Hackers wanted! Scholarships available to coders who'll come to journalism and help save democracy

Guest blogger Brian Boyer is a hacker journalist who writes about the intersection of technology and journalism. He's worked at public-interest journalism site ProPublica and is now at the Chicago Tribune, building their new News Applications team.

It's not news that journalism is in crisis. CNN turned newspapers into first-day fishwrap and Craigslist killed the business model. Solutions are scarce, and our democracy is at risk. I don't have a chart to guide our way through the darkness to Citizenry 2.0, but there are some who can navigate the singularity.

Journalism needs great hackers. Not just nerds, but programmers who care -- about the values of journalism and the power of a free press to hold government accountable. Luckily, hackers are a freedom-minded bunch. The free software movement is rooted in many of the same principals that guide journalism. But news organizations aren't very sexy places to work -- especially now, as layoffs, bankruptcy and closures plague the industry. So how can we bring nerds to the news? One old-skool school is trying.

Free beer school!

Tell your programmer friends: The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University is giving away full scholarships, plus expenses, to software developers.They can get a masters degree in journalism, gratis, from one of the most prestigious J-schools around.

I recently graduated from the year-long program, during which I studied with with one other hacker and ~45 brilliant 'normal' journalism students. I interviewed lawmakers, farmers and shopkeepers and wrote stories about agriculture, waterways, and the diabetes epidemic in Illinois. It was difficult to shake my introverted, google-first, face-to-face-as-a-last-resort programmer nature. But it was also thrilling.

Journalism is an info-geek's dream. You're constantly learning new topics, speaking with experts, and distilling real-world issues to their essence -- all in the mission of informing the folks who don't have time to soak up all that data. It's like being paid to write a new Wikipedia article every day.

We also wrote some software. My programmer colleague and I banged out enviroVOTE in a frenetic weekend of coding and coffee in the days preceding the election. The night of, we were tied to our keyboards, tallying results and tweeting updates while the rest of the world was watching TV. Such is the life of a journalist.

For our final project at Medill, the two coders and four non-coder new-media students built NewsMixer, an experiment in integrating social networks with news coverage. It was one of the first applications to roll out on Facebook Connect, and remains one of the only apps that explores its full potential. All the code is GPL'ed and has already spawned other open-source projects.

This is the time to remake journalism

Programmers have been making an impact in the news world for some time, but until recently most innovation in this space has been in creating new ways to present the old style. With a few shining exceptions like the datavisuals by the New York Times, most online news could have been written on a typewriter and mailed to Google for indexing.

Then, something amazing happened: Software won a Pulitzer Prize. Created by hacker journalist Matt Waite and other fantastically clever folks at the St. Petersburgh Times, PolitiFact is form of news that could only exist online. Aron Pilhofer, leader of the innovations team at the NYT, put it perfectly:

But is it journalism, some people asked? There's no lead per se, no narrative and no pyramids anywhere to be found, much less the inverted sort.

Journalism is about helping people make sense of important issues, and how those issues affect them personally. It's about uncovering that which someone wants to keep hidden. It's about holding people we place in high public office accountable. And by those definitions... PolitiFact more than meets the test. It takes a traditional form of newspaper reporting -- fact-checking what politicians say -- and scales it up in a way only possible on the web.

The NYT's Represent and its open-source cousin, Repsheet, are innovations much in the same vein, and their existence is a sign of the times. The tools now available to hackers are so great that we can think far beyond content management systems. The moment has come when a couple of great hackers can knock out a fully-fledged new form of media in a matter of weeks. Tell the Twitterati: there are lights in the distance.

Hackers wanted

The news is waiting to be saved. We have the technology, all we need is more nerds. So ditch your boring corporate gigs and come to journalism! Democracy is one hell of a fun problem to hack.

Building Bridges with the U.S. Intelligence Community

Guest blogger Jeffrey Carr is a cyber intelligence expert, Principal of GreyLogic, columnist for Symantec's Security Focus, and author who specializes in the investigation of cyber attacks against governments and infrastructures by State and Non-State hackers. Jeff is the Principal Investigator for Project Grey Goose, an Open Source intelligence investigation into the Russian cyber attacks on Georgia in August, 2008.

