Yves's planet

ReadWriteWeb: Improve Your Company's Media Outreach with MediaSync

2010-09-08T04:18:32+00:00

Here at ReadWriteWeb, like other major blogs, we get a ton of email tips everyday from entrepreneurs, PR companies and the general public suggesting story ideas and requesting product reviews.

Surprisingly, considering the size of our site and the pervasiveness of spam in general, most of these emails are quite interesting and useful. Some of them, however, appear to be blasted out to a list of seemingly random blogs with little forethought, or worse, a political screed written in all caps.

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For small businesses and startups especially, getting the word out to relevant media outlets, while important, can be a time-consuming task that competes with each day's list of to-do's.

So how can businesses streamline their media outreach? One answer is MediaSync, a service from Web marketing firm mBlast. MediaSync is a free database of media contacts that enables you to find individual journalists and bloggers based on the topics they tend to cover and the outlets they write for.

For example, a search for "social media" will return a list of bloggers for Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOm, CNET and others.

Each writer has a profile containing basic contact info, a brief biography, links to their social networking profiles, as well as data about the topics and beats they cover.

MediaSync currently boasts 521,899 media contacts in its database, and that number is sure to be growing on a regular basis.

The database is evidently a work in progress, as not all media contact profiles are populated, including those of a few high-profile bloggers and journalists. Nonetheless, MediaSync remains a good way to do some initial research into which media professionals might be most receptive to a given request for coverage.

Most tech and business bloggers see a ton of emails fly across their desktop and mobile phones each day, so targeting the right ones might improve your message's chances of getting read and, if you're truly onto something, acted upon.

Discuss

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from hex] mamememo: The Qlobe

2010-09-08T04:17:07+00:00

The most incredible Quine I have ever seen.

xkcd.com: Control

2010-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

ReadWriteWeb: Gmail's Priority Inbox Refreshingly Difficult to Game

2010-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

Google rolled out a new inbox last week that, in theory, separates your important emails from your unimportant emails and lets you speed through work faster.

Most of the initial reaction reflected users' concerns as email recipients - excitement about reading email faster, worry about missing something urgent because Google didn't think it was important. But most of us who receive email also send email, and we want those emails to be read. Are we entering an era of optimizing our emails for the Priority Inbox, just as we optimize our websites and blogs for Google search?

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The death of email marketing?

Email marketers in particular were scrambling after Google announced Priority Inbox. The blog Marketing Professor introduced a new term to describe the divide between priority emails and non-priority emails - the "Priority Inbox Fold."

The marketing blogosphere's conclusion seems to be that Priority Inbox is going to cripple marketers who rely on blasting out messages to a massive list of email addresses, but that it will be a boon to marketers who are trying to figure out how to really engage their audiences.

Excerpt and illustration from a post on the blog Marketing Professor about the "Priority Inbox Fold."

Some marketers have kicked around ideas like adding the word "important" to every email, emphasizing upcoming deadlines in the text or having a competition that requires your subscribers to reply. But most are upbeat - as marketers often are - about Priority Inbox.

"Gmail's Priority Inbox Isn't a Threat, But An Opportunity," booms a headline on email marketing blog Notes from the Lab. "Doesn't this just place a spotlight on what email marketers should be doing better than anyone? Providing value so the minute an email comes in from a sender, it's received with positive thoughts in mind? If you're doing things the right way, you shouldn't worry but be confident you'll be tagged as important."

Fretting about getting priority for outgoing email

But what does Priority Inbox mean for ordinary users? The feature seems to err on the side of assigning too much importance to email, as Google doesn't want to burn users right away by burying an email from the boss or a reminder from the dentist. ReadWriteWeb's fearless new researcher Micah Vandergrift tried valiently to send me an email that would be marked non-priority, to no avail.

Emails that were marked Priority included the subject lines, "This is interesting" (about pizza), "This is not a priority at all" (copy of an email from the Gotham City Beardsmen's Alliance), and a subject-less email which was a list of Micah's favorite bands from Last.fm.

Tough to game

But Priority Inbox is like a recommendation engine for email. It assigns a list of attributes to each email and watches for patterns as you gently mark emails important or not important by hand. I've only been using Priority Inbox for a week, so it hasn't fully learned the way we do things around here (not priority: humorous emails from uncle, press releases from Vespa. Priority: discount airfare).

As time goes on, I have faith that Priority Inbox will learn what I think is important. That's great for receiving email, but a little unnerving for sending it. The personalized algorithm makes it extremely tough to optimize for exposure in Priority Inbox the way we've learned to optimize for Google's search engine.

No doubt tricks will arise, like including urgent-sounding buzzwords in the subject line and making sure that you are included in the recipient's social graph. But based on early experiments,

But that probably reflects reality - senders and recipients are not always in agreement concerning the importance of an email:

Are you worried your emails won't get marked "Priority"?

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: What the VMworld Labs Demonstrated About the Cloud

2010-09-08T03:30:02+00:00

VMworld set up a lab this year that ran a hybrid cloud.

The VMware team set up a data center at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco that connected to public clouds provided by Terremark in Miami and Verizon in Ashburn, Va.

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The hybrid cloud was redundant so if it went down, the load could be picked up elsewhere.

This was the first year that VMworld used a hybrid cloud environment. They called it Lab Cloud. The numbers demonstrate the difference in what can be accomplished in a multi-tenant environment.

Last year, there were 4,500 labs completed at VMword. This year there were more than 15,000 labs done.

Lab Cloud deployed and destroyed about 4000 Virtual Machines on a per hour basis. In total, Lab Cloud deployed a total of 145,097 virtual machines. Private cloud environments can not usually handle this kind of load, showing again the capabilities of what can be done when data centers and public cloud environments are connected.

To be fair, it is important to remember that this is a lab environment. The Lab Cloud was built from scratch. Any enterprise environment will face any number of obstacles in setting up a hybrid environment.

One thing it does show is the volume of virtual machines that are being spun into the cloud. The Lab Cloud demonstrated how much more extended a cloud environment can be compared to a traditional data center operation or a private cloud.

It also shows how VMware plans to do training at future VMworld events. VMware set up 480 seats for doing labs. Each lab took about an hour to do. A few people complete all of the labs. But more so, it helped give attendees hands-on experience in how to manage thousands of virtual machines that are being deployed and destroyed throughout a work day.

Source: Yellow Bricks

The enterprise needs this kind of training for a few reasons. Hybrid cloud computing is still very new to most people. The labs give people a chance to learn new skills that will be needed as enterprise operations evolve toward a hybrid cloud computing environment.

And perhaps just as much, it shows the IT knowledge worker the possibilities that the cloud brings to their work.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: Police in 14 Countries Raid File-Sharing Hosts And Hit Close to Wikileaks

2010-09-08T03:15:58+00:00

Authorities cracked down on file-sharing sites across Europe yesterday in a major operation two years in the making, Swedish officials told media.

The raid is getting special attention because one target in Stockholm is best known for hosting part of Wikileaks.org, the site where whistle-blowers have leaked highly sensitive documents from governments across the world. But authorities said the real target was not Wikileaks, but the highly-active pirate network known as The Scene or Warez Scene, which encompasses 48 sites.

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Seven locations were raided in Sweden, according to the file-sharing news site Torrent Freak, including a university. Raids were also reportedly carried out in the Netherlands, Norway, Germany, the UK, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Belgium, where the request originated.

Several torrent sites including Pirate Bay were down for users in some countries today.

Five policemen showed up yesterday morning at PRQ, the company that in part hosts Wikileaks, and asked about two IP addresses used in 2009. The company handed over email addresses associated with the IP addresses, which are the only records it keeps on its clients. No servers or computers were confiscated, the company said.

