blog posts

By James Burke on 29 May 2010 15:21

Slides from a short talk on The Guardian and open/public data given by Chris Thorpe (@jaggeree) at the Gov2.0 Expo in Washington on the "Four perspectives of data.gov.uk" panel with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, John Sheridan and Dominic Campbell.

At the same conference Tim O’Reilly had a discussion (videoed) with Aneesh Chopra around “Government as a Platform” and in particular Healthcare.

By James Burke on 25 May 2010 21:09

biketoworkBike to Work is a great “Digital Guide to Bicycle Commuting” by Carlton Reid (@calrtonreid).

This 98 page guide covers cash incentives (including the UK cycle2work scheme) “women on wheels”, security and clothing and more.

Yes, there are lots of adverts but much of this is just “cycle porn”!

There are some great counter points to “I don’t have time”, “I’ll get all sweaty”, “I’ll smell”, “My co-workers will laugh at me”, “Only expensive bikes are good”, “I can’t, I have to wear a suit” and so on.

For me, I’m going to return to my 23 mile each way commute to the office on the back of this and use @runkeeper to keep track of commutes…!

 

 

By James Burke on 25 May 2010 15:56

The first place elite centipede team, sponsored by LinkedIn, crosses the finish line during the 2010 Bay to Breakers race Sunday, May 16 in San Francisco.

LinkedIn(CrunchBase profile) is the “de-facto” business/professional social networking site.

Personally I use LinkedIn as a “CV” but I’m not an avid “connector” in the business sense using this platform nor a user of this platform in the “social media” sense, however, my use case aside, the growth of the platform is undeniably impressive and this platform is around to stay as a “whuffie” component.

This infographic by Vincenzo Cosenza (licensed under a Creative Commons licence) provides a good current overview of the platform.

 

By James Burke on 23 May 2010 18:09
You left the Ark where? by nickgoesglobal, on Flickr

The term "curation" appears to be on the rise lately in many web, iPhone and iPad applications emerging and mainstream blog articles being published such as “Why Content Curation is Here to Stay” and “Curators of the Real-Time Web: Distilling the chatter to relevant, actionable information” although this is not showing up too much yet on google trends.

User Generated Content (UGC) has become the "norm" in many web2.0 and post web2.0 applications where text, images, audio, video etc. is openly shared and licenced with licences such as Creative Commons or freely shared via the "embed" where legal reuse and repurposing rights and obligations can sometimes be difficult to ascertain due to that lack of an adopted content licence.

RSS is well established for sharing a "collection" of resources from a single source and OPML is gaining adoption for "collections" of resources from multiple sources. On the real-time-web front protocols such as PubSubHubbub allow the real-time publishing of feeds but the usefulness and relevance of these feeds appears to be sparking a new area of interest in web apps.

One aspect of "Web 3.0" could be seen as the "return of the expert" and the rise and validation of the "subject matter expert" where their curated "works" is seen as holding value over and above other people and their collections due to them having more contextual social capital or "whuffie".

By James Burke on 22 May 2010 10:18

911report_cover_HIGHRES

The 9/11 Commission Report, formally named Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is the official report of the events leading up to the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was prepared by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (informally sometimes known as the "9/11 Commission" or the "Kean/Hamilton Commission") at the request of the President and Congress, and is available to the public for sale or free download.

The 9/11 Commission Report was released to the Public Domain(follow @thepublicdomain if interested in this topic) and available as a PDF, on scribd (flash & HTML5), LibreVox audio and an XHTML version amongst many other formats.

The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, and published by Hill & Wang, is an abridged graphic novel adaptation of the report (although a copyrighted work).

By James Burke on 21 May 2010 16:25

FCC III The Fiat Mio CC (@fiatmio) is a concept car where more than 15,000 people have submitted their ideas and contributions against 21 topics / discussion areas. All contributions have been submitted under a Creative Commons licence (see Fiat's terms) and have been used to shape the Fiat Concept Car III (FCC III) - "a car to call your own".

 

 

Users were stimulated to think in broad terms about traffic and life onboard. From the analysis of almost 17 thousand contributors, a briefing was elaborated containing the most popular ideas, suggestions and demands that make more sense with regard to the scenery faced by most participants. The end result was summarized as follows:

“A compact and agile car, comfortable and safe with innovative traffic solutions for big cities, a pollutant-free engine and the capacity to receive personalized updates, and changes in configuration, and having interface between car and user”.

The FCC III is the end result of this briefing. Fiat will unveil this future Concept Car at the Automobile Show in October 2010.

Fiat Mio 

By James Burke on 19 May 2010 16:52

Cameron Sinclair is the 2006 TED Prize winner and co-founder (and “Chief Eternal Optimist”) of Architecture for Humanity (@archforhumanity) and the Open Architecture Network, a non-profit that seeks architecture solutions to global crises.

Adaptable Hillside Classrooms Hundreds of projects are available on the Open Architecture Network and are all licensed with a Creative Commons licence – eg “Adaptable Hillside Classrooms”.

Each project contains a workspace, team profiles, project updates and access to related files that aims to offer open source architectural plans and blueprints on the web.

 

 

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