About three weeks before the start of the Russia-Georgia war last August, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a directive entitled “Analytic Outreach”. In it, DNI McConnell authorized members of the 16 agencies that comprise the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) to reach out to people outside the IC, “to explore ideas and alternate perspectives, gain new insights, generate new knowledge, or obtain new information.”

As someone who writes about Intelligence and National Security matters, particularly in the area of Cyber Warfare, this Directive was pretty inspiring to me. I had long held the opinion that Web technologists and researchers had an important role to play in Government. Unfortunately, I had no way of communicating that vision to anyone who mattered so I just decided to act on my own and launched an Open Source Intelligence gathering effort called Project Grey Goose, which brought together an eclectic mix of hackers, spooks, and techies from inside and outside the Intelligence Community.

Imagine how happy I was six months later to hear about a formalized and much easier way to bring outside expertise into the IC thanks to the dedicated efforts of a few intelligence professionals and the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis. Appropriately enough, this project is named BRIDGE.

According to its creator, Dan Doney, BRIDGE hopes to do for Public-Private collaboration what the iPhone Apps Store has done for the iPhone and its customers--produce a mind-boggling explosion of innovative applications for use by the Intelligence Community. We aren't at the mind-boggling stage yet because BRIDGE is still in its infancy, but there are some pretty cool apps which I'll describe in a moment.

In addition to being a development sandbox, BRIDGE also allows intelligence analysts to interact with outside experts whether they be in industry, academia, or other government agencies at the Federal, State, Local or Tribal level. Alternative analysis has long been a recommended approach to avoid myopic thinking by specialists. BRIDGE provides a platform for debating alternative viewpoints and comparing evidence across agencies, specialties, and borders of all kinds.

(continue reading)

The Lean Startup Talk From Web 2.0 Expo

One of our most popular talks at the Web 2.0 Expo SF was Eric Ries' The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products. I've embedded an audio version of his slides above. Eric recommends the talk for people who want to:

• Identify a profitable business model faster and cheaper than your competitors.
• Continuously discover what customers want to buy before building or making follow-on investments in new features.
• Ship new software at a dizzying pace: multiple times a day while improving quality and lowering costs.
• Build a company-wide culture of decision-making based on real facts, not opinions.

Eric has a follow-up to his talk and more thoughts about Lean Startups on his blog.

Importance of Innovation in Finance & BarCampBank

“Progress is not the mere correction of evils. Progress is the constant replacing of the best there is with something still better.” -Edward Filene

Two years ago, when we were organizing the first BarCampBank in the US, many people found it hard to believe that banks & credit unions could a place for meaningful grassroots innovation. Even crazier was the idea of organizing an unconference to begin bringing open source, transparency, identity, and community into the very closed world of banking & finance.

Since then the BarCampBank idea has turned into a movement. There have been over 14 events all over the world, and many of the ideas generated are beginning to turn into action.

To me, the global financial system is a platform that exists to “create more value than it captures”. Tim explained this in his Work on Stuff that Matters post, saying:

“A bank that loans money to a small business sees that business grow, perhaps borrow more money, hire employees who make deposits and take out loans, and so on. The power of this cycle to lift people out of poverty has been demonstrated by microfinance institutions like the Grameen Bank. Grameen is clearly focused on creating more value than they capture; not so the like of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, or WaMu, or many of the other failed financial institutions involved in the current financial meltdown.”

There has never been a more important time to bring meaningful innovation into the financial system, and there has never been more opportunity for our community to make it happen.

The next event is occurring this weekend (April 25-26, 2009) on Treasure Island in San Francisco.

