Category: Random, But Interesting

Scraping Orkut

I'm late on this, but apparently someone has scraped data off orkut and developed an app that shows how close other orkut users are to a particular zip code or city. Corante has the goods here. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it's against orkut's Terms of…

I’m late on this, but apparently someone has scraped data off orkut and developed an app that shows how close other orkut users are to a particular zip code or city. Corante has the goods here. This is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it’s against orkut’s Terms of Service – it explicitly says you are not allowed to scrape data. Second, it’s cool, and an example of what can be done when the web is viewed as an application. It points to something worth paying attention to.

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Ink Stained Google Hacks

A fun piece that ridicules an increasingly common habit: many reporters lean on Google to prove their point, instead of doing real research……

A fun piece that ridicules an increasingly common habit: many reporters lean on Google to prove their point, instead of doing real research…

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Mid-Talk, A Technorati hack..

Dave Sifry is issuing a challenge to bloggers in the etech audience to blog his new "products discussed in the past 24 hours," a neat hack that combines the Cosmos and Amazon APIs….so I bit……

Dave Sifry is issuing a challenge to bloggers in the etech audience to blog his new “products discussed in the past 24 hours,” a neat hack that combines the Cosmos and Amazon APIs….so I bit…

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Semantic Web Standards Released

CNET reports on OWL and RDF standards, published today by the W3C. "The Semantic Web is no longer a research project," said a W3C spokesperson….

CNET reports on OWL and RDF standards, published today by the W3C. “The Semantic Web is no longer a research project,” said a W3C spokesperson.

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Saving the World From Television

A UCLA study released this week concludes that the average Internet user spends 12 hours a week on the net, and half of those hours are taken directly from television viewing. in other words, regular net users have swapped TV time for internet time, kids in particular. This is an…

A UCLA study released this week concludes that the average Internet user spends 12 hours a week on the net, and half of those hours are taken directly from television viewing. in other words, regular net users have swapped TV time for internet time, kids in particular. This is an important trend. AdAge reports.

Excerpt: The Internet caused the number of hours children 14 and under spend watching TV to decline for the first time in 1998, a trend that has continued in recent years.

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Perception: Open Society, Transparent Government. Reality: Florida

Boing Boing points us to this amazing piece of enterprise reporting: A group of journalists posed as regular citizens making perfectly legal information requests of Florida government officials. Result: nearly half of them tried to get out of providing information to citizens. Yikes. Story here. Excerpt: Public officials lied to,…

Boing Boing points us to this amazing piece of enterprise reporting: A group of journalists posed as regular citizens making perfectly legal information requests of Florida government officials. Result: nearly half of them tried to get out of providing information to citizens. Yikes. Story here.

Excerpt: Public officials lied to, harassed and even threatened volunteers who were using a law designed to give citizens the power to watch over their government. In six counties, volunteers were erroneously told that the documents they wanted didn’t exist.

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Can’t We Be Friends?

MSFT's uber blogger Robert Scoble, after a week off, gets warmed up again with 26 (and counting) posts this weekend, the best for my money being this one. In it he suggests, after noting how sick he is of filing in the same profile information for orkut as he did…

MSFT’s uber blogger Robert Scoble, after a week off, gets warmed up again with 26 (and counting) posts this weekend, the best for my money being this one. In it he suggests, after noting how sick he is of filing in the same profile information for orkut as he did for his first IM app in 1996, that MSFT and Google have a few beers and figure out how to play nice by creating social software apps that work with one another. Excerpt:

Why doesn’t Google and Microsoft sit down at a table. Yes, I know, we’re supposed to be bitter enemies. Let’s get over that. Let’s sit down. Have a few beers. And come up with social software that can share contacts with each other. Let’s announce it in a joint press conference. Let’s get over our own lock-in strategies. Let’s work together on social software so that our customers can go back and forth between our systems.

Can we do that? I’d love to help if possible. I know the social software folks at Microsoft. They are listening to me. How about Google?

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Sick of Orkut? Try Urkel

In his new book Steven Johnson points out how unusual it is for folks to laugh out loud when they are alone. This orkut parody did the job for me…thanks to Weinberger……

In his new book Steven Johnson points out how unusual it is for folks to laugh out loud when they are alone. This orkut parody did the job for me…thanks to Weinberger…

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Why Do You Suppose It’s Taught In Seattle?

Hylton Jolliffe of Corante pointed me to this Seattle Times article on a graduate course at UW which focuses on understanding Google. The first portion of the syllabus is pretty complete for a one unit class, and a fine lens for the curious….

Hylton Jolliffe of Corante pointed me to this Seattle Times article on a graduate course at UW which focuses on understanding Google. The first portion of the syllabus is pretty complete for a one unit class, and a fine lens for the curious.

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Why Good Things Come After Bad Things Happen…

A proof point in the creative destruction that thrives in the Valley, Marc Canter writes: What happens when you lay off 30% of the work force and give a LOT of programmers too much time on their hands? Blogging, social networking, rdf and all sorts of ways of connecting them…

snoflowjpg.jpgA proof point in the creative destruction that thrives in the Valley, Marc Canter writes:

What happens when you lay off 30% of the work force and give a LOT of programmers too much time on their hands?

Blogging, social networking, rdf and all sorts of ways of connecting them together.  Like FOAF.

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