If you had to choose, would you rather Twitter get its act together on uptime issues, or mediate all the disputes that arise between members of the community at large?
Based on the buzz in the blogosphere the last several days, I’m getting some severely mixed signals. On the one hand, you have folks saying that all their new venture capital should be devoted purely to making themselves stable. On the other hand, you have this whole cadre of folks that have cropped up in the last several hours behind the banner of Ariel Waldman essentially saying that Twitter should focus on community building and legalese.
In case you’ve missed the tempest in the teacup, the latest uproar over Twitter has surprisingly very little to do with uptime, and everything to do with the use of a number of four-letter words in connection to a blogger. Ariel Waldman, who’s resume includes workplaces like Suicide Girls, Engadget, Pownce and AdRants, has had something of a problem with a fellow Twitterer engaging in abusive behavior over Twitter:
“In June 2007, I unfortunately found myself on the receiving end of multiple accounts of harassment from a user on Twitter. When the user started using my full name in their harassing tweets, I reported the harassment as a form of cyberbullying to Twitter’s community manager.
Music City Brewer's Festival in Nashville, TN (Saturday, June 28th) American Beer Month!
Topic: Current Events
10:40 am EDT, May 21, 2008
The Sixth Annual Music City Brewers Festival will take place on Saturday, July 28th, 2007 from 2pm - 8pm at the scenic Hilton Park, on the lawn of the Hilton Nashville Downtown. Sample beer from over 30 local, regional and national breweries. This one-day event is in celebration of American Beer Month, presented by the Institute for Brewing Studies. Local bands will perform all day, including the San Rafael Band and HoneyBaked. Food from area restaurants will be available as well. And since it'll be nice and toasty in Nashville in July, be sure to bring your camping chairs and shade umbrellas! Admission is $30 in advance or $40 at the door (if there's any left), and includes a souvenir mug and all beer samples.
Dash, which makes the very cool Dash Express GPS gizmo for cars review , has opened up an API so developers can build new apps for the unit. On announcement, according to a company press release, several apps will be available: a homes-for-sale app from Coldwell Banker, a calendar app that can read appointments from Outlook, Google and automatically route you to them, a weather app from WeatherBug, a speed trap app from Trapster, and Mediaguide, which can display the songs that just played on local radio stations.
I want the Trapster app. Not only is this the most useful of the apps, I believe, it s also the one that leverages the Dash s two-way capability the best: You can add to the Trapster database when you drive through a speed trap yourself. There may even be a button that says, Yo, I am getting pulled over right now. I haven t tried the service yet; I don t know.
Even cooler would be: Let me connect my Valentine One to the Dash device to update the database automatically.
The Dash API program faces two small problems, though: First, there s the chicken-and-egg issue for a non-market-leading platform. Dash is hardly the best-selling GPS product, even if it is the coolest. Developer interest will wane unless consumers start to get behind this product.
Second: Safety. I don t know how Dash is going to ensure that developers don t build distracting or confusing apps that get their users into trouble when they re driving. Building for the 60-m.p.h. user interface is not something many developers have experience with. Hopefully this will be addressed is Dash s presentation at the Where 2.0 conference Wednesday morning.
Current Dash Express users can go to the MyDash site for apps.
Does TomTom or any other NAV. system have an open API?
Last week NBC quietly released a learning tool called iCue in conjunction with MIT. See coverage on CNET TV s Loaded. It s been designed as a learning environment using a large collection of news clips taken from NBC s video archives to enable anyone to catch up on news coverage and current events. This archived footage is put into context, as long as viewers are willing to acknowledge that the content is coming only from one source NBC , and for now only with the focus on the U.S. presidential elections.
To get going, users can simply wander around the site, viewing various footage that s been meticulously categorized and DOCUMENTed complete with transcripts . They can also put their knowledge to the test with a smattering of editor-created mini games that require both a contextual understanding of what was going on at the time of the clip, along with whatever other bits of historical insight are found in the one- to two-minute segments. There s a whole lot going on, and I m betting the casual user is going to get lost very easily.
Check it out good idea... Kind of a web oddity ....
NNDB, a directory of important people and celebrities the two are not exclusive standing for Notable Names Database, has put together a mapping tool that lets you connect the dots to see how people are intertwined.
