Web 2.0 Summit Starts Today

Last year at Web 2.0 Summit, one prominent tech executive responded to our focus on "Web meets World" -- the way web technology is being used to attack the world's problems -- by saying "I don't come to this conference to learn how to do good. I come to learn about trends that are going to affect my business."

As it turns out, the "Web meets World" theme was in fact exactly on point with the trends that were going to affect his business. What Fred Wilson calls "the golden triangle" of Web meets World trends -- mobile, social, and real-time -- are at the heart of many of the cutting edge non-profit activities we showed last year, and they are very much at the heart of the for-profit companies following hard on their heels.

I've written a much longer paper on this subject - Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, and I won't repeat that there. But that's the theory. The practice is how entrepreneurs are taking advantage of these disruptive trends, how big companies are responding, and what kind of infrastructure changes we'll need to support the future that is coming at us.

This year at the Web 2.0 Summit, we'll be hearing how real-time, social, and mobile play out in the strategy of Google, Microsoft, Intel, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, News Corp, AOL, Comcast, Nokia, and even GE, but we'll also be hearing from entrepreneurs, and yes, even some more innovative hackers who are helping birth the future away from the commercial limelight.

The official sessions are great, but it's the hallway conversations that can really set your mind off in a new direction. For example, at a pre-Summit event last night, I had a fascinating conversation with Marc Pincus of Zynga last night about his belief that the third great internet business model has arrived. Fortunately, you don't need to bump into Marc to hear what he thinks: he's speaking this afternoon at 4:15. He's put his ideas about social selling into practice, with 129 million users playing Zynga games each month, spending millions of dollars on virtual goods. But what's most fascinating is how Marc sees the potential to apply social gaming principles to all of e-commerce. His riff on how what's he's learned applies to Amazon (and anyone else selling on the web) is worth the price of admission to the Summit.

I hope to see you at the Summit. John Battelle and I kick off the show with opening remarks at 2 pm at the Westin Market Street in San Francisco.

Social Networking is the Means to Achieve Workplace Collaboration

Yesterday I live-blogged a bit from the terrific Government 2.0 event produced by FedScoop.com at the Newseum in Washington, DC. I wrote a post about how collaboration was not the means, but rather an end made possible by the means of social networking tools. You can read my original writing and some initial comments here. Below, I expand a bit on these ideas.

My post was initially inspired by one speaker's (WFED's Chris Dorobek) notion, shared by some others (Justin Houk commented that, "Taxpayers don't want to think about those in government sitting around on Twitter all day even thought that might be an effective way to collaborate."), that social networking tools come across as too social or "fun" and that being social is not what people are truly doing (in the government) when they use them - they're collaborating. Thus, when marketing Government 2.0 to wider audiences, he feels that a term like "collaboration tools" is more appropriate.

In my opinion, while this might sound better to a more traditionalist, untrained ear, I think it is factually wrong to say that things like Facebook or Intellipedia are collaboration tools. True, collaboration often happens with these tools. And perhaps one could argue that collaboration is mainly what people hope to accomplish with them in the workplace. Fair enough. But I think that collaboration is the end result of leveraging social networks, which is in actuality what the social networking tools are for.

In other words, social networks are a means by which to accomplish something. This something might very well be collaboration. It might also be putting together an office softball team, or a study group of employees all learning Arabic. Is arranging players on a softball team "collaboration"? I don't think so. Is it an important part of a coherent, productive workplace? Perhaps. There are many important things that happen in workplaces based around social networks that are not strictly collaboration on work projects.

One big thing I've been thinking about lately is "leveraging social networks to accomplish important stuff" and no one can deny that personal relationships can influence collaboration. How well you know someone, how much you identify with them, how much you trust them, their level of reliability or transparency - all of these are values derived from social networking that then, when leveraged, can influence collaboration. Collaboration is not an end in itself, of course - it is a means to accomplish some end (finishing a draft report, etc.). So, social networking is a means to collaboration, which is a means to achieving some work or personal goal.

I also reject the notion that there is something wrong with having some fun at work. The idea that having fun with social software shouldn't be allowed in serious workplaces is ridiculous. And of course, anyone who's ever passed around a joke-of-the-week email, celebrated a colleague's birthday with a cake in the break room, or ended work at 4pm for an informal happy hour with the office (i.e., effectively every government and corporate employee) would surely agree with me on this. Work can be fun and be productive, too. The director of the Office of Personnel Management recently visited Google for a reason.