The raid comes as Wikileaks is preparing to release 15,000 classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan, which the U.S. government is anxious to prevent. PRQ denied that Wikileaks was the subject of the raid and Wikileaks has not made any statement yet.

"The raid was about the usual file-sharing crack-down, which they have each year, so not directed directly against PRQ or its customers," PRQ said in an email to customers.

The extent and precise targeting of the raid suggest that it was a dedicated effort to crack down on piracy. The fact that one of Wikileaks' hosts was targeted could be a coincidence because Wikileaks and file-sharing sites have similar requirements: security and bravery in the face of international law enforcement.

But stranger conspiracy theories regarding Wikileaks have been proposed. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is claiming rape charges filed against him in Sweden are part of a smear campaign orchestrated by the U.S. government.

What do you think - was Wikileaks a target here?

Discuss

Slashdot: Mozilla Labs To Promote Open Web Gaming

2010-09-08T03:10:20+00:00

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla Labs has started an initiative to promote and develop gaming based on Open Web technologies. They write, 'We are excited to present to you the latest initiative from Mozilla Labs: Gaming. Mozilla Labs Gaming is all about games built, delivered and played on the Open Web and the browser. We want to explore the wider set of technologies which make immersive gaming on the Open Web possible. We invite the wider community to play with cool, new tech and aim to help establish the Open Web as the platform for gaming across all your Internet connected devices.' To that end Mozilla Labs will launch Game On 2010, a game development competition, at the end of September."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: OTMj

2010-09-08T02:18:13+00:00

aur: OTMj 0.1 takes RDF/OO mappings from class definitions in the style of So(m)mer or Hibernate and allows to consume linked data from any data source.

(2010-09-08 02:08)

cs.MM updates on arXiv.org: M-Learning: A New Paradigm of Learning Mathematics in Malaysia. (arXiv:1009.1170v1 [cs.MM])

2010-09-08T01:18:52+00:00

M-Learning is a new learning paradigm of the new social structure with mobile and wireless technologies.Smart school is one of the four flagship applications for Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) under Malaysian government initiative to improve education standard in the country. With the advances of mobile devices technologies, mobile learning could help the government in realizing the initiative. This paper discusses the prospect of implementing mobile learning for primary school students. It indicates significant and challenges and analysis of user perceptions on potential mobile applications through a survey done in primary school context. The authors propose the m-Learning for mathematics by allowing the extension of technology in the traditional classroom in term of learning and teaching.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Equilibrium statistical mechanics on correlated random graphs. (arXiv:1009.1345v1 [cond-mat.stat-mech])

2010-09-08T01:18:16+00:00

Biological and social networks have recently attracted enormous attention between physicists. Among several, two main aspects may be stressed: A non trivial topology of the graph describing the mutual interactions between agents exists and/or, typically, such interactions are essentially (weighted) imitative. Despite such aspects are widely accepted and empirically confirmed, the schemes currently exploited in order to generate the expected topology are based on a-priori assumptions and in most cases still implement constant intensities for links. Here we propose a simple shift in the definition of patterns in an Hopfield model to convert frustration into dilution: By varying the bias of the pattern distribution, the network topology -which is generated by the reciprocal affinities among agents - crosses various well known regimes (fully connected, linearly diverging connectivity, extreme dilution scenario, no network), coupled with small world properties, which, in this context, are emergent and no longer imposed a-priori. The model is investigated at first focusing on these topological properties of the emergent network, then its thermodynamics is analytically solved (at a replica symmetric level) by extending the double stochastic stability technique, and presented together with its fluctuation theory for a picture of criticality. At least at equilibrium, dilution simply decreases the strength of the coupling felt by the spins, but leaves the paramagnetic/ferromagnetic flavors unchanged. The main difference with respect to previous investigations and a naive picture is that within our approach replicas do not appear: instead of (multi)-overlaps as order parameters, we introduce a class of magnetizations on all the possible sub-graphs belonging to the main one investigated: As a consequence, for these objects a closure for a self-consistent relation is achieved.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Diffusing opinions in bounded confidence processes. (arXiv:1004.1102v2 [physics.soc-ph] UPDATED)

2010-09-08T01:18:16+00:00

We study the effects of diffusing opinions on the Deffuant et al. model for continuous opinion dynamics. Individuals are given the opportunity to change their opinion, with a given probability, to a randomly selected opinion inside an interval centered around the present opinion. We show that diffusion induces an order-disorder transition. In the disordered state the opinion distribution tends to be uniform, while for the ordered state a set of well defined opinion clusters are formed, although with some opinion spread inside them. If the diffusion jumps are not large, clusters coalesce, so that weak diffusion favors opinion consensus. A master equation for the process described above is presented. We find that the master equation and the Monte-Carlo simulations do not always agree due to finite-size induced fluctuations. Using a linear stability analysis we can derive approximate conditions for the transition between opinion clusters and the disordered state. The linear stability analysis is compared with Monte Carlo simulations. Novel interesting phenomena are analyzed.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Towards a new crown indicator: An empirical analysis. (arXiv:1004.1632v2 [cs.DL] UPDATED)

2010-09-08T01:18:16+00:00

We present an empirical comparison between two normalization mechanisms for citation-based indicators of research performance. These mechanisms aim to normalize citation counts for the field and the year in which a publication was published. One mechanism is applied in the current so-called crown indicator of our institute. The other mechanism is applied in the new crown indicator that our institute is planning to adopt. We find that at high aggregation levels, such as at the level of large research institutions or at the level of countries, the differences between the two mechanisms are very small. At lower aggregation levels, such as at the level of research groups or at the level of journals, the differences between the two mechanisms are somewhat larger. We pay special attention to the way in which recent publications are handled. These publications typically have very low citation counts and should therefore be handled with special care.

physics.soc-ph updates on arXiv.org: Modeling Dynamical Influence in Human Interaction Patterns. (arXiv:1009.0240v1 [cs.SI] CROSS LISTED)

2010-09-08T01:18:16+00:00

We present a new perspective, together with a model and algorithm, on a well-observed property of many social phenomena: the influence strength between individuals changes over time (e.g., friendships break and reform). We propose an unsupervised generative switching model that simultaneously captures the system dynamics as the outcome of both (i) the influence between individuals (each modeled as an HMM), and (ii) the dynamics of the influence itself. We describe here a variational Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In our experiments, we illustrate applications of detecting structural change, predicting turn taking by analyzing a real group discussion behavior dataset and understanding flu influence patterns between US states. Results demonstrate that our approach is a strong alternative for modeling complex interacting social systems.

Slashdot: The State of Mapping APIs, 5 Years On

2010-09-08T00:24:10+00:00

macslocum writes "Map APIs took off in 2005, and during the ensuing years the whole notion of maps has changed. Where once they were slick add-ons, map functionality is now a necessary — and expected — tool. In this piece, Adam DuVander looks at the current state of mapping and he explains how mobile devices, third-party services and ease of use are shaping the map development world."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Mozilla Hopes Web Games Will Remind Us That Browsers Are Still Awesome

2010-09-08T00:20:32+00:00

Mozilla announced Mozilla Labs Gaming today, a push to get developers to make use of new Open Web technologies to build "awesome games" that can be played in a Web browser.

The move was timed to coincide with the latest update to Firefox 4, now in beta development, which promises better graphics and a new application programming interface (API) that will let developers read and write raw audio data in the browser. Together, the two announcements are aimed to let users and developers know there are still reasons to be pumped about the Web in this age of native apps.

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"Modern Open Web technologies introduced a complete stack of technologies such as Open Video, audio, WebGL, touch events, device orientation, geo location, and fast JavaScript engines which make it possible to build complex (and not so complex) games on the Web," Mozilla Labs wrote on its blog. "With these technologies being delivered through modern browsers today, the time is ripe for pushing the platform. And what better way than through games?"

