Lessons From Haiti Will Aid Chile

Earlier today Chile experienced a massive earthquake (you can see images of the damage on The BIg Picture). Now, just hours after the event online disaster relief sites are being spun up to aid the survivors. These are all variations on sites that were created to help Haiti survivors.

Google quickly sprang into action reusing many Haiti built-tools:

Crisis Response - This serves as a portal for all of Google's efforts. From here you can donate to victims, track the news and view the latest maps.

Person Finder: Chile Earthquake - Built on Google's AppEngine, this app aims to let people enter and retrieve information about people on the ground. It has an API and rich search functonality. News organizations agreed to update Google's application in an attempt to create a central repository (to avoid the conflicting data issues that happened in the wake of Katrina).

Mapmaker Download - Google's Mapmaker allows you to map the world from home. It then releases the data under licensing that enables NGOs and relief organizations to use it ( though many find the wording of the license quite confusing their data is actively used).

The Crisis Mappers have also reacted quickly. They have launched chile.ushahidi.com. IN Haiti the Ushahidi portal took in tens of thousands of text messages and plotted them on a map for NGOs and relief workers. The Crisis Mappers had teams working around the clock to convert the texts to english. The team is already working to set up shortcodes for the SMS service in Chile. Ushahidi uses Open Street Maps and will be relying on its network of volunteers to build out those maps.

I have written about how these disaster-relief applications were used in Haiti and the people behind them. We are now seeing the emergence of the disastertech platform. As Jesse Robbins says it a pattern of reuse. Each disaster will build upon the previous platforms.

If you want to help Donate, help out online, go to a CrisisCamp (there's one happening in DC today) or spend some time working on the maps of Chile at Mapmaker or Open Street Map.

A Prism for Jolicloud: Web-Centric Desktop Apps

I recently bought a netbook and installed Jolicloud, a Linux/Ubuntu distro designed as a replacement for, or companion to, Windows. Jolicloud was a revelation, something fresh and new in the seemingly snail-paced world of desktop computing. The bold idea of Jolicloud is that the browser is the operating system. It's all you need and you don't need to even think about it. The browser is a core service that supports all applications but it can recede into the background and let applications take the foreground.

The Samsung N210 netbook had Windows 7 Starter installed. I'll admit my discomfort with Windows. It's actually not so much the operating system itself, as it is the ecosystem that surrounds it. The desktop is cluttered with icons from the manufacturer and other add-ons, which seem to activate on their own. I don't want them yet I can't disable them easily. I realized that Windows has become like a carnival, with barkers trying to get my attention (and money) at every turn. I tried Windows 7 long enough to realize that it was really no different on a netbook than it was on a desktop. Windows. Same old, same old.

In fact, I bought the netbook to see if it was suitable as a computer for my mother. I want to help her be connected online to her family but she was frequently confused by the Windows desktop and its many applications and pop-up windows. AOL was just as confusing, layered on top of Windows. I tried moving her to Gmail and removing what I could from the desktop but it still became cluttered and she became so confused that she cancelled her Internet service. (I don't live in the same city as my mom so my ability to provide ongoing tech support is limited.)

A friend, Alberto Gaitán from DC, recommended trying Jolicloud on a netbook. Jolicloud was developed by Tariq Kim, who also created NetVibes. He had a vision of devices running an Internet Operating System, influenced by ideas from Tim O'Reilly. Here's an excerpt from the Jolicloud manifesto:

Jolicloud ... combines the two driving forces of the modern computing industry: the open source and the open web.

Jolicloud transforms your netbook into a sophisticated web device that taps into the cloud to expand your computing possibilities. The web already hosts a significant part of our lives: mails, photos, videos, and friends are already somewhere online. Jolicloud was built to make the computer and web part of the same experience.

Jolicloud offered something new on a non-Mac device -- peace of mind. I found an operating system that was adapted to the netbook, just as Apple has modified its core system for different devices. As much as it is an advantage for Apple, it is a disadvantage for every other computer manufacturer to ship their devices with a largely unmodified version of Windows. One gripe I have is that Windows doesn't use the more limited display space efficiently.

The Jolicloud user interface is simple and well-organized. Jolicloud is derived from Ubuntu and indeed some of the features I'm praising may also be present there. Quite frankly, it's been years since I've explored a Linux desktop, believing them to be hopelessly clunky and awkward, a generic imitation of existing windowing systems.

