The statistics were gathered by independent researchers and put online using eSpatial OnDemand GIS and Open Street Map. Open Street Map is like the Wikipedia of world and local maps, but it's also a popular data platform that many other applications make use of. Map nerds should watch the OpenStreetMap annual conference, State of the Map, for more exciting map and geodata news. The conference opened this morning in Denver, Colorado.

The WikiLeaks story has yet to end, despite the fact that some have theorized it soon will. So here is a second part to the timeline, covering all the stories from December 30 of last year down to the present.

"Last week a U.S. Justice Department court order was made public that directed Twitter to provide information on several of its users. The subpoena was made in conjunction with an investigation the U.S. Attorney General is making into the actions of the whistle-blower site Wikileaks and its leader, Julian Assange."

Wikileaks Calls for Sarah Palin's Arrest January 10, 2011

"The official Twitter account for Wikileaks has posted a press release this evening drawing a comparison between the controversial rhetoric from public figures that some believe contributed to the attempted assassination on Saturday of Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the even more explicit calls from public officials for violence against Wikileaks spokesperson Julien Assange and others. The organization called for public figures making such calls to violence to be arrested and charged with crimes."

Evidence Stuxnet May Be an American-Israeli Collaboration January 18, 2011

"Among additional evidence that this was a U.S.-Israel attack...US succeeded in stopping an April 2009 delivery of Siemens controllers to Iran, according to several Wikileaks-released cables."

Police Arrest 5 Men Over "Anonymous" DDoS Attacks January 27, 2011

"British police have arrested five people for their alleged participation in some of the highly publicized DDoS attacks last month... The five are being held on suspicion of being involved in Anonymous, the loose affiliation of so-called hacktivists who have targeted a number of websites, including MasterCard, Visa and PayPal, with distributed denial of service attacks. These attacks followed WikiLeaks' release of U.S. diplomatic cables in late November, and were aimed to punish companies who'd shut down WikiLeaks' access to financial resources."

Wikileaks Competitor OpenLeaks Opens Doors January 27, 2011

"In September, a number of Wikileaks' partners quit that organization, complaining that its leader, Julian Assange, was too tyrannical and careless. In November, they announced they were creating a competing leaks service, called OpenLeaks. In December, it was supposed to go live. Now, in January, it has."

WikiLeaks Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize February 2, 2011

"WikiLeaks has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, according to the Norwegian politician behind the proposal. The nomination of WikiLeaks was put forward by parliamentarian Snorre Valen, saying that the site was "one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech and transparency.'"

Leaked Security Firm Documents Show Plans to Discredit WikiLeaks, Glenn Greenwald February 10, 2011

"(T)he loose collective of online vigilantes - Anonymous - responded to a story in the The Financial Times and the actions of HBGary's CEO Aaron Barr by hacking into the company's systems and releasing tens of thousands of its emails and documents. Among those documents, an outline of plans to systematically discredit WikiLeaks, along with Salon journalist (and WikiLeaks supporter) Glenn Greenwald."

PayPal Freezes Donations to Bradley Manning Defense Fund [Updated] February 24, 2011

"Update: PayPal has just posted a press statement to its blog, stating that 'we have decided to lift the temporary restriction placed on their account because we have sufficient information to meet our statutory 'Know Your Customer' obligations.'"

British Court Orders WikiLeaks' Julian Assange Extradited to Sweden February 24, 2011

"A British court has agreed to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden to face rape charges. His attorneys have said they will appeal the decision."

Alleged Wikileaks Leaker Faces Death Penalty March 2, 2011

"Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who allegedly passed classified documents to the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, has just been charged with 22 additional counts, according to his attorney, Lieutenant Colonel David Coombs. Among these are 'aiding the enemy,' a capital offense."

First Academic Paper on WikiLeaks March 31, 2011

"Mark Fenster, Research Foundation Professor at the Frederic Levin School of Law at the University of Florida, has become the first academic to publish a paper on the implications of Wikileaks. The paper is titled 'Disclosure's Effects: WikiLeaks and Transparency.'"