Mozilla neglected to explain how these games will be distributed, a crucial detail for developers. Will there be a Firefox store similar to Google's Web app store, the Chrome Web Store? If so, will developers be able to charge money for these games?

Mozilla did announce an international game developer competition, Game On 2010, to open at the end of September. It's likely that the cash-flush Mozilla Foundation will put up some prize money for the best Web games.

Firefox's new audio API introduces new possibilities for game developers.

Mozilla hasn't explicitly pushed Firefox as the place to play all these fantastic new games, citing only "modern browsers." But the improvements to Firefox 4 suggest that's what it's thinking. It's possible that Mozilla expects developers who are inspired by this announcement simply list their games in the Chrome Web Store, which lists apps that can work in browsers other than Chrome.

We're guessing that driving developers to the Chrome Web Store is not what Mozilla is thinking. But it sounds like games are really a means to an end here. Magazines are writing stories about how the Web is dead and consumers and developers are flocking to native mobile apps. Mozilla wants to spread the word about what's possible in the Web browser.

We'll be paying close attention to see what details Mozilla reveals about the competition and its vision for the future of the browser-centric Web.

Are native apps really where it's at? What do you see in the browser's future, and do you think Web games are a good way to get there?

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: Archiving Iraq: One Wikipedia Entry's Edit Wars, Printed in 12 Volumes

2010-09-08T00:15:41+00:00

Above: Boutique book publisher and geek James Bridle has printed the 12,000 edits made to the controversial Wikipedia entry for Iraq War between December 2004 to November 2009 as a 7,000 page, 12 volume set of books.

"This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.
"And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future." -James Bridle

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Bridle spoke about the project in his talk "The Value of Ruins" at the dConstruct conference last week in Brighton, England. Audio of his talk is posted below.

Of the printed collection, Bridle says: "It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a dickhead'."

Of Wikipedia, Bridle says: "It's not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot."

I think that's pretty awesome.

Below: Bridle's talk at dConstruct, The Value of Ruins. Audio thanks to the wonderful podcast curation tool HuffDuffer. (Which, incidentally, was built by James Keith, author of HTML5 for Web Designers, who recently shook hands with James Bridle himself.)

The Value Of Ruins on Huffduffer

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: Top 10 Online Free Speech Resources

2010-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Anyone who writes on a specific topic will have a set of resources he or she refers to in order to keep on top of what's happening. Those of us who keep an eye out on how free speech issues affect the online world tend to use resources that are, of course, online. Practicing the transparency we preach, I thought it might be useful to share my top sources.

The criteria I used to come up with this list of 10 online free speech sources are that they need to be accessible to anyone, provide original news or original analysis of that news and be frequently updated. In this list I have focused on institutional resources.

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Reporters Without Borders - Internet RSF (as its known in French) was the first press freedom group to pay attention to the non-journalist, non-activist bloggers who were increasingly getting into legal trouble for speaking online. They're probably currently the best source on online threats internationally, with a lot of in-country intel.

Global Voices - Advocacy GVO leverages an international group of native respondents to cover issues of importance to the non-English speaking blogosphere (are we still using that term?). The leverage that group in turn to keep track of bloggers, and other users of social media, who have fallen afoul of the law.

Electronic Frontier Foundation This U.S. group is focused on the legal element of electronic speech. They are not just reporters and analysts. Their active cadre of lawyers are frequently actors in lawsuits to keep in the Internet open.

OpenNetInitiative Famous for their studies of filtering mechanisms and technology use in countries around the world, the ONI blog keeps intelligent track of news and trends in free speech.

MLRC: Legal Actions Against Bloggers Focusing on the U.S. legal landscape, the Media Law Resource Center's blog details "legal cases . . . in which bloggers have been sued for libel, privacy and related claims, or been subject to criminal investigations or prosecutions."

Net Effect Foreign Policy magazine's online speech blog, Net Effect is written by Evgeny Morozov, as wrong and dumb as he is right and smart (and he's right and smart a lot). Morozov has a distinctive point of view on events and trends online, one powered by more of a geopolitical context than most resources. Whether your agree with him (you won't) or disagree (you won't), there's usually something to think about, and sometimes news. He doesn't post as often as he should.

Wired - Online Rights Wired.com's listing of stories on electronic communications freedoms and threats to them come from across the magazine's contents. Some stories have exceptional analysis by thinkers in the middle of the stories.

Committee to Protect Journalists - Alerts The Committee to Protect Journalists was very late to the table in covering online issues, but their long experience dealing with threatened journalists and the contacts they have partially make up for it. A particularly good resource for overall free speech context in a region.

Freedom House - Newsroom Also good for overall context, Freedom House also produces intelligent reports on issues including online free speech trends.

These are the institutional resources I find myself using the most. In the future I may list the personal blogs I use the most, as well as the Twitter accounts from which I get the most useful information. In the meantime, how do you stay informed on free speech issues that affect you online?

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: Google Scribe Offers Mad Libs-esque Suggestions Across the Web

2010-09-07T23:45:00+00:00

Google has unveiled the latest addition to Google Labs, its text autocompletion tool Google Scribe. Scribe takes a look at the text you've already entered and tries to predict the next word or phrase, offering a drop down list of suggestions for you to chose from.

The most obvious application for Google Scribe is as a keystroke saver for Google's mobile platform, Android, and as an Internet-wide form of Google Suggest, the tool that suggests search terms as you type. In the meantime, it will likely offer up some entertainment and a bit of procrastination.

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The first thing we tried, after seeing if Scribe could tell us exactly how many sheets to the wind a drunk person might be, was to see what the tool suggested if we let it get behind the wheel. We started hitting "space" and then "enter" and wound up with this:

Another user noted in the reviews on Google Labs that they had found a similar phenomenon, wherein "If you let it autocomplete everything but the first word it ends up looping on itself, but not before running into 'Ima let you finish but Beyonce had one of the best...'".

Google-centric blog Google Operating System noted similar instances, which it explains comes from Google using "data extracted from web pages". It offers the example of "choose IngentaConnect" as a suggestion for after typing the word "why", which is offered because that phrase is used repeatedly on IngentaConnect's site.

For now, the tool is only available in English, though the presence of a language drop-down box strongly suggests others will soon be available. Users can also chose between constant word and phrase suggestions or having suggestions appear only when they hit the "tab" key.

A bookmarklet is also available, which shows which text fields on any page will allow Scribe to provide suggestions, meaning suggestions similar to those you would get in Google Search can now be offered up across the Web. In terms of functionality off the mobile platform, this might be the biggest - the power of Google Suggest anywhere you like. Perhaps this will be a feature we soon see added to Google Chrome? We'll see.

The real advantage, we think, will be to Google's mobile users, who don't have access to a full keyboard, but rather a touch screen. It could also be a big hit on Google TV, which will allow users to use their Android phones as controls.

Discuss

Slashdot: Smallest Manned Electric Plane Flies

2010-09-07T23:27:48+00:00

garymortimer writes "EADs have successfully flown an electrified Cri-Cri aircraft. The Cri-cri (short for cricket) is the smallest twin-engined manned aircraft in the world, designed in the early 1970s by French aeronautical engineer Michel Colomban, the Cri-cri aircraft is the world's smallest twin-engine . At only 4.9 m (16.1 ft) wingspan and 3.9 m (12.8 ft) length, it is a single-seater, making an impression of a dwarf velomobile with wings at close range. After its manned flight trials the airframe will be configured for autonomous flight. Obviously once the pilot is removed payload increases dramatically and the airframe itself has been approved for manned flight so certifying it for UAV flight should be simpler."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tommorris] YouTube - Why I Believe In Numbers

2010-09-07T23:17:48+00:00

ReadWriteWeb: Bahraini Blogger Arrested, Probably Tortured

2010-09-07T23:00:00+00:00

Bad economies always drag repression in their wake and social media is no exception to this rule. One of the worst instances is the recent arrest of Ali Abdulemam, a blogger and the editor of the long-running forum Bahrainonline.org (now shut down).