One example, featured in this demo video, shows the overlap of board members for large tech companies, including Apple, Intel, Yahoo, and Microsoft. You can use the tool to figure out who s worked where, then drill down to their personal histories--both work and play, with very little effort.
The backgrounds of each individual are maintained by the NNDB community and its editors. You can also go in to create your own charts, though you re limited to NNDB s directory of people and companies.
I was going to do one for CBS and CNET, but alas we re not there. You can, however, compare CBS to NBC, ABC, and even Fox Broadcasting. There s not a lot of overlap, but you can easily see people s positions at the company and where else they ve worked.
This reminds me a lot of Cogmap, a service that lets you map out the hierarchy of your workplace. It s got a little more flash, though, and is similar to They Rule, a site outdated about four years that chronicles the ruling class of corporations around the world.
For those who are less corporate-inclined, some of the celebrity maps are pretty amusing, including charts of who s been romantically involved with whom.
Here at Google, we receive a lot of feature requests - and it feels great every time we fulfill one of them. The ability to utilize the power of Google Maps from Flash is one of those requests that has been popping up on blog posts and other forums since the beginning of time or more accurately, the beginning of the Javascript Maps API . Over the past few hours, I ve had the enjoyment of finally seeing this particular feature request - a Maps API for Flash - come to fruition. Tiredness will grab me soon, no doubt. If you re one of the first readers of this post, rest assured that I m unlikely to still be awake: long hours have been worked; pre-launch nerves have jangled. Now it s time to let our baby loose into the world and see how the developer community will embrace it.
So, what do I like about the API for Flash? Smoothness and speed are a big part of it. We ve designed it so that Flash graphics can be used for each tile layer, marker and info window - opening up possibilities like dynamic shading, shadowing, animation, and video. When the user zooms the map, magnification changes happen smoothly and place NAMEs fade in. After the user drags a marker, it gently bounces to a halt. Generally, Flash allows for much greater embellishment, and, well... flashiness. I get excited just thinking about the creative ways developers might take advantage of having a Flash API for Google Maps.
What was one of our main design decisions for this project? We knew that version 1 of any software project is not perfect, so we opted to split the interface and implementation. As a result, you can build against the current version of the API, and as we add enhancements and tweaks, your website benefits automatically from each update. When you wish to take advantage of new API functions, only then do you need to download the latest API and rebuild.
Check out the demo... I am not big on flash, but I like that they are embracing something new....
Jamie Lidell has been releasing EPs or full-length albums for about a decade now, but his most recent album, Jim, hits all the right notes. Part funk, part soul, and a whole lot of “Minneapolis Sound,” Lidell helps revive one of the greatest eras of music. Check out this track:
Check it out... “Minneapolis” Great “Minneapolis” sound... :P
The LIFE SIZE MOUSETRAP is a fantastically hand crafted, 16 piece 50,000-lb. interactive KINETIC SCULPTURE set atop a 6,500-square-foot, 2,000-lb GAME BOARD.
This giant Rube Goldberg style contraption comes complete with a VAUDEVILLIAN style show, original MUSICAL SCORE by The one woman band Esmerelda Strange, Sexy Mice CAN-CAN DANCERS, Clown workers, acrobatic HI JINKS, and other SPECTACULAR SCENES dedicated to the pursuit of spectacle laden FUN!
One of the ironies of the current broadband situation in the US is that staunch free marketeers defend the status quo even though the result of their views has been duopoly and high prices. Meanwhile, other countries including those with a reputation in some quarters for socialism have taken aggressive steps to create a robust, competitive, consumer-friendly marketplace with the help of regulation and national investment. Related Stories
Critics, it s time to stop the quibbling: the data collection practices that show the US dropping year-over-year in all sorts of broadband metrics from uptake to price per megabit might not prove solid enough to trust with your life, but we re out of good reasons to doubt their general meaning.
On March 26, 2004, George Bush talked up the importance of broadband. This country needs a national goal for... the spread of broadband technology, he said. We ought to have... universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to their broadband carrier.
But multiple reports show that countries around the world are beating us at broadband, and we re putting our economy and technological leadership at risk through a truly stunning failure to cast a national vision. Other countries are doing better at this, and they re doing it through a combination of financing, fear competition , and federal mandates.
