"Web 2.0" entries
A Computing Future from Microsoft: Large and Cheap Displays
Chris Pratley, the head of Microsoft’s Office Labs, gave the PICNIC audience a peek into the future they envision when planning their products. What is that future? It was encapsulated in the above video that they made a year ago. Some of the technologies (Augmented Reality and realtime language translation for example) have already come to the fruition (and they are going to need to make a new video soon before it all happens).
Startups! Enter the Web 2.0 Expo Launchpad by 9/25
Startups provide the lifeblood (and R&D) for the web. Each year at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC (and SF) we celebrate their collective accomplishments by highlighting a few of their number during the Launchpad. This year’s Launchpad will occur the morning of 11/15. We are looking for five great startups to demo onstage and handle questions from our judges like Nate Westheimer. I’ll be hosting the event. I also spend time with each startup before the event reviewing and critiquing their demo. Past Expo Launchpad participants include 80Legs, Nitobi’s PhoneGap (SF 2009 winner), and Triggit.
Fallacious Celebrations of Facebook Fans
Publishing “top 10” lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers’ eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: “Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans.” For the record, this list is topped by the White House with 327,592 fans, followed by the Marine Corps, Army, CDC, State Department, NASA, NASA JPL, Library of Congress, Air Force, and Environmental Protection Agency. Congratulations to all these hard-working agencies. But what exactly are we celebrating here?
Submit a Talk For Ignite at PICNIC
This year we are going to Ignite PICNIC. PICNIC Network is an excellent conference in Amsterdam that is happening September 23-25. I attended last year and got a lot out of the combination of technology and art (Radar post). Other speakers this year include Nicolas Negroponte, Linda Stone, Kevin Slavin and many others.
Seeing the Future of Mapping in Crimespotting
This week Stamen Design released San Francisco Crimespotting. It’s a crime map and notification system that allows for time and crime trend analysis. SF Crimespotting has launched just over two years after the release Oakland Crimespotting (Radar post). Stamen had been waiting for crime data all this time and with the launch of DataSF they are able to use an official API for crime data. SF Crimespotting is very similar to the initial release for Oakland.
Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World
Even professional writers are prone to infrequent accidental plagiarism. But in the world of novels, newspapers, and college exams, there are rules about bootlegging others’ work that are well-established – most everyone agrees on what behaviors are unacceptable and what the consequences are. In bantamweight publishing, however, the rules are not so clear.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bot
Web technologies often allow you to scale things that weren't scalable before. Unfortunately, that list of scalable things includes spam. From unsolicited phone calls to unwanted emails to unnecessary tweets, it can seem like we're getting progressively overloaded with information we don't necessarily want. One group blamed for the increase in online spam are Twitter bots – Twitter accounts created…
Everyblock's Code is Open-Sourced
The code for Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock has been released. The open-sourcing of the site’s system were apart of the Knight News Challenge Program. Everyblock is a very impressive site that aggregates and geocodes local data — news, crime, fire, restaraunt inspections and reviews – and then lets users define their interests down to the block-level.
Bing's Sanaz Ahari on System Feedback (2 of 2)
The second part of this two-part interview with Sanaz Ahari, Lead PM on Bing, my interview focuses on the systems used to generate the categorization. Together we review some of the images from her presentation at a recent small search summit held by Bing for analysts, bloggers, SEO experts, entrepreneurs and advertisers.
The Web^2: it's Exponential, but is it Contracting or Expanding?
The theme for the Web 2.0 Summit this year is Web Squared. It is rooted in the idea that as the web morphs into less of a hub and spoke distribution model and more of a network of connected people and things, innovation and opportunity on it are growing exponentially. There has been a little bit of discussion on the Radar back channel about exactly what this means, or should mean, and Nat started things off with a thoughtful response that probably should be blogged as well.