After that, the following events are planned:

• BarCampBankVegas is set for May 2, 2009.
• BarCampBankCharleston2 is set for June 13, 2009
• BarCampBankGermany is set for October 23-25, 2009

Four short links: 6 Apr 2009

Baby nerds, evil URL shorteners, reasoned discussion, and the Government straps its Web 2.0 on:

1. Books for Wee Nerds -- Forget Pat the Bunny -- your baby wants to Pat Schrodinger's Kitty! Help baby search for subatomic particles and explore the universe. (via Tim's tweets)
2. On URL Shorteners -- Joshua Schachter and Maciej Ceglowski on the downsides of URL shortening services like bit.ly et al.
3. Mending The Bitter Absence of Reasoned Technical Discussion (Alex Payne) -- We’ve come to accept that trying to have a reasonable discussion on the Internet is like insert any number of increasingly offensive metaphors here. Usenet, IRC, forums, blogs, and now media like Twitter have all been black-marked as houses unfit for reason to dwell within. And so we roll our eyes, sigh, and quietly accept the idiocy, the opportunism, and the utter disrespect for our peers and ourselves that is technical discussion on the Internet. This need not be the case. It is possible to have a reasoned technical discussion on the Internet. People do it every day, particularly in smaller online communities where social norms are easier to enforce. We can do it. (via SarahM
4. GSA signs agreements with Web 2.0 providers -- Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, and blip.tv get agreements that make it legal for federal agencies to use those tools. Followup to my earlier cite of roadblocks to Web 2.0 tools for government use. (via Fiona's delicious links)

Web2Open: An Exciting Experiment

As I've written here recently, we've got some amazing sessions scheduled for Web2Open--the free unconference hosted by Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. One that I'm particularly excited about is a new experiment, "Practice Your Customer Pitch."

We're bringing in five startups who will get two minutes each to give their customer pitch (not their VC pitch), as if meeting a potential customer at a cocktail party (i.e., no slides but OK to drink if you want). To give them feedback, we've assembled a top-notch panel of serial entrepreneurs and marketing experts. It's not a competition, so there's no judging or ranking—just discussion among the entrepreneurs, panelists and other session attendees.

We're trying this idea for the first time, so who knows how it will go? But in the entrepreneurial spirit, we've mitigated our risks: even if the format doesn't sing, the session can only be a hit given the participants. (Thanks to Sean O'Malley for helping us connect with a lot of these folks.)

The rather impressive panel:
*Rashmi Sinha, moderator. SlideShare CEO
*Robert Acker, panelist. LiveSpot CEO
*Michael Cerda, panelist. cc:Betty CEO
*Nilofer Merchant, panelist. Rubicon Consulting CEO

The smart startups:
*CrowdVine, social networks for conferences
*dbTwang, Dogster for guitars
*Doodle, online scheduling magic
*Maestro Market, a Web 2.0 speakers' bureau
*Magoosh, customized test-prep

The session is on Weds, April 1 from 10:50 - 11:40a. If you still need a free pass for Web2Open, you can register using the code websf09opn. There's more general event info on the Open website.

Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Will Wright, Sims and Simulations

Will Wright has been the foundational genius behind a thirty year string of blockbuster games, from the early Raid on Bungeling Bay in 1984 to the first truly fun urban simulation Sim City, a game "universe" that let players create and manage their own cities, dealing with everything from balancing budgets and battling crime to dealing with the aftermath of alien attacks. This game was later expanded to SimCity Societies to better explore the larger social factors that shape society.

From there he delved deeper into the lives of the individual inhabitants of those cities with the Sims, a virtual "dollhouse" that gives players the ability to shape the eponymous sim-people, their houses, careers and relationships (and in subsequent installments, let them start businesses, party, go to college, have pets, and take vacations, among many other activities).

In 2008, Wright produced Spore, where the players can "play gods" - raising new life from Sim-ooze to intergalactic civilizations in a freeform multiplayer environment that's evolving nearly as fast as the spores themselves. Scheduled for June 2009, Wright will release the much awaited Sims 3, in which for the first time, the Sims world comes together in a full immersive environment, perhaps the full merger of Sims and Sim City.

Wright will be speaking on the Sims and games in general at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. O'Reilly editor Kurt Cagle caught up with Will Wright to ask a few questions.

Kurt Cagle: You've been doing this a long time. I can remember distinctly playing Raid on Bungeling Bay back on the old Commodores days back in the late '80s. The thing I find fascinating is every game that you've done in the last 25 years or so would more actually be considered a simulation rather than a game. What have you found most fascinating about simulations as games?