Abdulemam was arrested for the same reason before - he had acted as a midwife to discussion on democracy among other things. This time, he was arrested on September 5 for "publishing false news." Soon came speculation that he'd been tortured.

A group I was involved with, the Committee to Protect Bloggers, was one of many groups agitating for his release in 2005 during his first arrest. It worked. He was freed. Let's join together and make sure the same thing happens this time.

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Ali's a reasonable, engaged person, a reporter for Global Voices, a father and businessman. He seems to have made friends in half the countries on earth. No one deserves illegitimate imprisonment and torture.

ReadWriteWeb is not a partisan outfit. There's plenty of discussion and disagreement (on our own time) about political issues. (One of us even has the temerity to be from New Zealand, if you can believe it.) But some issues are human more than political and this is one of them. Although on a practical level, if everyone like Ali gets sent up the river, who will we write for?

Whoever you are reading this, Ali's one of you. So here's what you can do if you want to try to help. Please keep in mind, no matter what you do and who you connect with, don't be a tool. Ali's safety is the issue here, not your outrage.

Tweet Bahrain's foreign minister, Khalid Alkhalifa
Write the Bahraini ambassador in your country
Write one of the Bahraini officials listed here
Join the Free Ali campaign.
"Like" the Free Ali Facebook page
Use your social media accounts to talk about it
Post a link to your own discussion of Ali on the Free Ali Facebook page
Leave a comment of support below.

Discuss

MusicBrainz Blog: NGS Beta 3: Delayed

2010-09-07T22:51:16+00:00

What would a deadline be without a delay? Sadly, we felt that we were not quite ready to unleash beta 3 today. Rather than unleashing software that isn’t ready, we’re opting to delay beta 3.

We’re taking a look at where we stand and we hope to be able to finish it for next week. I’ll post about an update hopefully tomorrow.

Slashdot: They Finally Found Out We Like Our Computers

2010-09-07T22:31:35+00:00

I'm Not There (1956) writes "Sociologist Clifford Nass is talking about how people think of their computers as something like human beings. In one of his experiments, Nass found that people are more willing to 'help' computers when the computer helped them previously: 'When people were then asked to help optimize the screen resolution on a computer where the program had been "helpful," they were much more likely to do so than with the less helpful version.' He also found that people evaluating software's performance were more forgiving if the evaluation was done on the same computer the software was tested on. Nass has recently published the book The Man Who Lied to His Laptop, in which he 'uses our interactions with machines to investigate how human relationships could be improved.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: "Intelligent" Stamps and the Maturation of Augmented Reality

2010-09-07T22:00:00+00:00

Last week, The Royal Mail (the national postal service of the United Kingdom) introduced what it called an "intelligent stamp" that displays a video using augmented reality when it is scanned with a smartphone. Stamps are a heartwarming, sentimental collectors item that often memorialize historic people, things and events. This campaign - part of the Royal Mail's "Great British Railways" series - is no different. While it is certainly an interesting big-name marketing adoption of augmented reality, the experience feels lack-luster, and could have potentially been far more interesting with further development.

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What It Does

If you're the lucky recipient of a letter with a stamp from this series, you can use the junaio application on your iPhone or Android device to launch the "experience." After pointing your camera at the stamp, a 4-minute video of Bernard Cribbins - an 81-year-old British character actor - reading W.H. Auden's 1935 poem "The Night Mail" (whilst aboard a train, no less) automatically begins playing.

"Royal Mail's special stamps mark key events and anniversaries in the UK's heritage through a programme which aims to be both educational and informative," says Royal Mail's Phillip Parker. I watched the video. It's fun in its own quaint, antique sort of way, but if the Royal Mail really wanted to bring its stamps "firmly into the 21st Century," they could have done so much more with this experiment.

What It Could Do

Augmented reality could use more interactivity. Many experiences are one-way flows of data to the end-user. Why not let people contribute to a two-way exchange? I have nothing against the nostalgic video the Royal Mail created to play from this special set of train stamps, but perhaps they could continue to innovate using the medium in the future.

It would be great to see the Royal Mail (or any postal service) develop a special stamp with some small unique identifier that could be used to send personal messages along with letters. How cool would it be to get a letter from a friend, family member or loved one, scan the stamp and view or hear a recorded message from the sender? It would be like stickybits, but without the obtrusive barcodes.

The Maturation of Augmented Reality

Augmented reality needs to move on to the next step. It seems whenever a new brand discovers augmented reality, they discover it in its simplest state. "I can point my phone at a stamp and watch a video," is how the Royal Mail sees augmented reality, when in fact, they could do so much more with the technology.

I would love to see some brands really take a chance on the technology and get the most out of it early on. Many branded AR experiences (though not all) are very basic, or gimmicky, and the really cool innovative stuff is being tested in labs at universities. For the technology to continue to mature, vendors need to encourage the brands that come to them to take it a step farther.

If 2010 was the year for big brands to experiment with augmented reality, 2011 needs to be the year they start innovating and creating more practical experiences.

Discuss

Slashdot: Journalist Tricked Captors Into Twitter Access

2010-09-07T21:52:04+00:00

itwbennett writes "Kosuke Tsuneoka, a Japanese freelance journalist held captive in Afghanistan since April 1, was released over the weekend. His freedom came a day after he sent two Twitter messages from a captor's phone. 'i am still allive [sic], but in jail,' read a message sent at 1:15 p.m. GMT on Friday. It was followed a few minutes later with a second message, also in English, that read, 'here is archi in kunduz. in the jail of commander lativ.' The message referred to the Dasht-e-Archi district of Kunduz where he was being held. On Tuesday, speaking in Tokyo, Tsuneoka revealed how he managed to convince his captors to give him access to the Internet. 'He asked me if I knew how to use it, so I had a look and explained it to him,' said Tsuneoka. 'I called the customer care number and activated the phone,' he said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from kurtjx] The D2RQ Plattform v0.7 - User Manual

2010-09-07T21:49:25+00:00

ReadWriteWeb: College Students Head Back to the Classroom - Except Not Really

2010-09-07T21:30:05+00:00

Students are starting to return to college campuses, but according to a report commissioned by conferencing company Intercall, that doesn't mean they're heading back into the classroom.

The survey asked over 500 college students nationwide about their experiences with viewing course content over video streamed online. And 78% reported that their professors have used web streaming - either a live feed or videotaped lectures - with nearly a third saying that their professors use web streaming frequently. 21% of students reported that over half their course learning is done by viewing video content online.

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Skipping School, Except on Exam Days

Many students admitted that they only show up to class for the exams, and instead borrow notes and tapes from others in their class. 32% say they've asked a friend or classmate to record a class for them so they didn't have to attend in person.

The top benefits college students associate with having their lectures and college courses available via video online are "being able to 'attend' classes even though they are really out of town" (63%) and "being able to attend class when they want, not when the university has it scheduled" (58%). 47% reported that online content made it easier for them to work more hours at their jobs. And 43% touted the benefit of not having to get dressed for class. Only 15% listed "being able to attend more parties" as the main benefit of having their courses available online.

Video Streaming Makes Them Better Students?

Students also said that being able to access course content online gave them the flexibility to learn at their own pace. 64% said that viewing classes via online video lets them fast forward through the parts they do not find useful. More than half also said that online video helps them to spend more time studying by themselves. In addition, many reported that they felt more comfortable asking questions to professors online because they don't have to speak up in front of the class.