So, briefly, I think social networking tools are not necessarily collaboration tools. They are social software that allows social networks to be leveraged to accomplish things you find important. That might be collaboration on a National Intelligence Estimate (protecting America, earning your paycheck), or arranging a carpool with people in your agency (getting to work on time, being more green), or finding a racquetball partner (staying healthy, living well, bonding) - all of which postitively influence the workplace, in government and in the private sector as well.

As Fred Wellman commented on my original post, "I can't help but wonder if Chris [Dorobek] is seeking a more politically correct or business sounding name of the same tools with the goal of breaking down barriers to implementation and usage as opposed to a lack of understanding of the power of social networking applications in the business of government." I think there's a lot of truth to that. But I also think that, as an academic, this is actually not what we are doing.

This may sound a bit esoteric, but from an academic standpoint I think pointing out that using social networks - online and off - is at the very core of what we are doing is an important thing to point out. When we are "collaborating," we are leveraging social networks to accomplish important stuff.

Where 2.0 CFP Extended

Every year Where 2.0 is a gathering of mapping companies, and geohackers. This year there will be a lot of discussion about mobile apps (iPhone vs, Android vs. Pre vs. Nokia), user-contributed geodata (like Waze and Google Building Maker), temporal mapping, government geodata (like Data SF), augmented reality (like Wikitude), and the geolocated web. We've extended the CFP entry deadline until October 20th. If you've got something to contribute then submit a talk for the CFP now.

I've included some of the topics that we are looking for after the jump

(continue reading)

Four short links: 28 September 2009

Science Blogs, Concussion Games, Packet Sniffer, and an Astonishing Product Name

1. Sci Blogs -- aggregated and hosted blogs from New Zealand scientists and researchers. A planet aggregator has become a key part of building a community, even outside programming.
2. Super Better, or How To Turn Recovery Into a Game -- Jane McGonigal had a concussion, and created a game to keep her doing things that aided her recovery. Interesting discussion of how to build a game around a serious real-life problem. And honestly, people: if she can make concussion into a game, surely you can make your crap websites suck less?
3. Justniffer -- packet sniffer that identifies HTTP requests and emits an Apache-style logfile showing what was requested. (via Simon Willison)
4. Vegemite Names New Spread -- the original name was crowdsourced in 1923. They decided to repeat the process for their new product, a spread made from Vegemite and Cream Cheese. The winning name came from an Australian web designer: "Vegemite iSnack 2.0". This does not appear to be a joke (no mention that the commercial will use music from Rick Astley). Unsure which will make Americans more ill: the name, the idea of eating Vegemite mixed with cream cheese, or the idea of eating Vegemite at all.

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).

An initial viewing of the video shows that Chris and his team (and Microsoft in general) are concerned with screens of all sizes - from 10-foot wallscreen to 2-inch boarding passes. In all of these displays they imagine that the screen is also the interface. How will the current interfaces scale? For larger ones there is a concern for how to keep the controls near the user. For smaller ones there is no room for controls. The screens will be maneuvered by making the back touch sensitive (called Nanotouch). One of the key Microsoft researchers in this area is Patrick Baudisch.

These interfaces are possible now. I have played with Nanotouch devices at MSR -- some no larger than a 50 cent piece. And not only are the larger displays possible, they will potentially be cheap. The picture below is a new MSR project that shows one method for creating large scale screens cheaply. It uses a pico projector that is the size of the phone and a specially cut piece of plexiglass. The image below shows a display that is only ~2 feet tall, but you can imagine this working at 10 feet. Chris stated that the size of the display is bounded by the projector's brightness and that pico projector brightness is doubling every 9 months. In the future cameras can be added to allow for gestures on the interface.

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. The details are below:

For 2009, we continue the tradition of showcasing innovative and promising new companies at Web 2.0 Expo. While the definition of a launch has gotten cloudy in this age of public betas, we're looking for new companies or products that make us take notice. And while venture capital has been the focus in past years, the reality of the market is that companies must gain the attention of customers. So our judging panel and criteria this year focus more on what is essential and transformational in today's market than on ability to get funded. Along the way, we're sure the VCs in the crowd will find several startups they'd like to talk to!

The Approach
Entrants do not need to launch their company or a major product/service to qualify.
All proposals will be reviewed before Web 2.0 Expo by our panel.
The judging panel will be comprised of industry experts who will review Launch Pad companies for their value to their market (consumer, enterprise, etc.).
Judges will select about five finalists, each of whom will have five minutes to pitch on stage, in front of the Web 2.0 Expo audience (the largest gathering of the innovators in the Internet industry) and the panel.
Each company will receive feedback on its presentation from both the panel and the audience.