WikiLeaks Makes Volunteers Sign Non-Disclosure with $20 Million Penalty May 12, 2011

"Calling all of the material leaked to the organization, the 'property' of Wikileaks, the agreement repeatedly treats the material as commercial product."

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back in the Water... Sony Pictures Hacked June 2, 2011

"On the heels of a Memorial Day weekend hack of the PBS website - an act of retribution for an unflattering Frontline report on Wikileaks, the prankster-hackers LulzSec have found their next target. And it's a target that's just recovering from another security breach, namely Sony."

Adrian Lamo Speaks About His Wikileaks Role June 4, 2011

"A central figure in the famous Wikileaks/Manning "cablegate" case from last year is Adrian Lamo, the "homeless hacker" who snitched on Manning to the feds and led to the latter's imprisonment. I first met Lamo about ten years ago, when he surprisingly took me up on an offer to spend the night in my New York apartment and come in to talk to a high school networking class I was teaching at the time."

Wikileaks Loses Control Over Diplo Cables, Exposes Sources [UPDATED] August 29, 2011

"Unedited versions of the United States diplomatic cables that Wikileaks has released over the last year have gone public, exposing sources around the world to possible recriminations. According to German news magazine, Der Spiegel, based on an original report in Der Freitag, a convergence of screw-ups involving the group's former German spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg and an external contact of Wikileaks leader Julian Assange wound up throwing the doors open to the full, unedited materials."

WikiLeaks May Be Petering Out September 8, 2011

"Peter Dorling, of the Sydney Morning Herald, who has followed the news surrounding Wikileaks and its Australian founder from the beginning, has published a fascinating, fair-minded story that theorizes an end to Wikileaks. After accidentally allowing the publication of their remaining diplomatic cables - which, along with the publication of the password to those cables in a book by two Guardian reporters made them public - Dorling believes there is not much left for WikiLeaks to do. Their leak-submission function has not in fact functioned for a year and there does not seem to be another Bradley Manning hidden in the wings."

Bloomberg reports that Siemens AG and its joint venture, Nokia Siemens Networks, has made it possible for Bahraini secret police to intercept and generate transcripts of text messages and other mobile communications made by protesters in that country's troubled version of the Arab Spring.

South Africa plans Blackberry eavesdropping. The South African government is talking about giving police access to Blackberry's encrypted messaging (BBM). AFP reported that Deputy Communications Minister Obed Bapela called the BBM a security risk, quoting the Sapa News Agency: "There is evidence that criminals are now using BBM to plan and execute crime. We want to review BBM like in the UK and Saudi Arabia."

UK PM's plan to ban social media dropped. Prime Minister David Cameron's knuckleheaded attempt to place the onus for last month's riots on social media has died the death it deserved. Our contention that the leadership of Cameron's government was walleyed about social media was something they wound up admitting.

WikiLeaks may be petering out. Peter Dorling, of the Sydney Morning Herald, who has followed the news surrounding Wikileaks and its Australian founder from the beginning, has published a fascinating, fair-minded story that theorizes an end to Wikileaks.

After accidentally allowing the publication of their remaining diplomatic cables - which, along with the publication of the password to those cables in a book by two Guardian reporters made them public - Dorling believes there is not much left for WikiLeaks to do. Their leak-submission function has not in fact functioned for a year and there does not seem to be another Bradley Manning hidden in the wings.

Fight over Libya's Internet. Six months after going dark, Libya's Internet connection to the world came back on briefly during the rebel surge that resulted in their control of most of the country. It's largely dark again and it may take a definitive end to hostilities before it is up to stay.

China tightens restrictions on microblogging, citizens react. "Chinese netizens are in an uproar," NTD reported. "Recent indications from the Chinese regime seem to point to tougher controls on popular mircroblogging services, such as Sina Weibo." State-run Xinhua News Agency, which acts as a mouthpiece for the rulers, criticized the site for its role in spreading what it calls false information. The "toxic rumors" Xinhua attacked included a train crash in Wenzhou. The outraged citizen response on microblogging sites, including Sina Weibo, forced corrupt and lazy authorities to act.

