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I find business cases for data publishers much more compelling than examples of how open data can be used. For a start, I don’t think it’s possible to predict how open data will be used or what that will mean in terms of economic or societal impact: the wide world into which it’s released is just too complex to know.

One argument I’ve heard made about government open data is that releasing it can help organisations avoid the costs of Freedom of Information requests.

The reverse of cost avoidance is finding sponsors for open data publication.

benfalls inexakt ist Mathias Müller von Blumencron, wenn er  ebenfalls in der FAZ schreibt, dass es nun „doch ein Recht auf Vergessen werden im Internet“ gibt. Nein: das gibt es nicht.

Dieses Recht des Einzelnen ist  abzuwägen gegenüber den wirtschaftlichen Interesse des Suchmaschinenbetreibers und „dem Interesse der breiten Öffentlichkeit daran, die Information bei einer anhand des Namens der betroffenen Person durchgeführten Suche zu finden“

utocomplete-Urteil des BGH keine Klagswelle gegen Google gegeben habe, wie die FAZ einen Anwalt zitiert.

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns

There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.

Wikileaks (website) publishes documents that show a plan to curb the free software in the European Union.

This file shows that Jonathan Zuck, president of Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) –an organization with close ties to Microsoft–, and founder of Americans for Technology Leadership, had influenced the change of working documents of the European Union.

This publication shows how pressure groups influence or attempt to influence the decisions made by the European institutions, but in this case is particularly striking one of these groups trying to influence against free software (ACT) has close ties Microsoft,

We, the citizens, through the state, pay for the production of academic books and research papers twice, first through salaries and research grants, and second through the purchase of books and journal subscriptions. This is how the the most fundamental principles of academia, to study and to share its findings, are obstructed, and its operation is made far more expensive and cumbersome.

This document is a best practices guide for governments embracing the notion of "open data". It discusses why open government data is beneficial to society, i.e. how it is civic capital, and what kinds of technological considerations must be made when making government data open.

The release of the R package “googleVis” has made the production of interactive maps through Google’s Chart Tools a simple task.