Launch Pad Finalists: The Chosen Five
Five companies will be chosen by a panel to present on stage at Web 2.0 Expo New York. Each will have five minutes to present their company or product and will receive real-time feedback from a panel of industry experts and the audience.

Submit Your Company for Launch Pad
To submit your company for participation in this year's Launch pad, please complete the submission form. All Launch Pad submissions are due by September 25, 2009.

If you have questions you can leave a comment on this post or ping me on Twitter.

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? The fact that government agencies are embracing new technologies that the citizens they serve actually use? That's nice I suppose, but everyone from Papa John's Pizza to America's Next Top Model (200,000 more fans than the White House, cough) to someone I met once at a party during Internet Week has a Facebook "Fan Page" now, so surely we are not celebrating the mere presence of them. In fact, when everyone in my social circle's social circle asks me to become a fan of their long-standing charity, their favorite television program, or their single-person consulting firm, everything becomes a blur of meaningless, cheap invitations that become remarkably easy to decline. There is no value in simply having a fan page anymore. There may in fact be street cred in not feeling like you need one.

Are we applauding the government's fan numbers? The article leads with, "The White House currently has more fans than the Washington Redskins." The most powerful global seat of power in perhaps the most recognizable office building in the world has more fans than the local football team? Earth-shattering. Let's consider how popular the White House is. Facebook now has 300 million users; thus, approximately one out of every 1000 Facebook users is a "fan" of the White House. The other 999/1000 are not. And since many Facebook users live outside the U.S., one must assume that many White House fans do as well. Should every U.S. citizen using Facebook be a fan of the White House? Is that the goal? What's the marginal value of an additional 10,000 fans? Who knows.

Still, the White House shouldn't feel too bad about those stats. Rounding out the top 10, the EPA has convinced one of every 100,000 Facebook users to become their fans. Bravo. Let's keep this in perspective. Soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo has two fan pages that total four million fans. Julia Allison, who isn't even a real celebrity, has over 15,000 fans - if these numbers are in any way meaningful she's roughly as popular as the State Department, the agency heading up U.S. foreign policy. These numbers seem even worse when one considers that there are hundreds of U.S. Federal Government departments and agencies, many of which haven't a presence on Facebook or anything similar.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. Let's assume for a minute that these agencies are genuinely touching microniches and that the fans, whatever their numbers, are indeed fanatical about these agencies. What is the government doing with that raving fan base? Not much. Facebook fan pages from the Army and CDC and State Department primarily re-post their own news from their own websites. I didn't see any original writing. I didn't even see aggregation of information about, say, foreign policy from other sources. I certainly didn't see any innovative contests from the Marine Corps, or crowdsourcing from NASA. And while there are fan comments posted on the pages, it's not obvious at all what is being done with that feedback, if anything. Make fun of Tyra Banks all you want, but her show's fan page has 286 discussion topics, hundreds of photos, headshots, names, and bios of people involved in the show, and listings of upcoming events. They're so organized at America's Next Top Model that we might consider asking their staff to inform people about the resurgent H1N1 flu virus.

If you think I'm joking about that, you probably have no business working with social media for the government.

The larger issue here is that the connection of any of these Facebook fan pages to agency goals and strategy is murky at best. As someone who spends a bit of time thinking about "Government 2.0," it's difficult to decipher how this is helping the government. True, the pages are somewhat informative, and to some degree they reach a citizen audience where they are. But it's not novel and it's not social and it's not engaging. The execution is flawed, the tactics are questionable, the strategy is vague, and the goals are unclear. And all the government pages in the top 10 list effectively look the same. Monkey-see, monkey-do.

My personal Facebook page has about 2,000 connections, but this by itself is nothing to celebrate. The meaningful question is not about who has more fans, but about who can authentically and transparently - and usefully - interact with citizens to provide social and intellectual value and become the pulse of their conversations. Here are some questions I have for governments and agencies running Facebook fan pages: What are the names of the people running the pages? What are their titles? What city is their office in? Where do they blog? Which events are they attending this year? (Can I meet them there?) How are you going to get your fans engaged in your mission? How can I tell you my stories about military service, or foreign travel, or amateur astronomy? Would those stories be helpful to you? How are you using social media like Facebook to get citizens involved in their government?