Uzbekistan creates a national Internet. The Central Asian tyranny has created its own version of a "halal Internet." Muloqot is intended "for the formation of high morals." In reality, it is about control of access to information and the means to disseminate argument and to cancel out the effects of social networks like Odnoklassniki and Facebook, where dissidents gather.

Kazakhastan bans Livejournal. After ordering all Kazakhstani websites use the .kz domain to be hosted on local servers, where they can be controlled by the government, the country's authorities have begun banning sites. The latest is early blog platform Livejournal. The excuse given was that the social network's "promote(s) terriorism and religious extremism and (contained) calls to acts of terrorism and the manufacture of explosive devices."

Egyptian blogger moved to prison hospital. Blogger and critic of the military, Maikel Nabil was the first Egyptian to be arrested by the military in post-Mubarak Egypt.

He declared a hunger strike to protest the injustice of his military trial and imprisonment and the continued meddling by the Egyptian armed forces into civilian life. Now, he has grown sick enough that he has been relocated to the prison's infirmary. He sickened "two days after he stopped drinking liquids on the eighth day of his hunger strike."

His supporters have started a Facebook page to publicize his situation. A blog, Free Anas, has also been started, as well as a hashtag, #freeanas. Get on it, nerdlingers.

Libyan Internet starts to fail. Renesys reported that, after a long, stable summer of nothing much to report, Libya's Internet has now started to fail, probably as a result of infrastructure degradation due to war and neglect. The effects of this failure will be largely negative for the government, as they are the only ones who currently have access.

Egyptian blogger arrested for "defaming the military." In what looks like a frantic race back to the bottom, the Egyptian military, the erstwhile saviors of the people during the revolution, have added another notch to their billyclub with the arrest and probable prosecution in a military court of 26-year-old Asmaa Mahfouz. Admittedly, a statement on one of her social media accounts muddies the waters.

"If the judiciary doesn't give us our rights, nobody should be surprised if militant groups appear and conduct a series of assassinations because there is no law and there is no judiciary."

Egypt seems to have moved on from the confident non-violence of the Arab Spring.

Iranian blogger freed. After a hunger strike that lasted 25 days, the Iranian government released Dr. Mehdi Khazali. He was released on bail. Khazali, son of a conservative cleric, has been arrested three times.

Al Jazeera journalist arrested in Israel. Last week, Samer Allawi, a Palestinian and the Kabul bureau chief for the Qatari news agency, was arrested while journeying from the West Bank to Jordan. He was brought before an Israeli military court Tuesday and charged with belonging to the outlawed terrorist group Hamas. Allawi denies he is a member of the group.

Tunisia upholds filtering decision. According to Reporters Without Borders, "A Tunis appeal court yesterday upheld a 27 May court decision requiring the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) to block access to pornographic websites. ATI said it would refer the case to the country's highest appeal court because it did not have the 'financial and technical resources' to create the filtering and censorship system needed to implement the ruling."

Filtering regimes start, with few exceptions, with the "protection" of innocent eyes against the scourge of pornography. It never, ever stops there. (There is, after all, so much to protect you from.)

Iranian blogger beaten in prison. Hossein Maleki Ronaghi was beaten by a guard "after writing a letter to Iran's judicary authorities." He required hospitalization afterward. He is serving a 15-year sentence.

International investigation panel closes up shop in Bahrain. The international Bahrain Commission of Inquiry, an international group investigating the violence during Bahrain's protests, has shuttered its offices and hit the road "after angry crowds scuffled with staff members following reports that government officials would be cleared of committing abuses against protesters seeking greater rights."

Argentina blocks websites. The country's judiciary blocked leakymails.com and leakymails.blogspot.com, sites which "linked to allegedly leaked emails from members of the Argentine government." The effect was to inspire the creation of myriad mirror sites to distribute the material.

Anonymous, Telecomix take on Syrian Cyber Army. Declaring an #OpSyria, the groups are targeting the official pro-government computer hackers as well as the suppliers of censorship equipment to the country's violent ruling clique.