Will Wright: Well, as a kid, I spent a lot of time getting models and an inordinate amount of time dealing with the plastic and with models. That kind of got me into robotics which was kind of a different form of modeling. I bought my first computer, which was an Apple 2, to connect to my robots to control the programs on that. It wasn't too long before I started doing little simulations of the robots I was working on on the computer, and I started realizing this was kind of a new way to make the models that I'd kind of grown up making, except these models had dynamics underneath them rather than just static structure.

(continue reading)

Web2Open: Great Sessions, Recessionary Pricing

Next week is Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a four-day mind meld for programmers, practitioners and novitiates. The Expo is co-produced by O'Reilly and TechWeb, who, for the third year in a row, are devoting resources and a row of rooms to Web2Open--a free, two-day unconference that anyone can attend.

The Open, April 1 and 2 at Moscone West, is like most unconferences in that we provide a blank grid and designated rooms so that you can create your own discussion sessions. But unlike a lot of unconferences, the Open includes a handful of prescheduled sessions. And I gotta tell you, this year, we've got some incredible stuff on tap--all for the low, low price of free.

Among the highlights are Hybrid sessions (more fun than the name suggests). We pick three sessions in the main conference track and open them to all Web2Open attendees. Then the presenters from those sessions follow up with lively discussions in the Open. You can join both parts of Hybrid, or just one. This year's Hybrids include:

- Web Developer Tools with Ajaxian's Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer

- The Lean Startup with customer development expert and "Lessons Learned" blogger Eric Ries

- Sparking a Crush: Attracting and Retaining New Users with Adaptive Path's Alexa Andrzejewski

To attend the Open, you need a free Expo pass and the urge to participate in conversation. The Open site has details on how to register, along with session times. See you next week!

Transforming the Relationship Between Citizens and Government: Making Content Findable Online

Thursday on this blog, Congressman Honda asked, "how can congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government?" He noted that "A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met. Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation." He asked for input on what web 2.0 features he should add to his website to take advantage of today's online world.

The most important feature government web sites can add isn't really feature at all. But it would absolutely transform the relationship between citizens and government and make an amazing array of public data available. What's this magic feature?

Make government web sites search engine friendly.

How we look for information
Search is the primary navigation point for the web. Often when citizens look for government information, they start at a major search engine. They don't think to themselves, I need some information on vitamins, so I'll just go on over to the Office of Dietary Supplements at https://dietary-supplements.info.nih.gov. And then I need to make sure I'm eating a balanced diet, so I'll just check out https://www.nutrition.gov from the National Agricultural Library. And before I head to the grocery store, I'll make sure I understand how nutrition labels work from the information provided by the Center For Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at https://www.cfsan.fda.gov. Mostly, they go to Google and type in [food labels]. And in some cases, this works perfectly and the information appears.

But when information from government web sites doesn't show up on the first page of results for those searches, the information may as well not exist at all. For instance, an amazing amount of data exists from the U.S. Census Bureau, but it's inaccessible from search engines because it's locked behind JavaScript forms and the content itself doesn't use language that searchers would use. If I search for [98116 census data], results from census.gov are nowhere to be found.

Obstacles to being found in search engines
One problem is that the U.S. Census Bureau pages don't use zip codes to denote regions. They use tract numbers. Even if the pages were written in plain language searchers might use, search engine crawlers couldn't get past the JavaScript forms to access the pages.

Try doing a search using the same terminology as the U.S. Census Bureau, and you start to see the problem with the site's findability. Take [census track 97.02]:

None of those results lead to these handy details:

In addition to being buried behind JavaScript and containing little language people would actually search for, it's hidden in a popup with a URL like this: https://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/IdentifyResultServlet?_mapX=281&_mapY=216&_latitude=&_longitude=&_pageX=442&_pageY=554&_dBy=100&_jsessionId=0001cv7n8rWxjslrmI9aRw5nr-V:134a7lbrs">https://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/IdentifyResultServlet?_mapX=281&_mapY=216&_latitude=&_longitude=&_pageX=442&_pageY=554&_dBy=100&_jsessionId=0001cv7n8rWxjslrmI9aRw5nr-V:134a7lbrs

The server appends a session ID to the end of the URL (the portion beginning with "jessionsId"), which is tied to an individual visitor session and times out after 60 minutes. If I share that URL on a social media site, email, or in this blog post, anyone who tries to visit it just gets a "session as expired" message. It goes without saying that this kind of URL can't be indexed by search engines no matter how sophisticated they become.

