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Ignite Show: Monica Guzman on Being an Awesome News Commenter
by Brady Forrest | comments: 0
This week's Ignite Show features Seattle PI reporter Monica Guzman. She's spent most of her career writing for online properties and she's been able to watch learn what makes for a good conversation around a news item. As someone who also spends a lot of time publishing content online I can appreciate Monica's thoughts on good commenters and hearing some of what she deals with makes me very appreciative of our readers and how you add to the conversations on our site.
The Ignite Show is also available on iTunes.
tags: ignite show, newspapers
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Practical Tips for Government Web Sites (And Everyone Else!) To Improve Their Findability in Search
by Vanessa Fox | comments: 2
In an earlier post, I said that key to government opening its data to citizens, being more transparent, and improving the relationship between citizens and government in light of our web 2.0 world was ensuring content on government sites could be easily found in search engines. Architecting sites to be search engine friendly, particularly sites with as much content and legacy code as those the government manages, can be a resource-intensive process that takes careful long-term planning. But
two keys are:- Assessing who the audience is and what they're searching for
- Ensuring the site architecture is easily crawlable
Crawlability Quick Wins
This post is about quick wins in crawlability. In many cases, ensuring crawlability also ensures accessibility (particularly access via screen readers). From this standpoint, many government web sites have an advantage over other sites since they already build in many accessibility features. Creating search-friendly sites also improves usability and user access from mobile devices and slow connections. So forget everything you may have heard about how you have to sacrifice user experience for SEO. SEO done right facilitates deeper audience engagement, makes it easier for visitors to navigate and find information on the site, and provides access to a wider variety of users.
Use XML Sitemaps
Create XML Sitemaps that list all the pages on the site and submit them to the major search engines.
Why is this important? Many government sites have poor information architecture. Ideally each page of the site should have at least one link to it. This helps users navigate the site and helps search engines find all of the pages. Long term, these sites should revamp their navigational structure so that at least one link exists to every page. Since that may take some time to implement, an XML Sitemap can function in the meantime to provide a list of all pages for search engines to crawl.
Government sites have already made great progress in search by using XML Sitemaps.
The Energy Department's Office of Science and Technology (OSTI) implemented XML Sitemaps protocol with great success. "The first day that Yahoo offered up our material for search, our traffic increased so much that we could not keep up with it,' said Walt Warnick, OSTI's director.
If possible, provide an HTML sitemap as well, which provides a browsable navigation to site visitors. Below is a good example of a browsable HTML sitemap on nih.gov:
Don't block access to content
Make all content available outside of a login, registration form, or other input mechanism. Search engine crawlers can't access content behind a login or registration. If the content requires the visitor to enter an email address or otherwise provide input before accessing it, it won't show up in search results.
tags: google, search, xml
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Where 2.0 Preview - Tyler Bell on Yahoo's Open Location Project
by James Turner | comments: 2
You may also download this file. Running time: 00:28:07
Subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes. Or, visit the O'Reilly Media area at iTunes to find other podcasts from O'Reilly.
Location can be a vague concept to pin down. To a surveyor, location means latitude and longitude accurate to a few millimeters, while to a cab driver, a street address would be much more useful. If you're German, I can tell you that I live in the United States. To a Californian, I live in New Hampshire. And to someone from Manchester, I live in Derry. Unfortunately, the way that location is currently stored and presented online is both non-uniform and frequently at a level of precision inappropriate for the end-user. That's part of what Open Location is trying to fix. Tyler Bell, who took his doctorate from Oxford to Yahoo, is currently the product lead for the Yahoo Geo Technology Group. At O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference, he'll be discussing Open Location.
James Turner: So first off, can you describe what the Geo Technologies Group does?