Since January, mobile visits to YouTube have doubled in the UK. Hitwise estimates that smartphones and tablets account for as much as 10% of UK YouTube views. Across platforms, YouTube received 22.5% of UK visits to social networks, placing second after Facebook, which received more than half.

YouTube used to be known for its weirdos and amateurs, and while they're still abundant on the site, maybe more popular than ever, YouTube is becoming something other than a social network. It's now a mass medium.

Do you upload YouTube videos, or mostly just watch?

Why is this of interest to us at ReadWriteWeb? Because the UK's commitment to open data platforms implies to me that this kind of data will someday be available programmatically for analysis, pattern detection, alert monitoring and cross-referencing with other data sets, thus enabling new acts of creativity, self-awareness and innovation. (Or creepy, authoritarian psychographic monitoring and strategic buy-offs when citizens' anger flares ups in a hamlet.) What data could be more important as a platform than data about meaning in the human experience? That's presuming that the quantification of such qualitative matters is possible and can be well executed. It's a type of project that a growing number of governments around the world are undertaking.

UK survey respondents were asked to answer on a scale of 1 to 10 the following questions:

• how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
• how happy did you feel yesterday?
• how anxious did you feel yesterday?
• to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?

I think those are fascinating questions. (For the record, my replies would be 7,9,3,8. Yours?)

Finally, I worry that the human experience is complicated enough that multiple steps and multiple explanations of circumstances all add up to happiness. That's a recipe for political debate, more than quantitative clarity. Say the city of Detroit, Michigan was evaluated and deemed to be unhappy. That wouldn't be a surprise, right? But is it an unhappy city because international corporations have undercut the quality of life of the working class and a complicit government has responded with socially adverse policies regarding economic development and police activities? (Perhaps a Liberal explanation.) Or is it an unhappy city because its inhabitants have failed to adapt to the inevitable changes in the global economy and have created a culture of that de-emphasizes taking personal responsibility for their well being? (Perhaps a Conservative explanation.) I find one of those explanations potentially compelling and the other quite offensive, but I imagine you could use raw Happiness Data to support either of them.

Governments throughout Europe are focusing on quantifying happiness and wellbeing. If they can do so in a way that is of some consequence and if that data can be made publicly available, even in real-time, then the developers and data analysts of the world could have a powerful new resource at their disposal.

On December 20, the Hugo Chávez-controlled Venezuelan congress passed, and he signed, a law that devolves all power over online content to the executive. The congress coming in soon is much less agreeable to Chávez, hence the speed at which this was hurried through.

UK culture minister to ask for power to block porno. Like every spasm of filtering, this too is justified in the immortal words of Reverend Lovejoy's wife Helen, "Won't someone please think about the children?!" As long as they don't think about Orwell.

Over 50% of apps steal user info. A Wall Street Journal investigation of "101 popular smartphone apps...showed that 56 transmitted the phone's unique device ID to other companies without users' awareness or consent. Forty-seven apps transmitted the phone's location in some way. Five sent age, gender and other personal details to outsiders."

If the spirit of Christ is real in any palpable way, and I don't imagine that it is, it's in the souls and the blood of the thousands of people trying to keep faith in some hellish pit somewhere, confined for speaking up, speaking out or mouthing off. Try to find a shred of fellow feeling for them some time between your celebrations and your eructations. Or whatever. Shut up.

Merry Christmas to all my monsters.

SIM card photo by Warrenski | queen photo by Andrew Stawarz | scam photo by Jean Poirrier

Watson was one of the primary opponents of the bill, which makes it possible for the British government to put the kibosh on pesky websites under the guise of copyright infringements.

Given the proliferation of information-restricting legislation around the globe, we would like to see candidates in every election in every country make similar pledges. How about it? Here's a model for you in Watson's.