Three-quarters of those responding said that having their professors post video online or live stream their lectures would help them be better prepared for exams. And over half said that they think they can learn more effectively when they can watch videos via live streaming than when they sit in a classroom, with 54% saying they've seen their grades improve because of access to video lectures.

A third of those responding admitted that their parents would be upset to hear about the frequency with which they skip class or about their preference for finding alternative ways to access course material. (Only a third?!)

But whether or not parents understand, the results of this study seem to confirm what many already see as higher education's future: it's going to be online. Many students already prefer it that way.

Photo credits: Flickr user Sholeh

Discuss

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Technobabble » Using Jboss System Properties

2010-09-07T21:18:28+00:00

(2010-09-07 21:03)

Slashdot: Tech Sector Slow To Hire

2010-09-07T21:12:25+00:00

Iftekhar25 writes "The NY Times is running an article about soaring unemployment rates for IT in the US (6 percent) despite a tech sector that is thirsting for engineering talent. Quoting: 'The chief hurdles to more robust technology hiring appear to be increasing automation and the addition of highly skilled labor overseas. The result is a mismatch of skill levels here at home: not enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms, and too many people with abilities that can be duplicated offshore at lower cost. That's a familiar situation to many out-of-work software engineers, whose skills start depreciating almost as soon as they are laid off, given the dynamism of the industry.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: What It Means: Google, Yahoo Come Together With OpenID

2010-09-07T20:57:00+00:00

Google has announced that Yahoo users will now be able to quickly and easily sign up for Google products using their Yahoo email address. The feature, according to some in the industry, will be a boon for Google and OpenID, the Internet standard behind the feature. But what benefit does this provide for Yahoo?

Will making it easier for Yahoo users to sign in to Google - a direct competitor - draw users away from the portal, search and mail provider or will it help create an overall better user experience? According to Yahoo, making a process that users were already engaged in simpler will provide a better user experience and keep users interested in one of its most solid products - Yahoo Mail.

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According to Kaliya Hamlin of IdentityWoman.net, the step is a big one for OpenID.

"People have been asking FOREVER when are the big web portals actually going to accept other people's OpenIDs. This a significant step by Google to become a relying party," Hamlin told us today.

Yahoo is not in the business of locking users to only use its services, especially when the Web is getting so much more distributed and social. - Eran Hammer-Lahav, Open Web advocate for Yahoo

Scott Kveton, co-founder of the OpenID Foundation, agreed that it was "a big step forward for making OpenID that much easier to use".

"Making it easier to have Google and Yahoo work together is great for Google," said Kveton, but he questioned the advantage for Yahoo. He noted that "making it easier to on-board users into Google via their email accounts means being able to suck in the social graph."

We asked Eran Hammer-Lahav, an Open Web advocate for Yahoo, about the feature and he told us that it had been in some form of discussion for over two years now and would provide a better user experience for Yahoo's users.

"We don't try to lock our users in any way," said Hammer-Lahav. "We want them to have a better Web experience no matter what site they are on, just by being a Yahoo user. Yahoo is not in the business of locking users to only use its services, especially when the Web is getting so much more distributed and social."

Hammer-Lahav told us that Yahoo believes its mail product is strong enough to keep users happy (and loyal), as evidenced by when Yahoo was one of the first email providers to provide address book mobility. When we asked if Yahoo would be offering the same sort of feature, he explained that there weren't many Yahoo products that required email sign-ins, but the company is adding OpenID support for activities like adding comments, which do require full account sign-ins. In this case, Google added this functionality, he explained, because Yahoo email account holders make up a large percentage of the email market and those trying to create Google accounts.

In the end, that may be just it - the simple fact that users will be drawn to Google's growing arsenal of Web tools, from Google Docs to Voice to AdWords, and it's better to keep what business you can rather than have your users abandon your product completely.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: Latest Cyberduck Version Provides Better Cloud File Management

2010-09-07T20:30:46+00:00

Often appearing on lists of "must have" Mac software, the open source FTP, SFTP, and WebDAV client Cyberduck announced a new version yesterday that gives the tool even more file management features, including support for Google Storage and file versioning in Amazon S3.

New features include integration of Access Control List editing for Amazon S3 and Google Storage so that permissions can be granted to different users. Using Cyberduck alongside Google Storage, for example, one can limit access to files based on whether a user is logged in to a Google Account and authenticated against the ACL.

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File versioning support for S3 is also available in this version. You can show hidden files to display all revisions to a file, which allows you to revert back to a previous version. Versioning can be enabled per bucket, as can S3 Multi-Factor Authentication Delete, which secures files from deletion by requesting a one-time passcode.

Although Cyberduck is currently only available for Mac, a Windows version is now in private beta. A Windows version will bring Cyberduck into competition with CloudBerry, which offers many of the same features but does not currently support Google Storage, Google Docs or Rackspace Cloud files (but does support Windows Azure).

As tools like Cyberduck and CloudBerry move to support different cloud providers, interoperability is proving to be a major selling point - and a crucial feature.

Discuss

Slashdot: HP Sues Hurd For Joining Oracle

2010-09-07T20:22:11+00:00

CWmike writes "Hewlett-Packard is reported to be suing former CEO Mark Hurd, who was named co-president of rival Oracle on Monday. The Wall Street Journal first reported the news, and has now posted the full text of the suit on Google Docs. Among other things, it says, 'In his new positions, Hurd will be in a situation in which he cannot perform his duties for Oracle without necessarily using and disclosing HP's trade secrets and confidential information to others.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthony Volodkin is Fascinated: The first concert I’ve ever been to is also the first...

2010-09-07T20:16:00+00:00

The first concert I’ve ever been to is also the first concert in the Linkin Park gigography on Songkick. November 2000 is a long time ago.

ReadWriteWeb: Picture Your App With Auto-Wifi-Uploads from Camera Memory Cards

2010-09-07T19:48:27+00:00

Eye-fi, the creator of camera memory cards that automatically upload photos and videos to your computer or favorite website, has announced that it will launch a software development kit and community this Fall.

That means that any approved application will be able to pull media automatically from your camera into your account online when you walk past an accessible wifi signal. Will the company be generous in approving use of its developer platform? Startups around the world hope so.

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How it Works

Eye-fi has offered its basic service for 5 years and sells its newest 4GB card with "endless memory mode" (stored media is automatically deleted once safely on your computer) for $49.99. Eye-fi bundles the cost of connectivity into the cost of the device, similar to how the Kindle does 3G, but in this case it's data writing not reading.

To date, users have been able to upload media automatically to 45 different sites, from Flickr to Facebook to YouTube to Costco.com. Online reviews of the service are generally very positive. Now any approved application developer will be able include this feature in their apps.

Market Strategy

It's a smart move by Eye-fi. An ecosystem of app developers adds a compelling feature and then every new customer those apps acquire is a potential new customer for the memory card manufacturer.

"Eye-Fi's wireless data card is without a doubt revolutionary in the way it enables real time publishing of photos over WiFi directly from the camera," says Marcus Mac Innes, founder of Irish photo sharing service Pix.ie.

"The out of the box publishing destinations however were limited and many Pix.ie users complained about not having a direct upload facility from Eye-Fi to Pix.ie.

"With the release of a developer API, Eye-Fi seems to be responding to the growing demand for openness which ultimately provides their customers with more choice with regard to publishing destinations.

"So long as Eye-Fi don't discriminate when it comes to commercial use of the new APIs, this move will be a win win for all concerned."

Eye-fi offers an iPhone app and last holiday season the company partnered with Google to offer a free card to anyone who upgraded to a paid Picasa account. Additional options include automatic geotagging of photos and automatic uploads from any AT&T wifi hotspot.