But the big leap forward in my view for Jolicloud is how it adapts web sites to function more like desktop applications, an interface paradigm mashup of the iPhone and desktop. In Jolicloud, I launch Gmail as an application, and dozens of other services I use such as Twitter and Facebook can be organized as desktop interfaces. Like the iPhone, Jolicloud provides an Apps directory where you can choose applications to install on your netbook. In addition, Jolicloud provides cloud-based services for data storage. Jolicloud allows me to use a netbook as an alternate computer without really having to organize my data and service specifically for that computer. (I even find myself moving away from Mac-based software to web-centric services that I can use from any device.)

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Four short links: 26 February 2010

Gov App Building, Android FPS, Graph Mining, Keeping Fit

1. Who Is Going To Build The New Public Services? -- a thoughtful exploration of the possibilities and challenges of third parties building public software systems. There's a lot of talk of "just put up the data and we'll build the apps" but I think this is a more substantial consideration of which apps can be built by whom.
2. Quake 3 for Android -- kiss the weekend goodbye, NexusOne owners! My theory is that no platform has "made it" until a first person shooter has been ported to it. (via BoingBoing)
3. Graph Mining -- slides and reading list from seminar series at UCSB on different aspects of mining graphs. Relevant because, obviously, social networks are one such graph to be mined.
4. Treadmill Desk -- I want one. Staying fit while working at a sedentary job is important but not easy. I tried to type while using a stepper, but that's just a recipe for incomprehensible typing fail. (via BoingBoing)

Four short links: 25 February 2010

Rap Python, Being Believed, Hot Maps, and Old School Secrets

1. like python -- lets you write Python in Valleygirl, LOLCAT, fratboy, and rap. Still not a handle on writing Perl in Latin. (via Hacker News)
2. Belief In Climate Change Hinges On Worldview (NPR) -- applicable beyond climate change. Whether you get what you want depends on how it's framed and how it's delivered. The paper cited is available for PDF download.
3. gheat -- add a heatmap layer to a Google Map. For more on its design and implementation, read Chad Whitacre's blog.
4. TrueType VT220 Font -- turns out it's not as simple as a straight bitmap. This article explains how scanline gaps and a dot-stretching circuit create the look we old-timers remember. (via rgs on Delicious)

NoSQL conference coming to Boston

On March 11 Boston will join several other cities who have host conferences on the movement broadly known as NoSQL. Cassandra, CouchDB, HBase, HypergraphDB, Hypertable, Memcached, MongoDB, Neo4j, Riak, SimpleDB, Voldemort, and probably other projects as well will be represented at the one-day affair.

It's generally understood that characterizing a movement by what it's not is awkward, and it's hard to find an elevator speech to encompass all the topics of NoSQL Boston. Are these tools for "big data" problems? Usually, but sometimes even small web sites can find them useful. Are the tools meant for processing streams such as log files? Sometimes, but they can be useful for other text and data processing as well. And do they reject relational principles? Well, so you'd think--but different ones reject different principles, so even there it's hard to find commonality. (I compared them to relational databases in a blog last year.

The interviews I had with various projects leaders for this article turned up a recurring usage pattern for NoSQL. I was seeking particular domains or types of data where the tools would be useful, but couldn't see much commonality. What connects the users is that they carry out web-related data crunching, searching, and other Web 2.0 related work. I think these companies use NoSQL tools because they're the companies who understand leading-edge technologies and are willing to take risks in those areas. As the field gets better known, usage will spread.

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Global Ignite Week: Starts Monday with 65 Cities, 6 Continents, 500 Speakers over 5 Days

From March 1-5 there will be ~65 Ignite events happening around the world. Ignite is an opportunity for geeks to share their passions and ideas with local peers. Each speaker gets 20 slides that each auto-advance after 15 seconds for a total of just 5 minutes. The result is bite-size chunks of information that inform the crowd on new topics. There are lots of Ignite videos online.

Ignite has spread with very little prompting on our part. Almost all of the ~65 cities participating next week were self-started and community organized. As Tim said, "Self-organization enables amazing scale". Global Ignite Week is definitely and example of that happening. Anyone can throw an ignite -- they just need a laptop, a stage, ideas and a community. To be successful they will also need the backing of that community and in most cases the community has come together to make the event happen.