My (draft) Digital Pledges

1. I will support and campaign for more transparency in the public and private sector.
2. I will oppose measures that unjustly deny people's access to the Internet.
3. Whilst noting the acknowledged limitations, I believe people have the right to free speech on the Internet.
4. I will support all measures that allow people access to their personal data held by others. I further support restoration of control over how personal data is gathered, managed and shared to the individual.
5. I will use my role as an MP to support international free expression movements.
6. The Internet shall be built and operated openly and without discrimination.
7. I will support all measures to bring non-personal public data into the public domain.
8. I will support all proposals that lead to greater numbers joining the digital world and oppose measures that reduce it.
9. I believe that copyright and software patent laws should be reformed to reflect the needs of citizens in the Internet age.

The bill purports to provide comprehensive regulation of digital services, in order to clear the way to promoting Britian as a digital econmic power. Criticism focused first on a clause that would have given broad government discretion to the closing of sites. That clause was removed, but the amendment to another was still significantly worrying to some.

"The Secretary of State may by regulations make provision about the granting by a court of a blocking injunction in respect of a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright."

A little thought on which site might be accused of being "a location on the internet" where copyright violation might have occurred, or might occur in the future, and you're likely to come up with YouTube, BitTorrent, DailyMotion, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter and Google. To start with.

A second criticism focused on the way the troublesome bill was passed, during the period of time just prior to dissolution of parliament, called the "wash-up," when, to put it mildly, legislator attention is not at its peak.

The two men collaborated in helping build the excellent data.gov.uk and will now expand upon that work. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of the move: "We are determined to go further in breaking down the walled garden of Government...This Institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies."

Berners-Lee said two years ago last month that all the pieces were in place to build the semantic web, a paradigm based on giving structured meaning to and clear links between otherwise unstructured content floating around the web. Many people believe that a web with semantic structure will be the same type of boon to innovation that common standards like HTML have been.

Berners-Lee famously described his vision of the semantic web like this:

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize.

Today's announcement came along government calls to build super-fast broadband to every home in the UK. Prime Minister Brown claimed that such a development could foster economic development and as many as 250,000 new jobs.

As writer Tom Foremski pointed out this morning about the Web Science Institute, however "internet technologies have resulted in fewer jobs created than have been lost -- which is the way of all disruptive technologies."

Making the Vision Real is Hard, Too

Super-fast broadband to every home is a much easier thing to sell to the public than a future-web of structured, machine-readable data. After years of expectations, the semantic web remains in search of its clearly comprehensible killer-app. Earlier this month, semantic social bookmarking service Twine quietly slid into obscurity and was bought up by news recommendation service Evri. Twine was said to be possibly "the first mainstream semantic web app" two years ago. Founder Nova Spivak raised half as much money for Twine's parent company Radar Networks ($24m) as Berners-Lee's entire new institute is receiving. Twine faltered under poor usability and the leadership of Spivak, considered to be both one of the smartest people in the internet industry and a caustic egotist.

Thus is the dilemma for this supposed next stage of the web. Andrew Orlowski tears into today's announcement in The Register, calling it "a confluence of two groups of people with a shared interest in bureaucracy." Orlowski says the Web of Data is a fraud as well: "Of course, most web data is personal communication that happens to have been recorded. Most of the rest is spam, generated by robots, or cut-and-paste material 'curated' by the unemployed or poor graduates - another form of spam, really."

That's a funny critique but the truth is probably somewhere in between the superlatives and the condemnation. Critics like Orlowski have already grown jaded about the world-changing impact of the last iteration of the web (easy social publishing) and underestimate the platform potential of this next iteration.

"I've always been sceptical of the need for a 'new discipline.' [Web Science]," says leading semantic web consultant Paul Miller.

"A significant tranche of funding such as that announced by the Prime Minister this morning will be helpful in tackling some of the issues (both hard and soft) that still remain as we push more and more data out into the public sphere. I hope and expect that Nigel, Tim and others will devote at least as much attention to issues of trust, provenance, licensing etc as to the details of angle brackets, triples and ontologies."

Miller did a podcast interview with Shadbolt for the UK's largest semantic web company Talis, here.

