You can build it but they won’t come. All successful open source projects build communities of supportive engaged developers who identify with the project and keep it productive and useful.

Ongoing maintenance and distribution of the data hasn’t been budgeted for almost all the data sets we have today. This attitude has to change, and new projects give us the chance to get it right, but most existing datasets are unfunded for maintenance and release.

there are at least five different types of Open Data groupie: low-polling governments who want to see a PR win from opening their data, transparency advocates who want a more efficient and honest government, citizen advocates who want services and information to make their lives better, open advocates who believe that governments act for the people therefore government data should be available for free to the people, and wonks who are hoping that releasing datasets of public toilets will deliver the same economic benefits to the country as did opening the TIGER geo/census dataset.

Open Municipal Geodata

Goals

To develop an open technical standard for the structuring and sharing of public geodata

Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data sets, including cleaning up inconsistencies, transforming them from one format into another, and extending them with new data from external web services or other databases.

you can read how the Chicago Tribune, ProPublica and data.gov.uk have used it

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

How do you permanently delete profile information on social networking websites? Can you transfer your contacts and photos to another service?

Individuals

should have the "right to be forgotten" when their data is no longer needed or they want their data to be deleted

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

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.

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.

Let’s do an International Open Data Hackathon

It will happen on Saturday, Dec 4th

Anyone can organize a local event.

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network based digital currency.

Bitcoin transactions are practically free

n Q3 2010, the worldwide smart phone market grew an impressive 95% over the same quarter a year ago to 80.9 million shipped units. Nokia retained its leadership position, albeit by a diminished margin, with a 33% share of the market. Apple’s healthy performance this quarter saw it achieve a 17% share worldwide, a little ahead of RIM, which held a 15% share this quarter.

Android Takes OS Lead in US Market for Q3

Android is up 1,309 percent from this time last year and now holds an impressive quarter of the smartphone market.

android outsold iphone almost 2:1 that too in a quarter where new version of iPhone was released.

Dunbar's number it basically says that the most amount of people that you can maintain stable social relationships with is 150

Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.

Morten Hansen's fantastic book on Collaboration in which he states that the real value of collaboration and of networks doesn't come from strong relationships and networks but from weak one's. 

Measurements of the collective public mood derived from millions of tweets can predict the rise and fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average up to a week in advance with an accuracy approaching 90 percent

Unstructured Information Management applications are software systems that analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. An example UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or relations, such as works-for or located-at.

The UK government has compiled a list of 'principles' regarding its open data initiative, and is calling on the public to provide comments and feedback.

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

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,