The world's largest Internet retailer Amazon.com is known for many things besides shopping - Kindle eBook readers, for example, or its cloud computing infrastructure known as Amazon Web Services - but Amazon as a movie studio? That one seemed to come out of left field, didn't it?
Well, it's true - kind of. Amazon is indeed getting into the movie-making business with the launch of a new portal called Amazon Studios, but it's not a traditional studio by any means.
In the past several months, the Personal Democracy Forum teamed up with YouTube and a host of partner media organizations to enable voters to directly address the candidates. The experiment, called 10Questions, crowd-sourced the most popular questions for each of 46 competitive races in the midterm elections.
Daniel Teweles, VP of Business Development and Marketing at the Personal Democracy Forum, is reasonably pleased with the outcome so far. But there is an appreciable distance left to travel to make the platform relevant.
The most exhilarating thing about social media to me is that it allows us to extend and amplify our dreams and concerns. One of the most bracing things that can be done with innovations in the social web is to take that innovation and turn it to uses the creators never thought of. An example of both these aspects of the web is Vacant NYC.
In a DIY response to a combination of homelessness, vacant properties that could be leveraged to ease that homelessness, and what they feel is a municipal disinterest in both, New York-based group Picture the Homeless, inspired by crisis-mapping outfit Ushahidi, are using crowdsource mapping to identify vacant property and lots in that city.
Automatic translation tools like Google Translate allow you to get a very rough understanding of a text in a foreign language. For the most part, though, these translations are anything but perfect and can't capture the nuances and idioms that professional translators can. Linguee, a Germany-based startup, is a contextual translation search engine that walks the middle ground between machine translation and online dictionary (with some crowdsourcing mixed in for good measure). The tool offers support for English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French and is one of the best online translation dictionaries we have seen.
Above: Boutique book publisher and geek James Bridle has printed the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for Iraq War between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books.
"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification."And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle
A group of cavers has used Google Maps to create GrottoCenter, a huge online atlas of spelunkable caves.
Now, whether you dig maps because they allow you to get where you're going more efficiently or because they act as "data visualization" for the imagination, this is intriguing.
StackOverflow started as software developer Q&A site. The traffic on the site spiked like mad and stayed that way. Then, its founders, Joel and Jeff, had to buy a warehouse to keep their VC money in. Now, they've begun rolling out verticals.
Today, the latest version opened for private beta. GIS StackExchange is for people involved or interested in Geographic Information Systems. The beta is restricted to members of the Area51 GIS community but the public beta will begin on the 29th.
Popular group-buying daily deal site Groupon has gone back to its roots with the launch of an initiative called "G-Team," which harnesses the collective consumer power that has made Groupon such a success, in order to connect users to local fundraisers, campaigns and other charitable causes. The causes will be tied to the deals posted to Groupon so as to attract like-minded shoppers with community organizations whose campaigns they may be interested in.
For example, a deal on canoe rentals might be tied to a campaign to clean up a river, a deal on bike tuneups might be linked to a campaign to donate bicycles to disadvantaged youth and so on.
If you've ever flown, then you know this scenario: Your flight leaves at the crack of dawn. If you leave home with several hours to spare, you'll blow through an empty security line - but then what? Will the flight be delayed, leaving you with a two hour wait? In that case you'd rather not leave home so early.
With the Transportation Security Administration's new app, My TSA, you no longer have to worry.
With its translation efforts now recognizing more than 30 languages, what better partner to work with the user-created encyclopedia Wikipedia than Google?
The search engine touted its efforts last week at Wikimania 2010, claiming that its translation tools have been used to translate "more than 100 million words of Wikipedia content into various languages worldwide".