This week has taken a lot of coordination and planning. The independent Ignite organizers have all shown a great willingness to band together to make this happen. It's been really impressive.

Next week you can participate by attending one or watching them streaming online. In the following weeks we'll get >500 videos from all of the different events (events often have ~15 talks). I will personally be attending the Ignites at SMX West (3/2), Bay Area (also 3/2), and Portland (3/3). I'll be hosting Ignite Seattle on 3/4.

Here are the events happening on Monday (on Thursday there will be over 30 Ignites).

Monday, March 1st

Ignite Berlin

Ignite Frankfurt
Ignite LA
Ignite Manchester
Ignite Munich
Ignite Nairobi
Ignite Savannah
Ignite Milwaukee

I've included the whole list after the jump. They are listed by date. Attend if you can.

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Four short links: 24 February 2010

Mapping Data, Publishing Advice, Data Packaging, and User Reputation

1. Maker! Map the World's Data -- web-based tool to make elegant maps from public data.
2. Flat World Knowledge, a commercial publisher of open textbooks (Jon Udell) -- notable if only for Publishers need to be device-agnostic in the broadest sense. The printed book is one of the devices we target..
3. datapkg -- a data packaging tool, so you can easily find and install datasets.
4. On Karma -- very detailed look at user reputation, full of great takeaways. As with the FICO score, it is a bad idea to co-opt a reputation system for another purpose, and it dilutes the actual meaning of the score in its original context.

When it Comes to Tweets, the Key is Location, Location, Location!

Raffi Krikorian works to make geotagging tweets fast and efficient

When you only have 140 characters to get your message across, you have to depend a lot on context. For Twitter, a big part of that context has become location. Knowing where someone is tweeting from can add a lot of value to the experience, and it's Raffi Krikorian's job to integrate location into Twitter. Raffi will be talking about this and other location-related topics at the upcoming Where 2.0 conference. We began by asking him how Twitter determines location, and whether it will always be an opt-in option.

Raffi Krikorian: I think part of it is based around the philosophy of Twitter itself. We only publish information that you've explicitly given to us on a tweet-by-tweet basis. So for location on your tweets, it's all opt-in. You have to give us that location information, and we'll put it out. There are other things we do behind the scenes, like our local trends information, that doesn't actually tie to an individual person. We might do some IP look-ups. We look at your user location field. But for anything that's tied to an individual, it's all opt-in.

James Turner: 140 characters is a restriction that Twitter's famous for. Location is fairly high bandwidth information. Have you considered carrying location data out of band from the 140 characters?

Raffi Krikorian: We do that right now. Originally, when people used to tweet location, they put a URL in their text field which linked to a map or linked to a service which might show where they are. But ever since we launched our geotagging API in November, we store the latitude and longitude for your tweet out of band. It's completely metadata on top of the tweet. A bunch of clients implement it, such as Tweety and Seesmic Web, they can read that metadata, and will show you either a map or attempt a reverse geocode and give you an actual name.

James Turner: What value do you see location bringing to social networking? Usually, if someone is talking about a location, it's explicit in the message or in the blog, "I'm at so-and-so and the show is really nice tonight." If you imagine that people are pervasively providing their geolocation, how does that aid social networking?

Raffi Krikorian: I think that one, it helps people like us at Twitter to be able to give more relevant context information to other people. Especially in our 140 character constrained lifestyle, you can't necessarily put fully structured information of where you might be or what you might be talking about. But since we're now trying to expand the dimensionality of our platform to include place, we can now store that structured data, and, therefore, we can analyze it better. We can deliver it to the right people better, and we can do more interesting high-level analytics. Therefore, we can deliver relevant search or relevant information to people who are wanting it.

I think one of the dreams would be, not necessarily for Twitter but for someone out there, to be able to look at status update streams with geotagging on top of it and try to figure out what are the hot bars out there tonight, or be able to see cross-referencing with my foursquare check-in, for example. I want to be able to ask the service, "What bar should I go to right now that my friends have liked that I think I'll probably like and have no line?" And you'd only do something like that kind of high-level query if you actually have some really good way, either to analyze data or to get structured data out of the system. Analysis of that is going to be hard, especially in a world where you only have 140 characters to express yourself, for providing these metadata or meta ways to included structured information, and it becomes a UI problem to get that information into the system. It should become a lot easier for other people to build applications on top of it. So I think that's where geo-type stuff would go for networking, with better recommendations or better information delivery, better stuff within social networks.