These are questions that departments and agencies, and private companies for that matter, should be asking themselves before they deploy official new media platforms like a Facebook fan page. The answers to these questions and others should be visible on day one. When the first White House memo of the new administration outlined the principles of a transparent, participatory, and collaborative government, this should have been obvious. It appears not to be so.

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.

PICNIC is a part of the Geeks on a Plane tour. Here's a little more about Ignite @ PICNIC:

Ignite comes to PICNIC Amsterdam 2009! In partnership with Brady Forrest of O'Reilly Media, we present Ignite@PICNIC - a series of five-minute talks where the audiences takes over the stage. We'll select 10 talks for you to enjoy while relaxing at PICNIC '09.

In times of peril and uncertainty, the creative and innovative minds that emerge as leaders of change. Countless opportunities are emerging for social, cultural, educational and business entrepreneurs to re-engineer our future. What are the challenges we face? What can the PICNIC audience do about them? We'll be looking for some Ignite talks that identify problems and/or provide solutions. If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? Started in 2006 by Brady Forrest, Technology Evangelist for O’Reilly Media, hundreds of Ignite talks have now taken place worldwide. Now, Ignite debuts in Amsterdam at PICNIC ’09. This is your moment to shine!

What's an Ignite talk? Each speaker gets 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of exactly 5 minutes on stage to talk about whatever lights them up. It's fun, it's fast, and the format forces you to really think about what you want to say.

To do a great Ignite talk, tell us about something you're passionate about, something that others should know, or some unique bit of knowledge or insight that you can impart. And please don't submit a pitch!

Submit your idea today via http://bit.ly/IgnitePicnic

The submission deadline is Friday 11 September. A total of 10-12 talks will be chosen from the ideas submitted. If your talk is selected, we'll need to get your slides before PICNIC '09 (in Powerpoint). Selections will be rolling so submit early.

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. As I wrote in 2007:

Each type of crime is assigned a color-coded icon with an abbreviation. You can highlight all of a crime type's markers with a mouseover. You can also change the number of days for which crimes are shown. Each crime has a detail page and that crime can then be viewed in context with others. You can also slice the data by day, type and the intersection of the two. You can also subscribe to get email alerts and RSS feeds for a specific place in Oakland.

The latest releases of the Crimespotting platform reflect several important trends in online mapping:

1) Crowdsourced Maps - When Oakland Crimespotting launched it used Microsoft Live maps (which would now be called Bing). They have switched to Cloudmade maps which are based on Open Street Map data. The maps look amazing and at initial glance they appear to be the same as any other major provider's maps. Google's Mapmaker project (Radar posts) has also been seeing more attention and just this week expanded into Mexico (I wonder how long until they bring Mapmaker to the US). Waze (Radar post) is using user-generated traces to create their realtime maps.

2) Temporal Mapping - Time is being added to online maps and other visualizations. As data comes to use in realtime there are new conventions that need to be developed. Stamen, through this project and their work with Trulia Hindsight (Radar post) and MySociety (Radar post), are at the forefront of designing methods of dealing with varying scales and types of time data. In their post The Pie of Time Stamen details their thinking for how to represent hours, days and years in the project. The old Crimespotting did not allow you to navigate to archival data. With the new UI there are now permalinks to all crime reports The hours control is shown to the right. Only the crimes that occurred during the highlighted times will appear on the map. Stamen has included quick links to show specific times like "Commute" and "Nightlife".

The slider and dropdown used to navigate days, months and years are shown above. Each day of the slider shows the total amount of crime that day. The highlighted area dictates the crime shown on the map.

3) Government Data - The new federal administration has shown a renewed interest in releasing data (most of this will have some geocomponent). The 2010 Census is around the corner and that will add to the data flow. As more data is released you can expect an explosion of government mashups. You can also expect more civic minded companies (especially after this week's exit by Everyblock (Radar post)).

4) Geo-Analysis - GIS used within enterprises, governments and universities are designed to take massive geodata sets and simplify them so that decisions can be made. Crimespotting may look like a slick consumer app and that's because it is. However as you manipulate its many controls you'll realize that you can learn a lot about a city and how a time of day or section of the city impacts the likelihood of your being involved in a crime. You can determine if you're more likely to be mugged in the Castro on Thursdays vs. Tuesdays. The only problem is that you are limited to crime data. I'd love to have ability to add other layers like housing prices or average income. Crimespotting has a read API; I hope Stamen adds Write capabilities.

I'd ask the kind folks at Stamen (very nicely) to make a Crimespotting Seattle, but unfortunately we don't publicly release our crime data. Here's to hoping that we get a mayor in this Fall's election who will open the data coffers. Does your city share its data? If so include a link in the comments.