Tyler Bell: The Geo Technologies Group at Yahoo oversees all technologies that relate to geography and geographic information. So it's largely self-evident. But this is what I mean by that: it's really we own and oversee the maps and mapping technologies. So the visualizations and placements of geographically informed data. We also own user location technologies. So here, we're dealing with different methods of detecting user location, managing user location, and ensuring that users receive geo-relevant results whenever they log onto Yahoo or use a Yahoo service. And then lastly, we have something which is slightly more esoteric. It's called the Geoinformatics Group. And that's the organization which uses geography to inform data. And we do this without ever showing a map. So it's really how we add value and power to information wholly based upon where things are and where our users are.
JT: That's like returning relevant search information to what you know about the user's location.
TB: That's correct. That's the end product of search groups consuming the geo technologies services on the back-end. But what we also need to do is actually organize the geographic information. So instead of searches, they're the specialists at Yahoo about matching user intent to the results that are returned; it's our job on the Geoinformatics Group, for example, to say that when a user queries against Springfield or they're searching for Springfield, which of the countless Springfields in the United States, in the world do you mean? So we need to be able to recognize that this is a place. We need to identify all of the places of a particular place name. And then we need to be able to do a so-called geo-geo disambiguation to ensure that when you mean Springfield, when you mean Campbell, when you give us a city name, which is otherwise nonspecific, we are very likely to return the most direct and accurate results.
tags: geo, interviews, where 2.0, yahoo
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Four short links: 15 Apr 2009
by Nat Torkington | comments: 0
Computer archaeology, Unix, mad science, and data mining:
- NASA Images Saved By Volunteers -- Pictures from the mid-1960s Lunar Orbiter program lay forgotten for decades. But one woman was determined to see them restored. One woman and some keen hardware hackers who built Frankenstein's tape reader to recover the images. Not just a reminder of how ephemeral our media, but also the huge amount of useful work that falls outside the interest of Official Groups to fund. (via Tim's twitter stream)
- The Art of Unix Programming and The UNIX-HATERS Handbook (PDF) -- one loves Unix, the other ... not so much. It's interesting to read both books consecutively and realize the vast gulf that existed between Good Enough and Perfect, and how Perfect has been well and truly vanquished by Good Enough. The original Unix solved a problem and solved it well, as did the Roman numeral system, the mercury treatment for syphilis, and carbon paper. And like those technologies, Unix, too, rightfully belongs to history. (TAoUP via bengebre's delicious bookmarks)
- Theo Gray's Mad Science -- a book full of Make-like charismatic megascience that you could theoretically do if you were sufficiently patient, provisioned, and safe. Projects include making your own nylon, turning beach sand to steel, and making salt by spectacularly combining sodium and chlorine. (via BoingBoing)
- Microsoft Offers Data Mining Tools in the Cloud (Byteonic) -- Microsoft offers some data mining functionality of SQL Server 2008 with no local analysis services server in the cloud. The service is offered in two flavors: a cloud service and as a plug-in for Excel. The tools are forecasting, prediction, and "analyze key influencers". Interesting to see Microsoft offering this higher-level service than the simple Spreadsheet-in-the-Sky offered by Google.
Salt from sodium and chlorine
tags: cloud computing, data, databases, history, science
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Ignite Seattle Line-up
by Brady Forrest | comments: 0
Ignite Seattle 6 will take place on 4/29 at the King Cat Theatre. Doors will open at 7PM and talk will start at 8:30PM. We are very grateful to be getting sponsorship from Google and Biznik.
We'll feature 16 speakers doing great 5 minute talks and geek contest to kick off the night. We're still looking for 8 more speakers; if you want to speak submit your talk by 4/16. Here are the first 8 speakers:
Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) - Public Library Hacking
Money tight? Want to save more for a rainy day? If you aren't fully utilizing your public library, you might be wasting thousands of dollars a year!Librarian Dawn Rutherford will give you a quick trip through all your public libraries have to offer, and how to make the most of it, using tricks and tips gleaned from someone who has spent over half her life working or volunteering in them.