(continue reading)

Ignite SF @ Expo: 4/1 at Mezzanine

Ignite is coming back to San Francisco. On April First, the second night of the Web 2.0 Expo, I'll be hosting an Ignite at the Mezzanine (just four short blocks away from Moscone). As with all Ignites each speaker will only get 20 slides that each auto-advance every 15 seconds for a total of five minutes. Folks with a Web 2.0 Expo Badge will get priority entrance, but we'll open the doors to everyone before the talks start. Ignite is free.

The schedule for the evening will be:

7:30 - Doors Open; Entry is for anyone with Conference or Expo Plus Pass holders
8:15 - Entry for Anyone
8:30 - First Set of Speakers

• Danny O'Brien (EFF) Don't Push Me Cos I'm Close To The Edge
• Raven Hanna (MadeWithMolecules)- Science of Love
• Thor Muller (GetSatisfaction) - We're all Collapsitarians Now!
• Veronica Belmont(Tekzilla) - Make Your Business a Meme
• Michael Galpert(Aviary) - Images on the internets may appear realer than they are
• Aaron Rowe(Wired Science) - SARS, Drugs, and Biosensors
• Greg Elin(Sunlight Foundation) - Mr Hacker Goes to Washington

9:15 - Break

9:45 - Second Set of Speakers

• Jeff Veen (Small Batch Inc.) - "Great Designers Steal"
• Violet blue (Tiny Nibbles) - Open Source Everything
• Brian Malow (Science Comedian) - Hydrogen and Helium
• Heather Gold (the Heather Gold Show)- How to Get a Lesbian Pregnant
• Lisa Katyama (Tokyo Mango) -Japanese Tech Culture: Demystifying "Weird" Japanese Toys and Tools
• Romi Mahajan (Ascentium) - The Consumer Experience is DEAD
• Jer Faludi (Faludi Design) - Priorities for a greener world: If you could design anything, what should you do?
• Jen Bekman (20x200) - Overcrowded- How Crowd-sourcing is ruining everything.
• Mat Honan (Barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com) - Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle

I hope to see you there. You can RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming.

(continue reading)

Request for ideas: Crowdsourcing the Evolution of Congressional Websites

Guest blogger Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, serves in the U.S. Congress on the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Legislative Branch.

Tim recently asked readers of this blog to help provide me with guidance on the best way to make official legislative databases available to the developer community. The question, which also made its way onto Slashdot, led to a wealth of proposals, some of which I am considering developing into new legislation. Following on the success of that initial conversation, I’d like to ask for your guidance once again.

How can Congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government? Instead of viewing the public as a customer for services, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation.

Sites like stimuluswatch.org, for example, have shown how the public can advise officials on which elements of the economic recovery program are most effective in creating jobs and resuscitating our struggling economy. Together we can identify and cut ineffective government programs and simultaneously support cost effective initiatives that maximize Return On Investment.

Websites like these only become possible when government data (in this case a list of project requests from the US Council of Mayors) is repurposed to enable public participation. Until more government databases become available, however, the full potential of web 2.0 technologies will remain unfulfilled. A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met. Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.

As one leading e-government expert recently advised:

Free your data, especially maps and other geographic information, plus the non-personal data that drives the police, health and social services, for starters. Introduce a ‘presumption of innovation’ – if someone has asked for something … give them what they want: it’s probably a sign that they understand the value of your data when you don’t.

My constituents in Silicon Valley understand how opening up data can catalyze dramatic innovation, and I recently enacted legislation to provide free public access to legislative databases with that goal in mind. It is my hope that this information can foster the development of initiatives to empower the public to collaborate with and provide advice to Members of Congress. No longer will individuals simply petition their representatives – instead you should be our most valued advisors.

Government 2.0 is an achievable goal, and together we can make it a reality. In fact, I recently began a comprehensive redesign of my website with the goal of developing new and unprecedented ways of collaborating with my constituents.

To solicit ideas for the new website, I sent my Online Communications Director to a conference to lead a website brainstorming session. That conversation resulted in several intriguing proposals, including the suggestion that I post my hearing schedule for the week so that my constituents could propose questions for me to ask of witnesses.