Below: Some of the places users can already upload media from the Eye-fi card.

Discuss

Slashdot: Stanford's Authoritative Alternative To Wikipedia

2010-09-07T19:40:57+00:00

eldavojohn writes "For decades, Stanford has been working on a different kind of Wikipedia. It might even be considered closer to a peer-reviewed journal, since you have get submissions past a 120 person group of leading philosophers around the world, not to mention Stanford's administration. It has several layers of approval, but the authoritative model produces high quality content — even if it only amounts to 1,200 articles. Content you can read straight through to find everything pertinent — not hop around following link after link like the regular Wikipedia. You might question the need for this, but one of the originators says, 'Our model is authoritative. [Wikipedia's] model is one an academic isn't going to be attracted to. If you are a young academic, who might spend six months preparing a great article on Thomas Aquinas, you're not going to publish in a place where anyone can come along and change this.' The site has articles covering topics from Quantum Computing to technical luminaries like Kurt Friedrich Gödel and Alan Turing. The principal editor said, 'It's the natural thing to do. I'm surprised no one is doing it for the other disciplines.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Leaner Than Lean: Is Ultralight a New Class of Startups?

2010-09-07T19:40:00+00:00

There is a fascinating article online this morning from the San Francisco Chronicle's Tom Abate in which he profiles Raymond Lei, a 19-year-old Berkeley student and entrepreneur. While still in high school Lei founded ooShirts.com with just a computer and an idea. A few years and just a couple thousand dollars in capital later, Lei runs a successful 2.5 person team set to earn over $700,000 in 2010. Abate dubs ooShirts an "ultralight startup," but is Lei's bedroom business any different from a lean startup?

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In recent years, lean startups have become a popular sector of Internet businesses that look to push a product at "low burn." A lot of what makes a lean startup lean, according the man who coined the term, Eric Ries, is when the company strives to create value for customers. "Every activity that does not contribute to learning about customers" should be defined as "waste," Ries says.

But Lei's company seems leaner than lean, with almost no "burn" whatsoever. According to the ooShirts.com homepage, less than 0.5% of the company's revenue goes to advertising. Instead the company relies on referrals and repeat customers to help spread the word. By working with over a dozen suppliers, ooShirts keeps its shipping costs low - savings it passes on to its customers in order to undercut competition.

ooShirts is part of a unique subset of Internet companies. While many startups one might categorize as "lean" are developing applications and tools for the Web, ooShirts is playing in the co-creation and mass customization space. These companies serve as intermediaries between customers and manufacturers who can create customized products, and thus can afford to run at a "low burn."

Because of this business relationship, mass customization companies may need to be set aside from lean startups, which by nature are highly iterative product companies. But perhaps there is some intersection between lean startups and the low burning mass customization companies. Or maybe Abate's term "ultralight" is a new class of startups? Either way, running thin is certainly a growing trend among startups, and ooShirts is a fine example of how the Internet is enabling the success of these businesses.

Discuss

Slashdot: White House Correspondent Tweets His Heart Attack

2010-09-07T19:23:52+00:00

Tommy Christopher, who writes for mediate.com, has reporting in his blood, so much so that he livetweeted every part of his recent heart attack. "I gotta be me. Livetweeting my heart attack. Beat that!" and "This is not like the movies. Most deadpan heart attack evar. Still hurts even after the morphine," were among his updates as he was rushed to the hospital. Christopher is now in stable condition after recovering from emergency surgery.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: RIM Patents "Adaptive" Billboards for Delivering Ads Based on Traffic

2010-09-07T19:20:00+00:00

RIM, the company behind Blackberry smartphones, is getting into the smart billboard business, according to two patent applications it filed recently. But what would a smartphone maker and roadside advertising have in common? It could be a new way to serve up "adaptive" advertising according to data gathered from nearby Blackberry users.

According to mobile-focused blog Unwired View, the innovation comes in the form of using nearby phones to measure traffic speed and density and then adapting a billboard's content accordingly.

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When traffic is moving fast and drivers have no time to pay attention to billboards, or there's a dense crowd on the street so you are distracted and less likely to pay attention, the billboard may just blast a huge logo and slogan of the advertiser at you, to catch any peripheral attention it can get. When traffic slows down in a jam, and you are sitting bored at the wheel waiting for a car in front to move the next few meters, grateful for any distraction, the same billboard will give you a detailed information about the service, prices, benefits and stuff.

The two separate patents are for "Adaptive roadside billboard system and related methods" and "Adaptive pedestrian billboard system and related methods" and both are described as having a storage system that could retain a number of different messages for different speeds and traffic densities. Beyond the level of detail involved, such a system could also be used to offer interaction opportunities when density is high and speed is low (such as in a traffic jam).

The next step, of course, is for billboards to begin collecting more personal information than simply crowd-aggregated data, such as the types of cars being driven, to cater advertising more specifically to the people present. That same next step, however, treads on thinner ground in regards to privacy than simply the density and speed of traffic, which is already used by systems such as Google Maps to provide traffic analysis.

Discuss

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Quality Web Data

2010-09-07T19:18:21+00:00

mhausenblas: if you have input, please ping me via mail or tweet using #qualitywebdata

(2010-09-07 18:25)

Slashdot: Sony Releases PS3 Firmware Update To Fight Jailbreaks

2010-09-07T19:07:21+00:00

RyuuzakiTetsuya writes "Destructoid is reporting that the 3.42 firmware has been released for the PlayStation 3, and it has fixed the USB vulnerability that allows the PSJailbreak exploit to work." Sony's brief announcement of the update refers only to "additional security features," though the EU blog post acknowledges that a vulnerability was addressed. PS3-Hacks.com confirms that the patch is effective against the various jailbreak tools, and they point out a different tool for bypassing the update. Sony told the BBC, "... as we always have, we will continue to take necessary actions to both hardware and software to protect the intellectual content provided on the PlayStation 3."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Download Our Latest Free Report: The New Social Layer for the Enterprise

2010-09-07T19:00:55+00:00

We are once again pleased to announce a new premium report: The Social Layer: How the Rise of Web-Oriented Architecture is Changing Enterprise IT. Thanks to Socialtext for sponsoring the report and making it available as a free download.

The Web 2.0 era gave rise to social applications such as Twitter and Facebook. These services made it easier to share information and connect with family, friends and experts. The enterprise has followed this movement by creating its own social applications that fit within a secure environment.

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The report explores how social technologies in the enterprise is now evolving into a new "social layer," that allows people to access information from a variety of enterprise applications and colleagues across organizational silos. It discusses how microblogging, wiikis and other social technologies are used by employees to serve customers better and drive new business opportunities.

The report further explores the role of the open Web and the importance of Web services and applications to talk with one other easily and securely. The open Web has allowed services like Facebook to flourish by simply adhering to the HTTP protocol.The report demonstrates how enterprises can embrace a similar architecture to build their own social layer.

It also explores:

The rise of scripting languages, open frameworks and the "view source" culture.
The rise of REST APIs in the Enterprise.
The move to the cloud and a Web-Oriented Architecture.
Building the social layer in the enterprise architecture.

We think you'll find our report about the new social layer (embedded below) to be essential reading for the new technology enterprise. And remember, you always you can find our day-to-day coverage about social IT at ReadWriteEnterprise.

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: Yahoo's Yconalyzer and You

2010-09-07T19:00:00+00:00

You've probably read about Facebook and Google providing internally developed tools to the open source world. Often you'll see references to such tools during conferences or presentations during developer meetups.

One such tool you may not have heard of isn't from Google and it isn't from Facebook -- it's from Yahoo. Back in May, Yahoo released the Yconalyzer tool via the Yahoo Developer Network. Let's take a closer look at this tool and how you can start using it immediately for your own needs.