For an in-depth explanation of Berners-Lee's perspective, see the two-part interview ReadWriteWeb founding Editor Richard MacManus did with him last year. MacManus has said that Berners-Lee's vision of a read/write, two-way web, was a key inspiration behind the founding of the publication you're reading now.

We wish the Institute for Web Science the best of luck in delivering on its rich promise.

In our reporting on P2P issues, it's rare these days to get wind of some good news; today, we've learned that this plan to ban would not, in fact, apply to most file-sharing fiends. After one ISP stood up to the government's proposals by circulating a petition, the government responded favorably, saying, "We are not requiring ISPs to monitor for unlawful file-sharing. Nor are we proposing that ISPs look at what users download in order to combat piracy... We will not terminate the accounts of infringers."

However, UK ISP TalkTalk vigorously objected to some of the measures laid out in the bill and drafted and circulated an e-petition to abandon the idea that illegal P2P file-sharing should result in a permanent ban from the Internet for guilty users.

"If citizens are innocent until proven guilty," the petition reads, "ISPs would be forced to monitor internet usage to ensure that no copyrighted material is being transferred. This flagrant disregard for privacy is comparable to forcing the Post Office to search through parcels for photocopied documents or mixtape cassettes. Such requirements would place enormous strain on ISPs whilst failing to prevent the distribution of copyrighted material...

"Who is punished in the case of shared family connections? The increasing role of the Internet in access to society should not be underestimated. Cutting off households deprives families of education, government services and freedom of speech. We do not see this as a fitting punishment, nor do we believe the breaches in privacy involved to be justifiable under copyright law."

The government's full response states that officials are working with rights holders and media companies to find a balanced and equitable solution to illegal file-sharing - one that includes attractive, legal options for end users to access content, as well.

The Digital Economy Bill will require ISPs to notify users whose accounts had been flagged by a copyright holder as having been used for illegal file-sharing. "In the cases of the most serious infringers," reads the response, "if a rights holder obtains a court order, the ISP would have to provide information so that the rights holder can take targeted court action." As a last resort, the Bill provides for ISPs' taking technical measures to stop illegal downloading, ranging from bandwidth restriction, daily downloading limits and temporary Internet account suspension.

All in all, the government hopes to see a 70 percent reduction in illegal P2P downloads.

It'll be interesting to see how various national laws and regulations hold up if something like ACTA ends up being passed. In a nutshell, a U.S.-drafted chapter of this treaty on Internet use would require ISPs to police user-generated content, to cut off Internet access for copyright violators and to remove content that is accused of copyright violation without any proof of actual violation - a far cry from the more lenient proposals we're reading from the UK.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

At launch, Data.gov.uk has nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. The U.S. site, Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets today.

The UK government has been a big supporter of innovation built on top of public data. It sponsored a contest called Show Us a Better Way, giving cash prizes to people who came up with the best ideas for mashups they would like to create if they had access to the right government data. Charles Arthur at the Guardian has good coverage of the U.K.'s open data work (the Guardian has been working hard to open public data as well).

The U.S. government, on the other hand, has been lackluster in its move to open data to facilitate outside innovation. If Twitter is the poster child for building a thriving ecosystem around a streaming set of data, then the Obama administration has earned about 140 characters worth of praise for its fledgling efforts so far. The U.S. government's efforts to advance agencies' use of cloud computing may work in conjunction with opening data to the public and thus may improve the state of things, but time will tell.

Congress didn't even ask U.S. CTO Aneesh Chopra any questions about President Obama's Open Government initiative during his confirmation hearings. When the U.S. government's Data.gov site launched, critics pointed out that it was filled with relatively non-controversial data sets; plenty of USGS data but no DOJ or military data, for example. The U.K.'s data site, in contrast, includes 22 military data sets at launch, including one called Suicide and Open Verdict Deaths in the U.K. Regular Armed Forces.

One request that users of both sites still have is for data to be made available in standardized formats. The U.K. site does include a prominent promotion of the Semantic Web, no doubt a tribute to Berners-Lee's focus on the paradigm as the next step for the future of the web. More standardized, structured data is expected to be the direction that the program tries to get government agencies to move toward in the future.

