Data.gov, the US federal government's new catalog of sets of public data for outside developers to mashup and analyze, now faces some friendly competition. The Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan non-profit organization dedicated to government transparency, has announced that it will launch a National Data Catalog to go above and beyond what Data.gov offers.
We've been critical of the sparse offering from Data.gov but Sunlight's plan looks like it could surpass what even the most ambitious government program is likely capable of.
Google announced today that it has begun prompting users of its online health information service to fill out Advanced Care Directives, the documents that communicate end-of-life wishes ahead of time in case you're unable to communicate while hospitalized. On one level, that makes sense: communicate your wishes about being kept on life support or not and store it online with a very stable service provider. On another level, though, this is creepy.
The huge stores of knowledge about our lives and world now contained on the servers of huge companies like Google and Facebook could be put to great use - or they could end up providing the foundation for a sci-fi horror story. Chances are, reality will be somewhere in between. All this centralized information about us will be useful, a little invasive and a little disappointing in the utility actually delivered. When the worst-case scenario story gets written, though, it's hard to imagine this won't be a chapter.
If Facebook wants to comply with Canadian privacy laws, the company will have to make some changes to how it collects and retains information about its 12 million Canadian users. Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart singled out a number of issues her office found with Facebook's practices. These include the fact that the company's privacy policies are often incomplete and confusing, and that third-party applications can access far more information about a user than would be necessary for the application to work well. The complaint that triggered this investigation was filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC).
A couple of months ago, Papa John's marketing manager Jim McDonnell was quoted as saying that their "iPhone application" simply wasn't delivering as well as their mobile display advertising was. The implication behind his statement was that iPhone apps weren't all they were cracked up to be when it came to bringing in new sources of revenue for businesses. Of course, we took a bit of offense to that seeing as how Papa John's didn't even have an iPhone app to speak of - they had a mobile web site. And as of today, they have a little more competition.
Pizza Hut, a company that apparently understands the difference between an app and a web page, has just released a brand-new iPhone application that puts Papa John's lackluster attempt to shame. We wonder: will this be the start of a new trend in company-branded applications?
Today the Mozilla Corporation announced the pilot release of a new program they're calling "Contributions." The program will allow the developers of Firefox extensions, aka "add-ons," to solicit a dollar amount of their choosing for their work. For end users, the choice about whether or not to donate will be completely optional, so it's not like the Add-on site will become a marketplace where extensions are offered for sale. For developers, the financial support provided by the program will help them continue their efforts in delivering quality work. Hopefully, it will lead to fewer abandoned extensions, too - a problem that has plagued Firefox users for quite some time.
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation is calling for nominations for their EFF 2009 Pioneer Awards. Nominees are celebrated for their technical, social, economic, or cultural contribution to the "health, growth, accessibility, or freedom of computer-based communications." Past recipients of the award have included World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, Linux creator Linus Torvalds and Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker.
As the Internet of Things continues to slowly but surely ramp up, we're beginning to see more everyday 'objects' being connected to the Internet. One which caught our eye is a new web-connected bathroom scale. The company behind it is called BodyTrace and the product has been labeled 'eScale.' It wirelessly and automatically uploads a user's weight to the BodyTrace website, creating charts and recommendations from the data. The company claims that no software
configuration is required from the user to get it to work - perhaps because it relies on mobile technology (specifically the GSM cell phone network) rather than WiFi.
After publishing her book about social capital and the power of social networking,The Whuffie Factor, Tara Hunt is doing what any change agent does. She's changing. She's quit her job, purchased a winnebago and coerced five friends to karaoke across the country with her. Wuffaoke Or Bust is a cross-country road trip where six crooners and one pug will live stream their 13-city karaoke tour from San Francisco to Montreal. Think of it as a Rental Car Rally with a talent competition or Bullrun Rally with geeks instead of "petrolsexuals."
According to Inside Facebook, the blue giant may be working on a native Twitter application as evidenced by engineer Blake Ross' tweet from an application named "Penguin FB" on Facebook's development servers. Asks Inside Facebook's writer Justin Smith, "Is Facebook about to become the largest source of tweets?" The company did not comment on the "Penguin FB" project and Ross has since deleted the "Penguin FB" test tweet. For now, the public is left in the dark as to what all this means.
"Bits of destruction" is a phrase Fred Wilson uses to describe the destructive part of "creative destruction" brought on by digitization. We hear a lot about the destruction wrought on the newspaper business. A more interesting and nuanced wave is now hitting the book publishing business. Actually, it is three waves: the digitization of back catalogs, e-books, and print on demand. However this plays out, a lot of people will be affected, but the way in which it will play out is not at all obvious. This is too big a subject for one post, so read this as an introduction to a multi-post investigation.