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Yconalyzer and You

From the Yconalyzer sourceforce page:

Yconalyzer is a low-overhead pcap utility that provides a bird's eye view of traffic on a particular TCP port, displaying a distribution of duration, volume and throughput over all connections while being able to narrow down to a connection as well.

(emphasis added)

At this point you might be saying to yourself "oh, it's like tcpdump". While tcpdump is a valuable tool, you should still take a look at Yconalyzer.

So who uses Yconalyzer? You can see Yconalyzer referenced in presentations from very high profile groups like the Twitter web engineering team [PDF].

Some of the metrics you can gather from using Yconalyzer include:

How many client connections are taking too long?
What specific client IP addresses had connections that lasted too long?

How can you use Yconalyzer? Here are some examples of use cases:

Review connections where clients are sending less than a specific number of bytes
Review connections where the server is sending more than a specific number of bytes

The initial release of Yconalyzer has been updated to accommodate more environments and ease the process of getting started. Specifically, additions include fixes for Ubuntu environments (gcc-4.4.1) as well as GNU auto-build and configure utilities. For those running RPM as their package manager of choice there is even a spec file included.

To get started simply download the Yconalyzer source code from sourceforge and follow the README and INSTALL files. You should expect to see output such as that shown in the example below for a CentOS 5.5 build environment.

Next, let's verify we can capture traffic for a few seconds.

While this simple example is for web traffic you'll find Yconalyzer useful for any TCP performance metric gathering.

Will you be using Yconalyzer to test your own environments? Let us know in the comments below!

Discuss

sides by The Echo Nest: Video

2010-09-07T18:54:08+00:00

ReadWriteWeb: New Internet Explorer 9 Interface Caught on Video

2010-09-07T18:40:48+00:00

Microsoft plans to unveil the design of Internet Explorer 9 next week, but thanks to a new leak, we now have a pretty good idea of what the next generation of Microsoft's browser will look like. Currently, Microsoft only offers "developer preview" versions of the browser that do not feature the new user interface. The enterprising Internet Explorer 9 fans at IEBest.com, however, managed to get an early copy of the browser and captured the new interface on video.

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The first images of Internet Explorer 9 leaked last month and today's video confirms that Microsoft will likely use the stripped down, minimalist interface we saw in these leaked screenshots. As we noted last month, it looks like Microsoft has done away with the menu buttons and freed up even more space by combining the URL bar and tab bar into a single toolbar. While this frees up more space for displaying websites, it remains to be seen how effective this new layout will be when more than four or five tabs are open at the same time.

According to this new video, Internet Explorer 9 now also scores 95 out of 100 possible points on the Acid3 test, which measures how well the browser conforms to a specific set of web standards.

After looking at this video, do you think you will give Internet Explorer another try?

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: How to Make Objects Come Alive for Your Enterprise

2010-09-07T18:20:00+00:00

The Internet of Things took a step closer to mainstream adoption today with the announcement of Pachube's first enterprise offering. Pachube (pronounced "patch bay") shares real-time sensor data and enables users to analyze data or trigger actions in a variety of ways through its SaaS. For example, temperature sensors could trigger an alarm if a temperature gets too high or low in your server room. See our coverage of Pachube's applications for more use cases.

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Pachube Professional will give enterprises a choice of packages with varying datastreams, higher API rates, and more. Pachube also offers a free product with only five datastrems, 10 API calls per minute and a month's worth of history - but all the data is made public. The paid packages not only scale-up access to Pachube's services, but also add privacy options.

According to Cisco: "In just a few years, every door lock, card reader, video camera, vehicle, power meter, and light switch will have an IP address." In the meantime, Pachube and other IoT platforms have been mostly experimental developer tools, though some companies such as Current Cost have already been using Pachube in production. Pachube Professional brings these tools out of the lab and into the real world.

Discuss

Slashdot: Robot Snake Can Climb Trees

2010-09-07T18:17:28+00:00

kkleiner writes "The latest in a line of 'modsnakes' from Carnegie Mellon's Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways, including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, and even scale a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like and eerie about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera 'eye.' Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: Google CEO: The Next Great Stage of Search is Automatic

2010-09-07T18:16:53+00:00

Typing a search query into Google.com is such old news. Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave a much-hyped keynote talk at Berlin's IFA home electronics event today and said that his vision for the future of search looks very, very different.

Schmidt says he believes that in the future, your mobile phone will quickly and automatically deliver personalized information to you based on your physical location and interests. "Since you are in location X right now, and have interest Y, Google thinks you'd like to know information Z," the search giant will effectively say to your phone.

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Here's the key quote, as captured by PaidContent, a leading news site covering economics of digital content:

"Ultimately, search is not just the web but literally all of your information - your email, the things you care about, with your permission - this is personal search, for you and only for you.

"The next step of search is doing this automatically. When I walk down the street, I want my smartphone to be doing searches constantly - 'did you know?', 'did you know?', 'did you know?', 'did you know?'.

This notion of autonomous search - to tell me things I didn't know but am probably interested in, is the next great stage - in my view - of search."

That sounds pretty interesting, as long as you can turn it off and exercise some control over what's being sent. "What's that ping notification you just received," your mother in law might ask as you travel through town together. "Oh nothing," you might reply, "just Google telling me there is a business establishment nearby related to some of my recent search queries."

Seriously though, my long-term mobile search dream is this: dear phone, please tell me about the history, ownership, news coverage and other information about the building I am looking at in front of me. Make that automatic and ambient and I'm going to be one happy Google Mobile Search user.

Many industry-watchers have separated search and recommendation, saying that recommendation could in fact be bigger than search: it's the search you didn't even know you wanted to perform yet.

PaidContent's Robert Andrews raises two very interesting points in his coverage: "1) Android is already a considerable power hog without searches being performed at every footstep; 2) if Google can increase searches to this incredible frequency, can it also ramp up search advertising in lockstep?"

Discuss

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tang] LukeW | Social Engagement Checklist

2010-09-07T18:02:31+00:00

"what fundamentally motivates people to engage with others, I decided to try turning these principles into a high-level checklist for social Web applications. These questions attempt to answer the most vexing social design question: "why would people participate in a new service/product?""

ReadWriteWeb: The Big Picture: News Hound Eye Candy for Your iPad

2010-09-07T18:00:21+00:00

Over the course of this summer, we have witnessed the launch of a number of visually stunning applications for the iPad, including Pulse, Flipboard, Fotopedia Heritage and Discover. Now, one of the best and most popular photojournalism blogs, Boston.com's The Big Picture, is joining the fray with the launch of its own iPad app. About three times per week, the Big Picture features a new set of photos around a specific topic or news event.

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Thanks to the iPad's great screen and the editorial team's skill in choosing the best images, scrolling through these collections makes for a great visual experience. Most of these sets include somewhere between 35 and 50 captioned images from a wide variety of sources.

This is, of course, not the first iPad app that highlights great photojournalism. The Guardian, for example, was among the first news organizations to launch an iPad app that focused solely on displaying interesting news photos. Reuters, too, offers a similar application. These apps, however, tend to focus on one picture per day, while Boston.com's app doesn't update daily, but focuses on displaying a larger set of images.

The only real complaint we have about the app is that it doesn't pre-cache images. On a fast connection, the resulting delay is negligible, but on 3G or a slow broadband connection, the delays are often very noticeable and distract from the overall user experience.

The Big Picture iPad app (which is also compatible with the iPhone), is now available for $2.99.

Discuss

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from mhausenblas] Challenge.gov : The central platform for all US Government Challenges.