Mike Tykka - The Invention of the Wheel
It seems Nature has beaten man to almost every "invention" of his: Helicopters, Submarines, Electricity, Video Cameras, Supercomputers, etc. For the longest time i thought one notable exception was the wheel - seems hard to do out of flesh: think blood vessels; How do they attach? Then i started studying biochemistry and learned about proteins. Turns out nature has invented a full blown, reversible, proton driven turbine engine, many tens of thousands of which churn away in every one of the billions of cells in a human body.
Beth Goza (@bethgo) - Knitting in Code
Remember the joy of writing your first Hello World application? Do you still have a copy somewhere so you can gaze upon your coded baby steps into the world of binary goodness? In knitting, creating something beautiful is just like binary, with a series of knits and pearls you can dream up the most sophisticated of patterns. In the spirit of hi-tech meets hand-tech, I will show you how to convert your binary Hello World app into a pattern of stitches (think kint =1 pearl = 0), so that you can create, mount, frame and hang your Hello World genius for all to see.
Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) - The Secret Underground World of Lego
Get a glimpse of a thriving user generated content ecosystem that's been around since long before the web. See an incredible example of a community, and how a large corporation has completely let go of control only to find incredible success despite and maybe because of the economic downturn.
Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
We've all heard that it's a myth that creativity occurs in isolation. We've even heard about *group genius*, the ability for group with "flow" to create ground-breaking works of art or technology. Well, in this brief talk Shelly Farnham, social scientist and leading expert in community technologies, will take it to the next level and provide tips for how to leverage *community genius* to improve your creative powers.
Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) - The Mac Spy
I made a last minute decision to attend a meeting I somehow caught wind of. Assured of its importance, I flew down yet again, not even a month after MacWorld, to see what would happen at this 25 year reunion of the Berkeley Mac User Group.
Scott Berkun - How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk
To give a good talk you want to have a story. You have to be able to frame it. If you're going to give an Ignite talk you have to really, really quickly.
Scott Moore - Intangible Method
A digital fairy tale about a young woman who realizes that first person video footage from her own life is being posted to YouTube - before the events actually occur in real life.
Jen Zug (@jenzug) - The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
Drawing from her real life as a stay at home mom (as opposed to her imaginary life as a bar tender on Cape Cod), Jen Zug shares her parenting hacks to staying sane when the majority of her day is spent discussing the merits of Optimus Prime over Buzz Light Year.
tags: ignite
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Four short links: 14 Apr 2009
by Nat Torkington | comments: 0
Open data, lean startups, RSS-as-newspaper, and a design call to arms:
- OpenSecrets Goes Open Data -- The following data sets, along with a user guide, resource tables and other documentation, are now available in CSV format (comma-separated values, for easy importing) through OpenSecrets.org's Action Center [...] : CAMPAIGN FINANCE: 195 million records dating to the 1989-1990 election cycle, tracking campaign fundraising and spending by candidates for federal office, as well as political parties and political action committees; LOBBYING: 3.5 million records on federal lobbyists, their clients, their fees and the issues they reported working on, dating to 1998; PERSONAL FINANCES: Reports from members of Congress and the executive branch that detail their personal assets, liabilities and transactions in 2004 through 2007; 527 ORGANIZATIONS: Electronically filed financial records beginning in the 2004 election cycle for the shadowy issue-advocacy groups known as 527s.
- The Lean Startup Presentation at Web 2.0 -- with audio. I've raved about Eric Ries blog before.
- Times -- an RSS feedreader with a newspaper's layout. News reading can be improved and newspapers are in the middle of dying, so it makes sense that someone would try a face transplant. I'm not convinced that the newspaper's front page is the model for perfect news delivery, although I do love the ultimate in dense news layouts: Arts & Letters Daily. (via joshua's delicious feed)
- Designing Through a Depression (NY Times blog) -- exhortation to work on stuff that matters. This rethinking needs to come not just from designers but from the manufacturers, companies and other clients who decide what products and projects will be produced. There’s no excuse not to examine and re-examine what’s made, how it’s manufactured, what materials are used (and which are recyclable), what benefit it’s giving the consumer (or lack thereof) and what contribution, if any, it’s making to anything other than landfill. I believe recessions are when good things flourish.