All of these trends are going to be big topics at this year's Where 2.0 (3/31-4/2 in San Jose). Submit your topic now!

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.

In order for the British Army to raise more units during the First World War, it created battalions of otherwise healthy men with lowered minimum height requirements. In this way, short, powerful miners and similarly swarthy individuals were able to contribute to the war effort. These soldiers were called bantams (a term now heard most commonly in boxing, bantamweight). Similarly, in a Web 2.0 environment, the short powerful bursts of searchable, findable, and sharable data emitted from personal electronic devices are a form of bantamweight publishing in which persons outside the regulated publishing industry can contribute to the information sharing effort.

Bantamweight publishing comes in many forms. Twitter is certainly in this category, but there are a steadily increasing number of ways to share small bits of information with the world. From updating your Facebook Wall to Yammering inside your enterprise to updating your LinkedIn status to commenting on people’s BrightKite locations, everyone is doing it. But in an easily plagiarized world, who owns your sentences once you publish them? It’s not really clear. And in a murky environment where someone might get a macropublishing book deal by popularizing someone else’s creative hashtag, bantamweight publishing runs the risk of serious future problems.

Oh, bantamweight publishing has its customs. Self-policing crowds ensure that most people who lift someone else’s excellent quote or funny picture or news link give credit to the originator using the “retweet” (RT) convention followed by a username. But there is little downside to cheating relative to being expelled from college or fired from your newspaper. As is well known in animal behavior circles, it can be temporarily advantageous for cheaters to infiltrate a system like this.

To be sure, quoting someone’s original haiku verbatim and making it appear as if it were your own is an infraction of bantamweight publishing customs. But what if someone tweets an Abraham Lincoln quotation - must the re-tweeter cite the originator? The custom seems less pressing in this case, mainly because of a lack of intent to deceive and arguable "fair use" of a well-known statement by a famous person. One can imagine altruistic plagiarism as well, where people repeat memes to raise money for charity, or virally make people aware of an immediate Amber alert. Further, who could fault someone for copying information about a charity onto their Facebook Wall without citing the originator? In the bantamweight publishing world, information sharing can easily supersede attribution. There are gradations of citations.

Bantamweight publishing is popular among those who feel brevity is a virtue. But when an entire work of art is bounded in 140 characters, even brevity has its limits. Sometimes, squeezing in a proper attribution through editing content can change the original meaning, when the edits unwillingly shift from cosmetic to substantive. And what happens when you run out of space when attempting to retweet someone who retweeted someone who tweeted an important quotation from the Washington Post? To a large degree, a work of bantamweight publishing is like a painting with an upper weight limit, where the novelty is the canvas and the attribution is the frame; most viewers would choose to appreciate the canvas without the frame if given the hard choice.

Another major difference between regular publishing and bantamweight publishing is the lack of research and editing standards. Sometimes people attribute flawed information properly. It is obvious that excellent curators of information like NYU professor Jay Rosen and publisher Tim O’Reilly are exceptions to the rule, based simply on the phenomena of Rick Rolling, #moonfruit, and celebrity death hoaxes. To many, bantamweight publishing is not an micro-investigatory piece to be researched, sourced, edited, and spread, but rather a form of enhanced social chatter and gossip spreading. And according to the rules of gossip, it doesn’t really matter where it comes from; gossip is fun.

Few would argue that the British bantam units were a bad idea, and likewise bantamweight publishing has many virtues. But there are also pitfalls to this in an easily plagiarized world, particularly when money comes into play. Who’s looking out for the intellectual property of a winning hashtag that becomes a book, or a stream of haikus that becomes a blog that companies advertise on? At some point, bantamweight publishing will no longer be a lawless frontier territory; what will it look like next?

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 to automatically perform certain behaviors like following anyone who mentions "candy" or retweeting any mention of the the word "fashion."

Some people find such bots to provide annoying and useless clutter. I, on the other hand, have come to love the bot. In an age of information overload and filter failure, good bots can act as an initial filter for discovering pertinent things within the real-time information ecosystem. Unless you're fanatical about a subject, why follow 100 military bloggers or 250 marketing gurus or 85 fashionistas when one or two bots can collate their best stuff and simplify your life? Who has time to find all these accounts, track up-and-comers, and listen to everything they say? I tend to be a one-bot kinda guy. And when I find a good bot, I hang onto her.

