Pages

Google Closes Google Wave

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Google cannot create successful social media applications.

I linked to this article by ifindkarma in July, but it’s worth revisiting now that Google has announced the closing of Google Wave.

Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications…

“With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Why Google can't build a decent social app

If you’re interested in social media let me recommend the following post – Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications…

“So, to summarize: Google is responsible for Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. Ex-Googlers are responsible for Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter. Discuss.”

  • Share/Bookmark

The Future Well: Redesigning Healthcare

I’m a big fan of Dr. Jay Parkinson and his efforts at Hello Health. I posted about the project a little less than a year ago. Here’s Jay at the Gov 2.0 Expo talking up his new initiative The Future Well.

“Healthcare simply isn’t designed from the ground up to be a pleasant experience for the [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

More about fact-checking the news

Craig Newmark chimes in on the recent effort to fact-check the Sunday morning political talk shows.

He includes a lot of great links in that post, including a link to a longer meditation of his about trust- and reputation-systems.

“People use social networking tools to figure out who they can trust and rely on for decision [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Archigram, Psychogeography, Smart Cities, and Mujicomp

This Matt Jones talk at TechnoArk introduces the idea of Mujicomp, the widespread use of simple, interactive, and social gadgets. It’s a speculation about where the future of hand-held devices might be heading. Jones offers some examples of items that are almost there, but doesn’t really offer a good idea of what the object might [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Will we get a non-frivolous Chatroulette?

For those of you unfamiliar with Chatroulette (possibly NSFW) here’s Kottke’s perfect summation:

“I spent about 30 minutes on Friday night on Chatroulette (very NSFW). You push the start button and you’re instantly in a video chat with some random person. During my session, the average “chat” lasted about 5 seconds and I observed several people [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Future Travel – An interview with Casey Fenton of Couchsurfing

Over at Shareable Rachel Botsman interviews Casey Fenton, founder of CouchSurfing.

Rachel Botsman: One of the themes I explore in my forthcoming book is how collaborative communities quickly form “trust between strangers.” How did you create trust from the outset within the CouchSurfing community?

Casey Fenton: Right from the beginning, we wanted people who had never [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Making a Market Place by Hand

Here’s a terrific post by Kari Chapin, author of The Handmade Marketplace. It’s a post about creating a community for small-business crafts people.

“I really believe that building community around yourself and your business can be a big part of whether or not you are successful. Connecting with other like-minded artistic people, joining a local craft [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Building Cars, Open Source and 2.0 – Small Batch Automobile Design

This month’s WIRED has an interesting article about Local Motors, an open source car design start-up.

Local Motors takes the knowledge and history of kit cars and applies open source design techniques, and Web 2.0 networking to create small batch designs for car aficionados. At $50,000 a pop, this isn’t something everyone is going to want [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Bruce Sterling on Healthcare 2.0

The following is post 45 of 152 (so far) in Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2010, an annual conversation over at the WELL between Sterling and the WELL netizens. The discussion ranges far and wide, and brief essays like the following on the networked future of healthcare pop up regularly. I put the passage [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Paranormal Legislative Activity

Clever parody of Paranormal Activity in support of readthebill.org.

From the Sunlight Foundation:

“Congress should change its rules to require that non-emergency legislation and conference reports be posted on the Internet for 72 hours before debate begins.”

Downsize DC also has a recommended Read the Bills Act. This is the first time I’ve seen Downsize DC. They promote [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Working Wikily

Lots of good stuff about networked culture at Working Wikily.

“Network tools and approaches are creating new opportunities for powerful social impact. Social innovators are pioneering the art of working wikily, embracing openness, transparency, and decentralization.”

  • Share/Bookmark

FaceSpace

MySpace and Facebook are meeting to talk “about how they might further share data.”

“That’s according to The Telegraph. “Hypothetically speaking, as nothing has been formally arranged yet, MySpace could become a Facebook Connect partner – which would allow people to share content they liked from MySpace with their Facebook network,” Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

11 Ways to Improve the News

Dan Gillmor has some tips for improving news orgs.

“A core mission of our work would be to help people in the community become informed users of media, not passive consumers — to understand why and how they can do this. We would work with schools and other institutions that recognize the necessity of critical thinking.”

  • Share/Bookmark

Google’s Fast Flip

I really like the Fast Flip design, but it’s not as malleable as I’d like to see. I want to add feeds, and create tabs and rows.