tags: design, government, newspapers, open data, rss, transparency
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Four short links: 13 Apr 2009
by Nat Torkington | comments: 1
Worms, sorting, languages, and infrastructure:
- Twitter XSS Attacks (Lynne Pope) -- several incarnations of a worm spread quickly across Twitter this weekend. Twitter profiles are generated by themes, whose parameters users can change. The user-supplied value for the colour was used directly in the CSS color field without filtering, which the original worm strain used to end the CSS and begin Javascript to put the worm into the profile of any Twitter user who viewed the infected profile. Infected users were made to tweet about the worm, with links that would infect anyone who viewed. The worm spread quickly through RTing one of the worm's messages, which claimed to link to instructions on fighting the worm. Later variants use background-color and background parameters. Initial variations downloaded Javascript from mikeyylolz.uuuq.com, since closed down by its hosting company. Later variants download the code from stalkdaily.com, the site that the initial variation spammed about. I wonder whether the 17-year old author of the variants will be able to pay his inevitable legal bills through Google click dollars? (also interesting: Sophos and bdonews)
- Visualising Sorting -- some beautiful and informative illustrations of how sorting algorithms work. (via @ajtowns)
- Art and Code: Obscure or Beautiful? -- In the presentation called “50 in 50″ you can see Guy Steele rap about APL and later in the video about spelling keywords backwards. The song about God wrote in Lisp code is also a part of the presentation. Among the languages mentioned are APL, Cobol, AP/I, Scheme, IPL-V, AED, Madcap, Piet, SNOBOL, ADA, Algol60, Intercal, Logo, Perligata, Shakespeare, Lucid, Occam, HQ9+, MUMBLE, Rake, Perl and of course Lisp. It kicks in at about 3m20s and is rather a post-modern presentation. (via
- Experiences Deploying Large-Scale Infrastructure in Amazon EC2 -- As an aside, I've been very impressed with the reliability of EC2. Like many other people, I didn't know what to expect, but I've been pleasantly surprised. Very rarely does an EC2 instance fail. In fact I haven't yet seen a total failure, only some instances that were marked as 'deteriorated'. When this happens, you usually get a heads-up via email, and you have a few days to migrate your instance, or launch a similar one and terminate the defective one. (via Simon Willison)
![[Heapsort Illustration]](https://web.archive.org/web/20090416065802im_/https://www.hatfulofhollow.com/posts/code/visualisingsorting/heap.png)
tags: amazon, cloud, infrastructure, security, twitter
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Tweenbots: Cute Beats Smart
by Brady Forrest | comments: 13
If you wanted to build a robot that could go from one end of Washington Square Park to the other without your help how would you do it? How expensive in time and money would it be? Would you build or buy a navigation system? Construct a sensing system to detect obstacles? Or would you decide to take a different tact and use cute as your primary tool?
ITP student Kacie Kinzer created a 10-inch smiling robot called a Tweenbot that can only go straight. For each journey Kacie would give the robot a destination and clearly label it. Given the obstacles in its way and lack of navigation or steering systems the expectation was that the robot would not make it. However the robot's avoidance of the uncanny valley and clearly written goal helped it out. Humans would redirect the Tweenbot so it successfully reached its destination. Below is a map of one Tweenbot journey:
Mission 1: Get from the Northwest to the Southwest Corner of Washington Square Park / time: 42 minutes / number of people who intervened: 29
As Kacie describes on the site:
Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”
So why do people help out the tweenbot? Personally I would not be able to resist assisting the anthropomorphized little robot. The smile signals its innocent intentions and the Tweenbot's label makes it clear how to help. It's something for designers and technologists to remember; sometimes cute and clever can get the job done much cheaper and in less time than smart and expensive.
