Group items tagged

UK open government data: the results of the official audit

not yet systematically assessed the costs and benefits of the Government's specific transparency initiatives

Government departments reckon on spending from £53,000 to £500,000 each year on just providing and publishing open data

The use of open source software, cloud computing technologies, and an integrated approach to search, video, and social media seems almost common-place in industry these days. Yet government websites aren’t quite there with the exception of a few noteable exceptions (not an exhaustive list by any means). This is why I’m so excited about that NASA has recently released an RFI (Request for Information) for information on how to build a better public website nasa.gov and intranet insdie.nasa.gov. This is a really big step for NASA, but,we truly need your help.

Being the monopoly holder of transit data does not benefit TransLink.

Consumers don't turn to who has the data, they turn to who makes the data easiest to use.

It should be focused on shifting the competitive value in the marketplace from access to accessibility.

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.

From an official and public service point of view information providers want openness biased towards information access. One tends to encourage participation, but this is understood as mechanisms facilitating feedback, not as tools making the public producers of content. From a commercial point of view information providers also want to facilitate easy access, but these actors also have strong interests in encouraging openness with users acting as producers of content. These actors are more likely to develop an understanding of the “quality of information” with a bias towards information’s ability to appeal and engage an audience

Government 2.0 is transformative

Government 2.0 is multi-leveled

Government 2.0 is tech-enabled

Social computing will continue to grow in government, but won't hit critical mass in 2010.

Don't forget that there was some clamping down on social media in government during 2009 including the Marines restricting access to services such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter. Progress in 2010 will be better in state and to a lesser extent local government. The federal government will also struggle with a consistent policy and approach for internal and external social computing, which probably won't emerge next year.

Open data goes back to the drawing board. I've been bullish on open data and APIs for years and the government got religion in 2009 with data.gov. But the usage is down as government workers and businesses realize that the data is often far out-of-date and not in forms that can be used operationally.

In fact, Obama's base of small donors was almost exactly the same percent as George W. Bush's in 2004 -- Obama had 26% and the great Republican satan 25%. Obviously, this is unacceptable to current popular thinking.

The myth is that money from small donors dominated Barack Obama's finances

It comes down to which definition of "small donor" you accept

Google Caffeine — the remodeled search infrastructure rolled out across Google's worldwide data center network earlier this year — is not based on MapReduce, the distributed number-crunching platform that famously underpinned the company's previous indexing system. As the likes of Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft work to duplicate MapReduce through the open source Hadoop project, Google is moving on.

The whole section "Minority investment evaluations aren’t real" is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don't even know where to start. It's like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5' tall boy as 5' tall because he's often sitting down. Every single day every single public company in the world is valued by the last share traded, usually for a tiny fraction of the company.Finally, to the main point. Facebook has certainly figured out how to make money off of 500,000,000 users. And as they optimize, they will make a lot more money. When they figure out how to make another DIME off of every user, they will instantly be making another $50,000,000 a year... in pure profit. How much profit will 37signals make if you figure out how to make another dime off of every customer? Eh David? Facebook works on the theory that when you have a lot of people, you don't have to make as much per person, because the amount of money you make is the number of customers times the amount of money you make off of each one. Again, that pesky multiplication.

The bond and equity markets are based on sound regulation, transparency, and quarterly statements. Facebook has none of those things when it operates in the dark of the secondary markets.

If it seems like American teens are texting all the time, it’s probably because on average they’re sending or receiving 3,339 texts a month.

No one texts more than teens (age 13-17), especially teen females, who send and receive an average of 4,050 texts per month. Teen males also outpace other male age groups, sending and receiving an average of 2,539 texts.

Texting is Easier and Faster than Voice Calls

privacy advocates are pushing for a similar “do not track” feature that would let Internet users tell Web sites to stop surreptitiously tracking their online habits and collecting clues about age, salary, health, location and leisure activities.

Consumer advocates worry that the competing agendas of economic policy makers in the Obama administration, who want uniform international standards, and federal regulators, who are trying to balance consumer protection and commercial rights, will neglect the interests of people most affected by the privacy policies.

In the 1990s, the Commerce Department had an extremely prominent role in developing what we think of as Internet policy, and we are reinvigorating that historical role

It is my firm belief that we cannot expect citizens to trust Europe if we are not serious in defending the right to privacy

The first is our work with social networking sites.

The second example is RFID

About a year ago I wrote a simple web application to present UK train times in a simple format for mobile phone users.

When I wrote the app none of the official train timetable sites could do this and I don’t believe any can now.

To reiterate – I built this because it was convenient and would be useful to others.  Not to make a profit. …and today National Rail killed it.

f you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long

You think your business is different, that you’re only going to have one shot at press and everything needs to be perfect for when Techcrunch brings the world to your door. But if you only have one shot at getting an audience, you’re doing it wrong.

In that short rapid iteration environment the most important thing isn’t necessarily how perfect code is when you send it out, but how quickly you can revert if you need to so the cost of a mistake is really low, under a minute of brokenness.

How, then, does the public get access to data, and ideally, to raw data streams?

Using force, by changing the laws or creating new regulations

Using intimidation, by enlisting the news media to pressure the agency