- Transparency Sites to Close — the US government’s open data efforts will close in a few months as a result of the cuts in funding.
- Browser Wars, Plural (Alex Russell) — nice rundown of demos of what modern browsers are capable of.
- Brief Descriptions of Potential Home Information Services (image) — lovely 1971 piece of futurology, which you can read going “Google News, Amazon, Google Calendar, PayPal, ….” The ancients vastly over-estimated our appetite for educational material, though. There’s no education site on the scale of a Google, Amazon, eBay, etc. (via BoingBoing)
- Google’s Recipes for Recipes — I’m as astonished as anyone to find myself agreeing with Nick Carr. The whinge is basically that by promoting recipes marked up in a particular format, Google have created an environment that favours corporate recipes over small less-technical people who can post plain text recipes but wouldn’t know microformats from microfilm. The really interesting part is how the choice of drill-down categories can backfire: Take, for instance, a recent search for “cassoulet.” The top search result is a recipe from Epicurious, one of the larger and better sites. But if you refine by time, your choices are “less than 15 min,” “less than 30 min,” or “less than 60 min.” There is no option for more than 60 minutes. In truth, a classic cassoulet takes at least 4 hours to make, if not several days (the Epicurious recipe takes 4 hours and 30 minutes; yet there in the results are recipes under each of these three time classes. One from Tablespoon goes so far as to claim to take just 1 minute. (It’s made with kidney beans, canned mushrooms, and beef, so it’s not long on authenticity.) … Refining recipe search by time doesn’t result in better recipes rising to the top; rather, the new winners are recipes packaged for the American eating and cooking disorder. (via Daniel Spector)
"transparency" entries
Top Stories: October 31-November 4, 2011
An author turns to automation, a look at privacy in the age of big data, and a simple rule for data ethics.
This week on O'Reilly: Former author Robbie Allen explained his shift to software-generated writing, Terence Craig said transparency is the best way to handle digital privacy, and we learned how a simple question can keep data companies honest.
What does privacy mean in an age of big data?
Author Terence Craig on why data transparency trumps anonymization.
Ironclad digital privacy isn't realistic, argues "Privacy and Big Data" co-author Terence Craig. What we need instead are laws and commitments founded on transparency.
Strata Week: IBM puts Hadoop in the cloud
IBM taps the cloud to make Hadoop easier, Factual cleans geo data, Google gets transparent with gov data requests.
IBM targets businesses with a cloud-based Hadoop product, Factual tackles incomplete geo records, and Google embraces transparency by publishing and explaining the data requests it gets from governments.
Cooking the data
In a world of full disclosure, cooking the data is the new cooking the books.
Open data and transparency aren't enough: we need True Data, not Big Data, as well as regulators and lawmakers willing to act on it.
Promoting Open Source Software in Government: The Challenges of Motivation and Follow-Through
I have posted a prepublication draft of my article “Promoting Open Source Software in Government: The Challenges of Motivation and Follow-Through,” published by the Journal of Information Technology & Politics.
Advances, setbacks, and continuing impediments to government transparency
The good, the bad, and the edgy in open government at Computers, Freedom & Privacy.
Should the patent office open its internal guidelines to the public?
Anyone following policy issues around technological innovation has noticed the power and scope of patents expanding over time. To understand the forces contributing to this, I recommend a thoughtful, readable summary–and highlight the role played by internal documents at the patent office.
An ethical bargain
Transparency, relationships and other things corporations could learn from a small bookstore.
Most of the relationships you build with corporations are like icebergs — essentially hidden from view. But what if we could interact with “human” corporations? What would that look like? How would it work?
Why the eG8 mattered to the future of the Internet and society
Four interviews explore why the eG8 mattered and what's at stake for the Internet.
If the Internet has become the public arena for our time, as the official G8 statement emphasized, then experts say we must defend the openness and freedoms that have supported its development.