There are more Tweenbots coming so if you happen to see any friendly robots around your town lend a hand. Here are some of the prototypes that are currently in development.
via Hacker News
tags: emerging tech, etech, geo
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Four quick posts: 11 April 2009
by Marc Hedlund | comments: 12
[I love Nat's "Four short links" format and am ripping it off to try to get myself blogging again. Instead of links, these are four blog posts I've been meaning to write but haven't.]
- It turns out Facebook is not completely useless if you're married! And no, I'm not talking about the world's most overvalued Scrabble platform, and I don't mean "I'm in an open relationship." Instead, I was shocked this week to find that Facebook is better than Flickr for sharing private photos. I've considered myself a member of the Flickr generation for some time now, but when posting pictures of my daughter, I set them to "Friends and Family" only. My Flickr contacts seem to get pictures mostly via RSS, and since no RSS message is posted for private photos, they never see my shots. Facebook, though, by making their Newsfeed a site-only feature, brings people to their site every day, which in turn lets them see my private postings. I posted a picture on Flickr and wound up with zero favorites and one comment (as it turns out, from a Flickr employee who happens to be a contact); I later posted the same picture on Facebook and got 8 favorites and 11 comments. Flickreenos: you should put a message in RSS feeds that says, "Marc just posted a private photo -- click here to see it." Or, you know, add a Scrabble app.
- Is there any doubt the iPhone has totally won the mobile platform war? I don't really get why Palm is even bothering to launch the Pre. "It's the App Store, stupid." It took the original Palm OS about 12 years to reach 50,000 applications developed for Palm OS; in under a year, the iPhone OS already has 25,000 applications available. The App Store promises to fulfill many developers' dream -- to work alone and strike it rich. Palm is competing by trying to match the UI, and that won't work. The Android team made a smart move recently by working on a home automation platform; changing the playing field is probably their best bet.
- Related: the App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it's a feature. If you can't get an app approved until it's working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you're much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right. That raises the quality level across the App Store. Palm is talking about lowering the bar for development of apps, and I bet that will fill their platform with crap-ass, low quality one-offs, and people will learn to distrust apps as being valuable; instead they'll just be widgets.
- Nearly all of the things that have gotten me excited online over the past year involve making media faster and easier to consume over the air (OTA): Boxee, Roku, Kindle for iPhone, even sad-sack Hulu. A lot fewer Amazon boxes are showing up at my house, even though I'm buying plenty of media from them through Kindle and Roku. OTA-media FTW! Now we just need a DRM revolution so I can actually own this stuff instead of getting a lame-ass license.
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Becoming Location Aware: Where 2.0 Early Registration Ending 4/13
by Brady Forrest | comments: 0
Despite the downturn the geolocation space is still active. This year's Where 2.0 conference will be highlighting the companies, technologies and people that make the industry go. Where 2.0 is happening in San Jose at the Fairmount Hotel from 5/19-21(the first day is workshops; the next two are all mainstage talks). Early registration ends this Tuesday, 4/13. You can get an extra 25% off for being a Radar reader with this code: whr09rdr.
The schedule for the show is almost full. The hottest topic this year is location-aware apps, services and data. It's been almost a full-year since the iPhone enabled third-party apps to use our location; we're going to hear from startups, researchers and the platform providers.
Two of our keynoters will dive into what can and should be done with location data. MIT Professor Sandy Pentland, the fellow responsible for coining the term Reality Mining and author of Honest Signals, will discuss his research on mining company communication patterns and his location data ownership initiatives. Microsoft Researcher Eric Horvitz has been gathering location data from volunteers for over 5 years. Using this data he has created virtual assistants, life stream recorders and other forward looking applications for our historical location data.
Many of the location-aware startups are operating in the mobile space. Mobile social networks are facing an increasingly crowded market -- one that was just entered by Google's Latitude and still waiting entries from both Facebook and Nokia. We'll hear from the founders of Foursquare and Brightkite as well as Pelago (Radar post) how they are going to grow in this market.