The success of that session, and the quality of your answers to the last question I posted here, gives just a hint of the possibilities that can result from greater partnership between elected officials and the public. While I may not be able to implement every idea that is suggested, I do plan on providing a list of the most innovative ideas to my fellow Members of Congress.

What features could I implement on my website to tap into the wisdom of the crowds?

• Propose an idea
• View submitted ideas
• Join our conversation on twitter using the #honda2.0 tag

With your help we can empower the public to partner with Representatives in improving the policies of our nation. Let’s begin making Gov 2.0 a reality.

- Mike

Wikirank: A Zeitgeist for Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most significant sites on the web. It produces vast quantities of data and the Wikimedia foundation tries to make all of it available to the public. Wikipedia's traffic data can be an insight into what's interesting on the web. Wikirank, currently in closed beta, shares that information very cleanly.

On its homepage Wikirank shows which Wikipedia articles are the most read and which pages are gaining in popularity. Additionally, you can find each article's detail page via search. On the detail page you can find and article excerpt, traffic numbers and a (soon-to-be-embeddable) traffic chart that allow you to compare traffic with other topics (up to four).

Wikirank (@wikirank) was produced by Small Batch Inc.. The design was done by Jeff Veen, most lately of Google Analytics and previously of Measure Map and Adaptive Path.

Update: In a comment Veen said: Second, the UI wasn't designed just by me, but was a group effort that included the rest of Small Batch's cofounders: Bryan Mason, Greg Veen and Ryan Carver. We also were fortunate enough to work with the very talented Dan Cederholm from Simplebits.

In an email, Veen told me that the charts were built without Flash. It's all Javascript using the HTML Canvas element . The data is being processed in EC2 and stored on S3. Tokyo Cabinet is being used to manage the data store.

With a service like Google Trends available you might wonder why this is significant. Wikipedia only has one page for the Python or Ruby programming languages where as there are a lot of other Rubies or Pythons (or George or Paul for that matter) that dirty the data for the same query on Google Trends. As an added bonus Wikirank will report on Google properties (unlike Google Trends).

You can sign up to be notified of their launch. If you don't want to wait for Wikirank to go live you could bide our time with some of these alternatives. Wikirage tracks which Wikipedia pages are being edited the most -- a good way of judging recent news or controversy. Wikichecker will produce a summary of edits for a page such as Tokyo (the page includes an intriguing "Frequent users also edit these articles" which is an unusual path to potentially similar articles). Wikitrends shows the most popular Wikipedia pages in fourteen languages.

Wikirank is a testament to good, clean design and the power of existing web tools. It's the first project from Small Batch, but it won't be the last. I expect that their other projects will also focus on data visualization

Jeff Veen will be keynoting at the Web 2.0 Expo SF on 4/3 and speaking at Ignite SF on 4/1.

Recent Posts

• The Social Nervous System Has More Than One Sense | by Tim O'Reilly on March 12, 2009
• Two Thousand People Singing Daisy Bell Together via Mech Turk | by Brady Forrest on March 11, 2009
• Startup Marketing Isn't Rocket Science, So Don't Hire the Ph.D Too Soon | by Darren Barefoot on March 9, 2009
• Vivek Kundra: Federal CIO in His Own Words | by Timothy M. O'Brien on March 5, 2009
• Kodu: Visual Programming on the Xbox with P2P Level-sharing | by Brady Forrest on February 24, 2009
• Managing monopolies and dominance in the Net age | by Mike Shatzkin on February 23, 2009
• For-Profit, Non-Profit, and Scary Humor | by Michael Jon Jensen on February 7, 2009
• Google's Latitude Adds Location-Sharing to Mobile Phones | by Brady Forrest on February 4, 2009
• Big Mo' and The Bears | by Dale Dougherty on January 31, 2009
• Github: Making Code More Social | by Brady Forrest on January 29, 2009
• Making Site Architecture Search-Friendly: Lessons From whitehouse.gov | by Vanessa Fox on January 22, 2009
• change.gov Becomes whitehouse.gov | by Tim O'Reilly on January 20, 2009