I don’t like that it embeds full articles. I thought placing your frame around a whole page went out of style 15 years ago. Maybe that’s to control for [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009

ReadWriteWeb's Top 5 Web Trends in 2009
View more presentations from Richard MacManus.

“Last week we ran a series of posts outlining the 5 biggest Internet trends of this year: Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, Internet of Things. Effectively this was ReadWriteWeb’s State of the Web 2009.”

  • Share/Bookmark

Wi-Fi Enabled Bus Shelters

The Mainframe points to this story about Clear Channel-sponsored wi-fi enabled bus shelters.

“The scenario would work something like this: as you approach the transit shelter which has been branded with the sponsor’s logo, your cell phone or internet enabled device will pick up free service from the wireless box inside the shelter. When you open [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Academic Earth – Online Lectures from Top Scholars

School is just around the corner, and just because you won’t be attending university doesn’t mean you can’t sit in on some lectures.

Academic Earth collects individual lectures, and the lectures from entire courses, and puts them up on the web. Here, for example, are four lectures on copyright law.

“This course is an introduction to copyright [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Department of Defense has a Blog

The Department of Defense is the latest federal government web site to get a 21st-century make-over.

You can be-fan the DoD on FaceBook, follow it on Twitter, watch its YouTubes, look at its Flickr, or read the blog.

  • Share/Bookmark

Comment/Link Problem – UPDATED

If you come to a story from an RSS feed, or if you click on a post title to comment, the cursor will no longer recognize links in the post or allow copying of text within the post.

The nice folks at IntenseDebate (the commenting plugin I use) are looking into this glitch.

Links work fine from [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Shrinking the world with augmented reality

Interesting article about augmented altruism.

“Augmented reality is the hottest emerging trend in technology these days. You may remember an early scene from the movie FIGHT CLUB where Ed Norton’s character is walking through his apartment and price tags pop up denoting how much everything costs. Well imagine if that could happened every-time you held up [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Kendrick Meek 2.0

Kendrick Meek‘s campaign for Florida’s open Senate seat expects to tap into the grassroots strength of Web 2.0 and social media. Meek begins testing the waters by sitting down with self-proclaimed troublemaker Peter Schorsch of St. Petersblog 2.0.

“Both Meek and Cruz reiterated the campaign’s commitment to new media, not just paying lip service, but [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Earmark Search

LegiStorm has a great new feature that allows for easy earmark searching.

“We currently have earmark data for fiscal year 2008. By viewing earmark spending data in a variety of ways, you can learn details about the locations receiving funds for special projects and which legislators are securing those funds.

“Our earmarks data comes from the Taxpayers [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Transparency Corps

Want to help make the federal government more transparent? You can volunteer over at Transparency Corps.

For example, you can sign up for an account, download some .pdfs of earmark requests, and then copy and paste “the most interesting pieces” into a form. There are huge numbers of requests, and spreading the work out among [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Applying Open Source Principles to Federal Government

A lot of great talks at OSCON ’09, like this one by Gunnar Hellekson of Red Hat Government. Hellekson was there promoting Open Source for America.

  • Share/Bookmark

Some Web 2.0 Speculations

If you are interested in Web 2.0 stuff, let me recommend this post over at net critique by Geert Lovink. The Digital Given–10 Web 2.0 Theses by Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter.

“Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Florida Politicians who Twitter

Gubernatorial candidates Alex Sink and Bill McCollum are both on Twitter.

They also have Facebook pages. Bill. Alex.

  • Share/Bookmark

Google Wave

The next iteration of Gmail will combine Google Chat, Gmail, Google Docs, and the rest of the Google online suite of apps into one multi-capable tool named Google Wave. It’s sort of a wiki-esque re-imagination of email that includes a lot of AJAX functionality and API extensibility. The following demo is sort of long, but [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Government Gadget Gallery

Here’s a list of government gadgets available for your blog or webpage.

“These government gadgets (or widgets) are online applications built by one website that can be displayed on another website. You can embed these gadgets in personalized home pages, blogs, and other sites. Once you’ve added the widget, there’s no technical maintenance—the original source of [...]

  • Share/Bookmark

Agriculture 2.0

Wired has a great story about using networks and Web 2.0 apps to make buying from local markets easier.

“Now, a [San Francisco] Bay Area startup has launched a service to make it easier and cheaper for restaurants to buy food from small, local farms. With a suite of mobile apps for use in restaurants and [...]

  • Share/Bookmark