Your location data is going to become increasingly valuable. Startup Sense Networks will discuss their business of of extracting insights from large amounts of location data. I am sure Nokia's Michael Halbherr will touch on the wealth of data they have from acquisitions like NAVTEQ and Plazes and how they will be supplemented through Nokia's devices. Perry Evans will discuss the nascent ad market for location-based services.
Even though the iPhone has made finding a user's popular that doesn't mean it's become easy or even possible on other devices. There will be two developer workshops dedicated to the topic -- one for finding users on the web and another for native mobile applications.
The day after Where 2.0 ends there will be the third edition of WhereCamp where the conversation will continue.
tags: geo, where 2.0
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AT&T; Fiber cuts remind us: Location is a Basket too!
by Jesse Robbins | comments: 3
The fiber cuts affecting much of the San Francisco Bay Area this week are similar to the outages in the Middle East last year (radar post), although far more limited in scope and impact. What I said last year still holds true and is repeated below:
From an operations perspective these kinds of outages are nothing new, and underscore why having "many eggs in few baskets" is such a problem. I believe we will see similar incidents when we have the first multi-datacenter failures where multiple providers lose significant parts of their infrastructure in a single geographic area.
Remember: Don't put all your eggs in one basket... and Location is a basket too!
To really understand the issue, I recommend Neal Stephenson's incredible (and lengthy) Wired article from 1996 entitled "Mother Earth Mother Board":
It's also worth mentioning the outages to multiple service providers hosted in a single colocation facility when the FBI sized all the equipment in the facility, the big outage at 365 Main from two years ago, and many others (see: Radar posts & comprehensive coverage at Data Center Knowledge).[...] It sometimes seems as though every force of nature, every flaw in the human character, and every biological organism on the planet is engaged in a competition to see which can sever the most cables. The Museum of Submarine Telegraphy in Porthcurno, England, has a display of wrecked cables bracketed to a slab of wood. Each is labeled with its cause of failure, some of which sound dramatic, some cryptic, some both: trawler maul, spewed core, intermittent disconnection, strained core, teredo worms, crab's nest, perished core, fish bite, even "spliced by Italians." The teredo worm is like a science fiction creature, a bivalve with a rasp-edged shell that it uses like a buzz saw to cut through wood - or through submarine cables. Cable companies learned the hard way, early on, that it likes to eat gutta-percha, and subsequent cables received a helical wrapping of copper tape to stop it.
[...] There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn't going to happen. "Cutting a submarine cable," Barnes says, "is like starting a nuclear war. It's easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate."
As the capacity of optical fibers climbs, so does the economic damage caused when the cable is severed. FLAG makes its money by selling capacity to long-distance carriers, who turn around and resell it to end users at rates that are increasingly determined by what the market will bear. If FLAG gets chopped, no calls get through. The carriers' phone calls get routed to FLAG's competitors (other cables or satellites), and FLAG loses the revenue represented by those calls until the cable is repaired. The amount of revenue it loses is a function of how many calls the cable is physically capable of carrying, how close to capacity the cable is running, and what prices the market will bear for calls on the broken cable segment. In other words, a break between Dubai and Bombay might cost FLAG more in revenue loss than a break between Korea and Japan if calls between Dubai and Bombay cost more.
The rule of thumb for calculating revenue loss works like this: for every penny per minute that the long distance market will bear on a particular route, the loss of revenue, should FLAG be severed on that route, is about $3,000 a minute. So if calls on that route are a dime a minute, the damage is $30,000 a minute, and if calls are a dollar a minute, the damage is almost a third of a million dollars for every minute the cable is down. Upcoming advances in fiber bandwidth may push this figure, for some cables, past the million-dollar-a-minute mark. [Link]
tags: at&t;, cloud, failure, failure happens, fiber, infrastructure, operations, outages, velocity, velocity09, web infrastructure, web operations, web2.0, webops, worries
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Where 2.0 Preview - Pelago's Jeff Holden on Creating Stories Out of Your Life
by James Turner | comments: 1
You may also download this file. Running time: 00:23:05
Subscribe to this podcast series via iTunes. Or, visit the O'Reilly Media area at iTunes to find other podcasts from O'Reilly.