Bots love to exchange gifts with you, too. Generally, my tweets are relatively long and filled with informative nouns - and bots appreciate my efforts. Every instance when I mention "celebrity" or "baseball" or "journalism" to the world is like giving a tiny gift to a bot that keeps it relevant. And in exchange, the bot ensures that my information automatically gets to a wider audience of people that I don't know yet. Around the clock, bots are selflessly recruiting my next generation of fans. And my love affair with bots is just beginning; because they're inherently unjealous creatures, I can use as many bots as I want, whenever I want, however it pleases me.

Brands, on the other hand, always want to be my soulmate, even though they don't often love me back. They don't tell their friends what they heard from me, and they don't share their best gossip with me. Usually when I meet a brand, I find them to be a very distant anti-filter that talks only about themselves. They're rarely chivalrous. Unlike bots desperately seeking my attention, brands only want me when I talk to them first. Sometimes they thank me for the compliments, and sometimes they're sorry they hurt me, but either way I always feel a bit empty after talking with a brand. Brands are just not that into me.

Brands tend to be very jealous and are always checking to see if I'm being faithful. Yet while I sit around hoping they'll get in touch, they always seem to be busy talking to someone else. One brand that's on my mind all the time is Comcast, but how often do they ever think about me? According to my diary, @comcastcares wrote me four times, and @comcastbonnie just once. Frank and Bonnie (and Scott, too) never suggest novel things I might like to watch based on shows I tweet about, never give me the latest news about high-speed Internet connections, and they don't even try to sell me on the digital phone service I don't have. This brand only tries to make me happy after they've hurt me.

I'm not the only one getting his feelings hurt. Unlike bots I love who share my information and give me some in return, Comcast rapidly narrowcasts in a multiplexed Kabuki dance designed to cheer us up when we're feeling blue about them. Frank and his colleagues send messages to specific people 97% of the time, and retweet what they say less than 1% of the time. And its not like other brands are thinking about me a lot either - even my beloved Starbucks only retweets fans like me about 1% of the time. Sure, I'm on cloud nine during an occasional encounter with a brand I really like, but they always seem to roll over and ignore me afterwards.

Developing relationships in a socially networked era is difficult because there's less old-fashioned courtship and more emphasis on "hanging out." It's hard to find a truly generous brand nowadays. That's why when it comes to brands, I like to spend my nights with non-profits that friends set me up with. A new article points out a lot of great reasons to develop relationships with non-profit brands: they're member-driven, promote community participation, create value in people's lives, and engage audiences by speaking to their primary interests.

Developing a relationship with a non-profit brand in this economy is hard, though - they always want me to pay for everything. Bots, on the other hand, are happy to go Dutch. Sure, most Twitter bots aren't great at engaging in conversation, but I think they can be thought of as stripped-down non-profits. The reason I have learned to stop worrying and love the bot is because they're created by passionates to collate knowledge from people they don't know, and share it with other people they don't know. Call me Dr. Strangelove, but I'd rather have a good one-night stand with a generous bot than a bad long-term relationship with a selfish brand.

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.

Adrian made the announcement on 6/30. Here's the list of newly open-sourced, GPL'd goodies found on Everyblock's new Code page:

The main package (probably the thing you're looking for) is the publishing system, known as ebpub.
Second, the packages ebdata and ebgeo contain Python modules for processing data and making maps.
Third, the packages ebinternal and everyblock round out the code that powers EveryBlock.com. They're internal tools and are likely not of general use, but we're including them to be complete.
Finally, ebblog and ebwiki are our blog and wiki software, respectively. Because, dammit, the world needs another Django-powered blogging tool.

Django fans, Python geohackers and anyone who wants to build a local data aggregator are going to be thrilled. Adrian was one of the co-creators of Django and was one of the first Google Maps Mashup creators.

Everyblock has only launched in major US cities. There's plenty of room in the market for locals to create their own version. Everyblock spends a lot of time curating the incoming data feeds so I doubt that anyone will be able to roll out new sites too quickly. One thing to note: the trademark Everyblock is not available. However, the Everyblock team would not mind being acknowledged if you use their code. Personally I get a lot of value of Everyblock in my city. I get a daily email with all the crime, news and errata near my house.

Everyblock is now going to move onto the second stage of its existence. About five months Adrian blogged about the dilemna they would be facing when they open-sourced their software. As he said at the time:

But now we've reached an interesting point in our project's growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we're open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That's a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock's philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?

At the time I suggested that they try to federate with new everyblocks. After yesterday's announcement I mailed Adrian to ask him for a hint about their future plans, but for now he's keeping mum.

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