Solving CAPTCHAs to Transcribe Books

We took detailed looks at reCAPTCHA and how it works last September and in early 2007. In short, reCAPTCHA has found a nifty way to crowdsource book transcriptions. When users solve a CAPTCHA through reCAPTCHA, the software will give users two words: one with a known answer (the control word) and one where the OCR software wasn't quite sure what the word was. Once a certain number of users have solved the suspicious word with the same result, it becomes a control word itself and the OCR software can learn this word.

Now, Google will be able to use this same technology to improve its own OCR efforts. Google currently makes over 1 million out-of-copyright books available for download through Google Books and one of the main arguments against these books has been the fact that these texts are not edited and include a lot of OCR errors. With reCAPTCHA, Google could potentially bring the error rate down dramatically and make Google Books even more useful.

A number of UK government officials and departments already use Twitter, including the Foreign Office and the Communities and Local Government Department. With Andrew Stott, the UK Cabinet Office also has its own "director of digital engagement."

As the AP points out, most governments in Europe have only had moderate success on Twitter, though quite a few UK government accounts have a large number of followers and the Prime Minister's account has over 1 million followers.

A couple of interesting points from the guide:

• Whitehall staff should not follow users uninvited in order to avoid being accused of "Big Brother" style behavior - they can follow users back who follow them first, though
• tweets should be written in a human style ("informal spoken English") and go beyond links to press releases and announcements
• tweets should be frequent, timely, and credible
• tweets should include exclusive content, including insights from ministers
• all posts have to be cleared by staff at the Information Officer grade and above

Provide Thought Leadership, Monitor Twitter

A section about the government's objectives states that officials should use Twitter to provide thought leadership and give citizens a low-barrier method for interacting with government departments.

Williams also advises officials to monitor Twitter for mentions of "our brand, our Ministers and flagship policy initiatives, engaging with our critics and key influencers."

Twitter Policy

Interestingly, Williams also advices departments to post a Twitter Policy on their websites and link to it from their Twitter profiles. This policy includes information about what followers can expect (2-10 tweets a day, type of contents, etc.), as well as a notice that being followed back by a department "does not imply endorsement of any kind." The policy also states that staff will only respond during office hours, Monday to Friday (which might be a bit limiting given that social media doesn't exactly take a break on the weekend).

Overall, within the boundaries of what governments can do within social media without hitting the limits of what would be seen as acceptable and without breaking the governments' own rules, this guide seems extremely level-headed and contains numerous useful pieces of advice for individuals and businesses who are just discovering Twitter.

Berners-Lee, a man whose invention of the web has had a greater impact on humanity than all but a handful of inventions over the last 50 years, is now one of the world's leading advocates not just for government data on the web but for free public access to raw bulk data that anyone can process for analysis and mashups. While the new Obama administration has made big promises about open government, it may now quickly find itself falling behind the UK.

The Obama administration has had a mixed record so far in terms of opening up government data. The launch of Data.gov was widely celebrated, though we found it too limited an offering. The Democrat controlled Senate finally opened up its voting record in machine readable XML format last month (that's great), but the nominee for the first federal CTO position faced zero questions about data transparency in his congressional hearings (that's bad). The White House said yesterday that it has clearly heard the public call for more open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces filled with open data) - so things certainly won't be standing still on this side of the Atlantic either. US CIO, Vivek Kundra, wrote an excellent blog post on the challenges and opportunities of open government data on Monday.

Having Berners-Lee on the team should be a huge boost for the UK government efforts, though. Most recently Berners-Lee made headlines for (trying to) lead the TED conference of global thought leaders in a chant of "Raw Data Now!" That conference was the same one where Bill Gates opened a jar full of mosquitoes into the crowd like a mad man, so that the elite group could get some feeling of the fear associated with malaria like so many millions of other people feel.

In other words, Berners-Lee is a hard core advocate of open data. It's hard to imagine a more high profile move for a government to take than to announce that he's coming on board to help the effort.