Tools like Twitter and Facebook have let people share in near real-time what they are doing. Now with a new generation of location-aware mobile devices, you can tell your friends or the entire world where you're doing it. Jeff Holden's company, Pelago, is one of many trying to come up with a killer application that blends location, images, text, and social networking to create a new kind of group awareness. Before starting Pelago, Jeff had a long career as the Senior Vice President of Consumer Websites for Amazon and before that, the Director of Supply Chain Optimization Systems. He'll be speaking at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 Conference on "Footstreams: Clickstreams for the Physical World."
James Turner: Pelago's first product is Whrrl. Can you start by describing what Whrrl is and what the experience to date has been?
Jeff Holden: Yeah. Sure. So Whrrl actually, there's a little complexity there because we just launched Whrrl V. 2.0, which is the prize we're focused on. And Whrrl V. 2.0 is a real-time storytelling product for people's daily lives.
JT: When you say storytelling, I've seen a lot of people talk about storytelling with these new social network things. What concretely does that mean to you?
JH: The most important aspect of what we mean by that is the organization of the content as the story unit. So the unit of content inside Whrrl is the story. And a story for us is something that has a beginning and an end. It can have multiple people involved in the story who can all share and contribute to a single story together. It has a location associated with it. And then people basically inject into those containers, those story containers, photos and text. As they're doing that, that's actually being shared out to any number of friends that they choose. And those friends can then jump in and actually comment on the story which then becomes part of the story as well. And so that's what we mean by it is we're focused on this -- I think some people use that term generically. We're using it very specifically to refer to the core unit of content in Whrrl.
JT: From a practical standpoint, apart from people who are chronic Twitterers and would just use it every moment of their life, what would you see a typical story being?
JH: What we're seeing right now is a lot of the families are using the product to share stories. And, in fact, just this morning Alison Sweeney, she's the host of the Biggest Loser and she was on Days of Our Lives for years. She's a really famous soap opera actress. She just started using Whrrl today. And she visited the set of Days of Our Lives with her family. And so it's actually entitled, "Family Visits Days." And we feature that story because it's such a cool -- and she did it publically. And it's a really cute story about her kids and the visit with the cast of Days of Our Lives. So we're seeing a lot of that kind of thing. We're seeing people at a more general level are viewing kind of very, very funny things like Melissa Pierce, who's a really very successful video blogger and just general blogger; she's done a number of very, very funny stories. She did one called "Lonely Bear" about this gummy bear lost in the world. And through a sequence of photos and text updates, she told the story of Lonely Bear and kind of left it dangling and was going to have a follow-up segment. And is actually going to be collaborating with people to build the next story.
So people are using it in different ways. And it's really kind of unleashing a lot of creativity.
tags: geo, interviews, where 2.0
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Recent Posts
- Four short links: 9 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 9, 2009
- Four short links: 8 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 8, 2009
- PhoneGap, the Mobile Platform Democratizer | by Brady Forrest on April 8, 2009
- You ain't gonna need what? | by Mike Loukides on April 7, 2009
- It's Really Just a Series of Tubes | by Jesse Robbins on April 7, 2009
- Four short links: 7 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 7, 2009
- W. David Stephenson on the Federal CIO: Vivek Kundra | by Timothy M. O'Brien on April 6, 2009
- Ignite Seattle Returns! Submit a Talk | by Brady Forrest on April 6, 2009
- Four short links: 6 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 6, 2009
- The Future of Our Cities: Open, Crowdsourced, and Participatory | by John Geraci on April 6, 2009
- Savory: Native Kindle epub and PDF Converter | by Artur Bergman on April 3, 2009
- Four short links: 3 Apr 2009 | by Nat Torkington on April 3, 2009
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The 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo, happening April 20-23, 2009 in Santa Clara, CA, brings over 2,000 open source and database enthusiasts together to harness the power of MySQL and celebrate the huge MySQL ecosystem. Read more
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