In this case, there are four key players. Two of them are a couple: a journalist who lives in New York and a social media specialist who lives in London. The other two have roots in Pakistan: a journalist and documentary filmmaker who recently moved to the U.S. and a political commentator in Islamabad.
Each of them contributed to a chain of information that turned one man's offhand comments about a helicopter in the middle of the night into an internationally known work of citizen journalism.
"The relevant point here is not Schmidt's thought on behavior and choice but the fact that, no matter what you choose to do or not do, your life exists in the cloud, indexed by Google, in the background of a photo album on Facebook, and across thousands of spammy directories that somehow know where you live and where you went to high school. These little bits of information exist like digital detritus. With software like PittPatt that can glean vast amounts of cloud-based data when prompted with a single photo, your digital life is becoming inseparable from your analog one. You may be able to change your name or scrub your social networking profiles to throw off the trail of digital footprints you've inadvertently scattered across the Internet, but you can't change your face. And the cloud never forgets a face. "
"From the makers of AppScale comes an open source platform that provides customizable gamification elements designed to increase user interaction on websites. The project involves badging, points, live notifications, and leaderboards. Additonally, the platform provides analytics to track user participation."
At least it does if you live in one of the six cities Google has so far partnered with. Boston, Portland, San Diego, and San Francisco, as well as Madrid and Turin across the pond, have all worked with Google to include a real-time schedule of their public transit systems in the latest version of Google Maps.