“The first surprising part of this story is that the Boston Police Department has a Twitter feed. They use it to post breaking police-type information that’s useful to the public, such as roads closed due to car accidents, crime data, big arrests, etc. Sometimes they also reply to reader questions. And that is how TruTV learned that the Boston police will not hide the zombie invasion from the public.”

Online version of forthcoming O’Reilly Book about a Python library for NLP.

“I am at a loss to explain why Eucalyptus is being treated differently than these applications by Apple. I’m also frankly amazed that they would suggest I should be manually censoring content that is being downloaded from the public Internet – classic, even ancient, books, no less.”

“In the memorandum, the President outlined three principles for promoting a transparent and open government: transparency, participation, and collaboration. Now, the President is calling on you to help shape how that commitment is fulfilled. This online brainstorming session, open from May 21st to 28th, 2009, will enable the White House to hear your most important ideas relating to open government.”

“Amazon is now hosting all United States TIGER Census data in its cloud. We just finished moving 140 gigs of shapefiles of U.S. states, counties, districts, parcels, military areas, and more over to Amazon. This means that you can now load all of this data directly onto one of Amazon’s virtual machines, use the power of the cloud to work with these large data sets, generate output that you can then save on Amazon’s storage, and even use Amazon’s cloud to distribute what you make.”

“Preliminary result of a little competition with the goal to write an image encoder/decoder that allows to send an image in a tweet. The image on the left is what I currently manage to send in 140 characters via twitter.”

“I’ve been wanting to talk about this for a while. I was holding off, while Apple was working to patch this vulnerability. Unfortunately, it is still not patched in their latest security update from just a few days ago. I believe that since this vulnerability has already been public for almost 6 months, making MacOS X users aware that Java needs to be disabled in their browser is the good thing to do.”

“Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.”

“An unlikely pair of politicians — Bob Barr (Libertarian Party) and Ralph Nader (Green Party) — are jointly supporting Right-To-Repair Act of 2009 (H.R. 2057), a law that would make it legal to break the DRM on automotive systems so that independent garages can repair cars even if the manufacturers try to lock them out and then charge high rents to a select few mechanics who are given the crypto keys necessary to read the engine diagnostics.”

‘A century and half ago, journalists were much closer to the market and more clearly understood they were sellers of labor in the market. Before professionalism of journalism, many journalists not only wrote the news, but went to the streets to distribute and sell it and few journalists had regular employment in the news and information business. Journalists and social observers debated whether practicing journalism for a news entity was desirable. Even Karl Marx argued that “The first freedom of the press consists in it not being a trade.”‘

Independent micro-coverage of a bill before the House of Representatives.

“For good or ill, the modern economy is driven by middle-class consumption. If middle class wages are rising, everything is fine. They’ll consume more, debt will stay tolerable, and rich people will benefit from the growing economy. But if middle class wages are stagnant, then vast pools of money are increasingly directed toward the rich, who have a limited ability to spend it. So they end up loaning it back to the middle class, collecting economic rents along the way, and the middle class laps it up, figuring that their wage stagnation is just temporary and they’ll eventually pay all the money back.

“But they don’t, of course, because today’s rich have no intention of ever allowing wage growth among the middle class. The result, eventually, is disaster.”

“A guide to bars and avoiding crime in NW” (and a submission to the Apps for Democracy contest)

“The easiest and most entertaining way to collect feedback from your audience: Project polls or message boards on a large screen, have everyone send their input via their cell phones and see results instantly!

“This free service is limited to 100 participants per question, please contact us if you are planning bigger events. Service currently only available in the United States.”

“I had made the call a couple days earlier to cancel my print subscription. After going through the process of getting the Chronicle at a reduced rate of $20 for a year of Wednesday-through-Sunday delivery, then having that rate shoot up to $400+ per year, the time had come to cut the cord. Or stretch the cord, depending on what I would now be reading over breakfast.

“Because, after all, I write and edit a site dedicated to the way media habits are changing, so why can’t I change my own habits? What was keeping me in ink and paper for so many years? The morning ritual of reading the paper over breakfast? Sharing it with family and loved ones? The simplicity of taking a glance at the news, cutting out an article by hand? Extra wrapping paper?”

“One of the more interesting and truly useful trends sparked by the microblogging service is the way street-food vendors have flocked to it to relay info to customers. This is particularly helpful with vendors who switch up locations from day to day—or hour to hour. In retrospect, it almost seems like Twitter was made for this purpose. What better way for a roving kitchen to publish crucial intel, from the field, without a dedicated internet connection?
“For your convenience, we’ve compiled a list of street vendors on Twitter, divided by region.”