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The future of publishing lives on and around the web

Richard Nash outlines his gameplan for uniting audiences and content

I'm at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference this week interviewing folks at the forefront of the publishing world. I'll be posting a few videos here on Radar and you can find others at the TOC blog.

My favorite part of TOC is the energy. There's a lot of positivity coursing through the venue. There's a lot of forward thinking, too. And when you run into Richard Nash, founder of Cursor, you're encountering the embodiment of all that TOC enthusiasm. He's the anti-curmudgeon.

As you'll see in the following interview, Nash is passionate about the web's ability to connect audiences and authors with the topics that excite them. I found his thoughts on tagging really compelling (1:57 mark). It's a useful reference point for the organic nature of web communities.

Four short links: 23 February 2010

Disaster SMS, Open Source Win, Confidence, Pirate Experience

1. SMS in Disaster Response -- Haitians SMS urgent needs to 4636, where they're translated through crowdsourcing and acted on. All based on the Uhsahidi SMS engine.
2. Inside Open Source's Historic Victory -- open source developer wins against someone who took his work, added it to an open patent application, and then sued the open source developer for violating his patent.
3. What's Wrong with Confidence (Pete Warden) -- the lean startup approach and the scientific method. Good read, with two magnificent quotes: "Strong opinions, weakly held, and Confidence is vital for getting things done, but it has to be a spur to test your theories, not a lazy substitute for gathering evidence.
4. If You're a Pirate -- the user experience of legitimate DVDs is shite. That's not the only reason that people pirate, but it sure ain't helping.

Long Tail iTunes Book Apps Are More Expensive

In an earlier post, I examined the average price of the Top 100 PAID apps and noted that the relationship between price and popularity was somewhat dependent on the category. But in the Book category, I concluded that the Top 10 PAID apps were on average cheaper than those ranked 91-100. But what if we examine all Book apps, will the long tail apps be pricier?

The animated graphic below traces the evolution of prices in the iTunes Book category. In Q3-2009 the Book category exceeded 10,000 PAID apps, and since then long tail Book apps have (on average) tended to be much more expensive than their more popular counterparts^†.

Since there are far fewer FREE apps compared to other large categories, pricing is especially critical for Book apps. There are now over 28,000 Book apps, 92% of which are PAID apps^††. Looking ahead, the iPad will be available in a few months and many publishers will need to learn how to price their apps for yet another device (see for example [1], [2]).

[For more on ebooks and electronic publishing, be sure to follow events at this week's TOC conference on twitter.]

(†) There is an upward trend in MEAN price from the more popular apps to the long tail, indicating that many more pricey book apps are in the long tail. The graphic also nicely shows the evolution of prices over time.
(††) The animated graph ends on 2/14/2010, at which point the chart represents the 26,000 PAID Book apps available in the U.S. iTunes App store during that week. In comparison, there were over 29,000 Game apps, 70% of which were PAID apps.

Four short links: 22 February 2010

Schuyler in Haiti, Data Principles, Damn Internet Get Off My Lawn, and Leadership Lessons

1. Schuyler Erle's blog -- Schuyler, a leading geohacker, is in Haiti as part of a World Bank effort to rebuild geospatial infrastructure. His blog posts and twitpics are excellent.
2. Panton Principles -- basic groundrules for useful open data in science. Raises the flag of licensing: arbitrary license clauses or hastily-repurposed software licenses lead to a quagmire of incompatible licenses and prevent useful combinations of data, just as license proliferation in open source created a confusing and difficult environment for people trying to combine multiple open source projects' code.
3. The Internet? Bah! (Cliff Stohl) -- piece from 1995, which I remember reading when it was first published. It stands as a great reminder that scale and change happen: in 1995 there were barely 16 million Internet users and statements like this seemed self-evident: Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople. (via Hacker News)
4. Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy (YouTube) -- 3m long and it's a brilliant insight into creating a movement. Must watch. (via robertobrien on Twitter)

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