guardian has created an interactive visualization of some 2.5 million tweets to challenge the British government's contention that rioters used Twitter to organize the recent violence.

Developer Week in Review: Google Goes Yardsaling

Google consumes mass quantities of mobile, social media gone bad, and C++ learns new tricks

We learned that Google liked Motorola products so much they decided to buy the company, that social media has a dark side, and that C++ isn't ready to join Sanskrit in the dead languages section just yet.

If it's important, the news will find me

Which works better: gulping from the info firehose or letting news come to you?

Facing info overload, Peter Meyers ponders more efficient ways to find what’s newsworthy. What works for you?

Four short links: 20 July 2011

Four short links: 20 July 2011

Meaningful Subsets, iPhone Reading, JSON Parser, The Epiphanator

  1. Random Khan Exercises — elegant hack to ensure repeatability for a user but difference across users. Note that they need these features of exercises so that they can perform meaningful statistical analyses on the results.
  2. Float, the Netflix of Reading (Wired) — an interesting Instapaper variant with a stab at an advertising business model. I would like to stab at the advertising business model, too. What I do like is that it’s trying to do something with the links that friends tweet, an unsolved problem for your humble correspondent. (via Steven Levy
  3. JSON Parser Online — nifty web app for showing JSON parses. (via Hilary Mason)
  4. Facebook and the Epiphanator (NY Magazine) — Paul Ford has a lovely frame through which to see the relationship between traditional and social media. So it would be easy to think that the Whole Earthers are winning and the Epiphinators are losing. But this isn’t a war as much as a trade dispute. Most people never chose a side; they just chose to participate. No one joined Facebook in the hope of destroying the publishing industry.