“Creating a well-informed public is a core value of representative government. It is a prerequisite for ensuring the best representatives are elected and a crucial component of government oversight—as well as being important in areas well beyond civics. This document speaks to why public government data (also called “public sector information”) is a valuable resource to society if put on the Web and shared freely with the public, and discusses how to go about doing it. We discuss technological considerations and end with sixteen guiding principles for best practices in open government data.”

“It’s not that expensive. For the cost of 60 miles of highway, we can have a 10 million-book digital library available to a generation that is growing up reading on-screen. Our job is to put the best works of humankind within reach of that generation. Through a simple Web search, a student researching the life of John F. Kennedy should be able to find books from many libraries, and many booksellers — and not be limited to one private library whose titles are available for a fee, controlled by a corporation that can dictate what we are allowed to read.”

“Not keeping an index, or map, of where documents are kept gives the a City an excuse to deny a request for information. The lack of an index makes documents more difficult to locate. Therefore using the exemption offers a loophole for a City to deny release of a piece of unfavorable information.”

‘The LEGO Group and Adam Reed Tucker of Brickstructures, Inc. officially introduced the LEGO Architecture line in 2008. The line currently consists of six buildings – now including two of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous and recognizable buildings, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and “Fallingwater.”’

“They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Well, the greatest trick that Washington ever played was convincing the nation that the actual work of government was too dull for the people to participate in or pay attention to.”

“A set of sketchnotes from the SND annual meeting on May 16, 2009 at Tribune Tower, in Chicago, IL”

“Yet as the credit bubble inflated, the same spirit of permissiveness that pervaded the mortgage market mellowed the cranky skepticism of us emerging-markets investors. A three-year unsecured loan to a “Top 4” (read: the fourth-largest) bank in Azerbaijan, almost as large as its entire deposit base? How about financing the takeover of a decrepit Balkan steel mill with imperfect title at almost 100 percent of its value? However brutally I might have dismissed them, whatever specific flaws I might have criticized, these deals were getting yeses from other funds. Salesmen often called later to make sure I knew the deal had been placed; their gloating implied that my no left me behind the times.”

“When it comes to finding a figure for the citizens of Chicago, they say the meters are worth $1.16 billion,” says Waguespack. “But when it comes to finding a figure to cover Morgan Stanley, they say they’re worth, what, $5 billion? Who are they looking out for, the residents or Morgan Stanley?”

‘”People are welcomed and encouraged to take public transportation if they find they don’t want to pay parking fees,” said Jessica Maxey-Faulkner, Park District spokeswoman.’

‘A spokesperson for the producer said: “Danger Mouse remains hugely proud of Dark Night of the Soul and hopes that people lucky enough to hear the music, by whatever means, are as excited by it as he is.”
‘He added that the album, which comes with a limited edition, “100+ page book” of David Lynch photographs inspired by the music “will now come with a blank, recordable CD-R”.
‘”All copies will be clearly labelled: ‘For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.’”‘

“In November of 2008 the City of Toronto hosted an internal Web 2.0 conference and invited Mark Surman – executive director of the Mozilla Foundation and long time participant in the Toronto social tech space – to deliver the keynote entitled “A City that Thinks like the Web“.

“This marked a turning point in the history of the city. It was the moment when the Mayor, Council, City Staff and an increasing number of citizens collectively understood the power and potential of architecting a city to be open and participatory.

“This site is dedicated to propagating that idea. To provide resources to help enable citizens of cities around the world to get their local governments to open up and to track what data sets cities have opened up so citizens can use them.

“Below is the talk Mark gave. Encourage others to watch it. And then edit it. Create “a city that thinks like the web” presentation for your town, city, metropolis, or mega-region.”

Javascript tool provides (surprisingly accurate) geolocation in the browser, if permission is granted by the user. Free for non-commercial use.

“It is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism… have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.
…
“By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.”

“The internet is huge, growing, and being built by people who speak hundreds of different languages. There are editions of Wikipedia in over 200 languages, and some scholars estimate that there’s as much user content created in Chinese as there is in English. Unless we find scaleable, inexpensive ways to translate, we’re each going to face an internet that’s grows everyday, where we find less of the content understandable. Until we figure out better solutions to translation, we’re fooling ourselves into believing we’re more cosmopolitan and connected than we actually are.”

“Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet. Journalism therefore needs a bright line imposed by statute: that the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement.”

“Based on the bitter, intemperate comments following my story on Malort cocktails last month, I know how difficult it still is for some to believe you can–or should–make a delicious, balanced drink with Chicago’s native wormwood liqueur and still preserve its two-fisted integrity. And yet, Bar DeVille’s Brad Bolt is taking the case to another arena.”

Blog of gems found on library bookshelves.

“THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED THAT the City of Vancouver endorses the principles of:

Open and Accessible Data – the City of Vancouver will freely share with citizens, businesses and other jurisdictions the greatest amount of data possible while respecting privacy and security concerns;
Open Standards – the City of Vancouver will move as quickly as possible to adopt prevailing open standards for data, documents, maps, and other formats of media;
Open Source Software – the City of Vancouver, when replacing existing software or considering new applications, will place open source software on an equal footing with commercial systems during procurement cycles…”

“We appreciate that this commonsense idea is finally getting some high profile attention. We aren’t so naïve as to think that congressional Republicans aren’t engaging in a little partisan gamesmanship with their sudden embrace of an idea that has been around for some time. They weren’t exactly carrying the banner for the cause when, for example, they were in the majority and Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act in 2001.”

“The new rules would make working with earmark data easier by “requiring any Committee accepting earmark requests to maintain a searchable online database of Members’ earmark requests.”. This would bring some uniformity to the way different committees — Transporation, we’re looking at you — require disclosure of earmark requests.”

‘Santana had actually already sought permission from the bank to settle for as little as $10,000. It’s an open secret that if a debtor is willing to wait long enough, he can probably get away with paying almost nothing, as long as he doesn’t mind hurting his credit score. So Santana knew he should jump at the offer. But as an amateur psychologist, Santana was eager to make his own diagnosis — and presumably boost his own commission.
…
‘The man mulled it over, and a few days later called back and said he’d pay $12,000.

‘“Boom, baby!” Santana shouted as he put down the phone. “It’s all about getting inside their heads and understanding what they need to hear,” he told me later. “It really feels great to know I’m helping people in pain.”’

Flavors include Frank Behry, Mintimalism, Mies Vanilla Rohe

“So what can nonprofits & social change organizations learn from the world of open source development that could help them engage their members on a deeper level and create a bigger impact? Some lessons may be found in the inspiring open-source project, OpenMRS. OpenMRS is a community-developed, open-source application for managing health information in developing countries.”

“What I am saying is that no torture or harsh interrogation techniques were employed by any U.S. interrogator for the entire second term of Cheney-Bush, 2005-2009. So, if we are to believe the protestations of Dick Cheney, that Obama’s having shut down the “Cheney interrogation methods” will endanger the nation, what are we to say to Dick Cheney for having endangered the nation for the last four years of his vice presidency?”

“Still, it seems only right that journalists — who spend a lot of time pressing public officials to disclose their income sources — start revealing potential conflicts of interest. Some form of transparency will become even more important as a thousand new and unproven news sources bloom online.

“Without the Chronicle’s dynamic reporting duo, the Bay Area air district would not be getting back its $75,000, money that could help cities expand bike paths or plant more trees.

“That’s proof enough for me that we can start the disclosure on these speaking engagements right here and now.”

“Rich snippets could be a turning point for the Semantic Web, since, for the first time, they create a powerful economic motivation for semantic markup. Google has told us that rich snippets significantly enhance click-through rates. That means that anyone who has been doing SEO is now going to have to add microformats and RDFa to their toolkit.”

“Depicting networks (also known as graphs, and covered in chapters 7 and 8 of Visualizing Data) is a tricky subject, and too often leads to representations that are a tangled and complicated mess. Such diagrams are often referred to with terms like ball of yarn or string, a birds nest, cat hair or simply hairball.

“It’s also common for a network diagram to be engaging and attractive for its complexity (usually aided and abetted by color), which tends to hide how poorly it conveys the meaning of the data it represents.”

“Americans’ bad eating habits ensure our supply.”

‘They are calling themselves “twisters.”’

‘Mr. Kerlikowske said the issue was one of limited police resources, adding that he doesn’t support efforts to legalize drugs. He also said he supports needle-exchange programs, calling them “part of a complete public-health model for dealing with addiction.”‘

“Do birds have a favorite font?”

“Scrapy is a high level scraping and web crawling framework for writing spiders to crawl and parse web pages for all kinds of purposes, from information retrieval to monitoring or testing web sites.”

“The Congressional Research Service investigates important issues and produces detailed, well-written reports that are available to members of Congress but not the general public. A resolution has been introduced in the Senate to make these reports freely available online. It would be an important step forward for government openness, and it would narrow the information gap between Washington insiders and ordinary Americans.”

“I’m sure there’s a dozen other things that I could recommend– things like publishing your personal financial disclosure forms online, and providing the bills that you sponsor in machine readable formats, but really– just these two things are great!

“So if you’re a hill staffer or even a Member of Congress, please consider these two things. And if you need help, feel free to get in touch. If you’re unclear on some of this technical stuff, we’re happy to answer any questions you have. We are more than happy to provide you with instructions on specifically how to do this stuff.”