2010-09-07T17:46:13+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tommorris] Meetup/London/37 - Meta

2010-09-07T17:43:56+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tommorris] Literary Taste: How to Form It - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2010-09-07T17:39:36+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tommorris] Irony's Edge - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2010-09-07T17:39:21+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from mhausenblas] R2R Framework – Translating RDF data from the Web to a target vocabulary

2010-09-07T17:35:11+00:00

Slashdot: NSA Director Says the US Must Secure the Internet

2010-09-07T17:35:09+00:00

Trailrunner7 writes "The United States has a responsibility to take a leadership role in securing the Internet against both internal and external attackers, a duty that the federal government takes very seriously, the country's top military cybersecurity official said Tuesday. However, Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the US Cyber Command, provided virtually nothing in the way of details of how the government intends to accomplish this rather daunting task. 'We made the Internet and it seems to me that we ought to be the first folks to get out there and protect it,' Alexander said. 'The challenge before us is large and daunting. But we have an obligation to meet it head-on.' It's unlikely that any of Alexander's comments Tuesday will do much to quiet the criticisms of the Obama administration's security efforts thus far. Speaking mostly in generalities, Alexander emphasized the administration's commitment to the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a plan developed by the Bush administration and recently partially de-classified by Obama administration officials."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from tommorris] Anonymous Pro

2010-09-07T17:31:57+00:00

sides by The Echo Nest: Video

2010-09-07T17:31:08+00:00

Alan's blog: Across Ireland to Limerick: Stepping Out of Time

2010-09-07T17:18:30+00:00

Early last week I had a few days external examining the iMedia course at Limerick. A wonderful course I was impressed again at the Dawn 2010 show pieces produced by the students who come predominantly from arts or design backgrounds and many of whom have never touched code or soldering ...

Alan's blog: Last Day — Doolin to Limerick

2010-09-07T17:18:30+00:00

From Doolin's harbour side you can see the ferries that ply back and forth to the Aran Islands. The rock is limestone, like the Burren, and the land beneath cut through with caves including the world's largest stalactite and the submerged 'Green Holes', only discovered in the 1980s. ...

Alan's blog: Serendipity and Song — Westport to Doolin

2010-09-07T17:18:30+00:00

Westport nestles on the far shore of one of Ireland's great peninsulas, jutting into the Atlantic, with the Mountains of Connemara to the south and the wild coasts of Achill to the north. Some years ago we camped on Achill Island in late September. Most Irish campsites close after the ...

Alan's blog: Into the West — Larne to Westport

2010-09-07T17:18:30+00:00

The fastest route to Limerick from Larne is probably due south to Dublin and then across to the West, the route we took as a family when we first visited Ireland together on the weekend of the Good Friday agreement. At that time, the IRA and Unionist cease-fires had been ...

Alan's blog: Roads of the Sea — Tiree to Larne

2010-09-07T17:18:30+00:00

Friday morning at 9am saw me at the ferry queue in Scarinish waiting for the Tiree--Oban ferry, saying goodbye to Fiona and to Tiree as I won't be home again for most of the next two months. Friday is an early ferry -- 5am check-in for those coming from Oban, ...

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Yves, and Patrick's music hack day thing, mentioned in wired

2010-09-07T17:18:26+00:00

(2010-09-07 17:07)

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1

2010-09-07T17:18:26+00:00

danbri: W3C Recommendation 7 September 2010

(2010-09-07 17:07)

ReadWriteWeb: Year One Labs Launches Startup Accelerator in Montreal

2010-09-07T17:05:44+00:00

When ReadWriteWeb profiled Montreal last month as part of our "Never Mind the Valley" series, it was clear that the city had a thriving entrepreneurial community. And today the Montreal startup scene gets stronger with the announcement of the launch of Year One Labs, a startup accelerator program.

Sponsor

The program is founded by four entrepreneurs - Raymond Luk, Ben Yoskovitz, Ian Rae, and Alistair Croll - who describe themselves as "operators, not armchair quarterbacks. We've been in the trenches." The program will utilize the "lean startup" methodology and be focused on a "rigorous process of customer development and iterative adjustment."

Year One Labs' founders say the program will take a hands-on approach, offering $50,000 issued in tranches, a network of mentors, access to investors, and office space at the Year One Labs space. In exchange, the program will take a minority stake - between 10-20% - in the participating startups. Mentors include Flowtown co-founder Dan Martell and Shopify creator Tobias Lutke.

According to a blog post at Flow Ventures, of which Luk is the founder, "The best way to 'pitch' Y1L is to sit down with us face to face and talk about the problem you're going to solve."

Discuss

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from inkdroid] DBpedia » Blog Archive » DBpedia 3.5.1 available on Amazon EC2

2010-09-07T16:57:46+00:00

Slashdot: Researchers Say Happiness Costs $75k

2010-09-07T16:52:32+00:00

SpuriousLogic writes "Does happiness rise with income? In one of the more scientific attempts to answer that question, researchers from Princeton have put a price on happiness. It's about $75,000 in income a year. They found that not having enough money definitely causes emotional pain and unhappiness. But, after reaching an income of about $75,000 per year, money can't buy happiness. More money can, however, help people view their lives as successful or better. The study found that people's evaluations of their lives improved steadily with annual income. But the quality of their everyday experiences — their feelings — did not improve above an income of $75,000 a year. As income decreased from $75,000, people reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness, as well as stress. The study found that being divorced, being sick and other painful experiences have worse effects on a poor person than on a wealthier one."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: How to Get Android Notifications on Your Computer Desktop (Mac, Linux or Windows)

2010-09-07T16:45:51+00:00

Do you want to be notified of Android notifications like calls, text messages, low battery alerts and more when you're on your computer? An open source mobile application called "Android Notifier" does this by connecting your mobile phone's notification system to the notification system on your computer. The desktop application currently works on Mac only, via the popular notification app, Growl. The project's developer says the Linux port will arrive "soon" and he's looking for volunteers who will connect the app to Windows systems as well.

But he needn't bother. We came across another application called the "Android-Notifier-Desktop" which offers a multi-platform desktop client for the above mobile app to the overlooked Linux and Windows users.

Below is the complete installation guide to using both of these apps on your computer.

Sponsor

According to the project homepage, hosted here on Google Code, the "Android-Notifier" mobile application is useful for people who wear noise-cancelling headphones, keep their cell phone in their bags or don't want to be interrupted to look at vibrating phone while in a meeting.

The mobile app sends notifications to the computer it's connected to, including things like new text messages (both SMS and MMS), the phone number of the incoming call, battery status notifications, new voicemails and more.

The desktop app connects to the phone over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or, in the future, USB. The Bluetooth method is only supported on Android 2.0, however, due to restrictions in older Android versions. (To determine what version of Android you use now, go to Settings -> About Phone -> Firmware version.)

How to Install and Use the Notifier App

To get started with this app, do the following:

Bluetooth Method

Install and run the Android app from the Android Market. (You can scan this barcode to find it).
Install and run the Desktop app for your OS from the Downloads section.
Ensure your Android device is paired with your desktop (Settings > Wifi and networks > Bluetooth settings on Android)
Enable the Bluetooth notification method on the Android app's settings (enabled by default)
Open Bluetooth options in the Android app's settings:

Device pairing - select this to open Android's system bluetooth options, where you can pair your target device
Target device - once your device is paired, select this option to send notifications to a specific device. If this is set to "Any device" (the default), the notifications will be sent to the first computer device found
Auto-enable bluetooth - if enabled, notifications can be sent over bluetooth even if you keep it disabled - every time the app needs to send a notification, it enables it, sends the notification, then disables it again. The downside of this option is that it can take multiple seconds for the notification to actually be sent.

Enable the Bluetooth notification method on the desktop app's settings (enabled by default)
The desktop app will listen to and start displaying events from the Android app.
You can now exit the Android app - the notifications service will be running in the background by default.

Wi-Fi Method

Install and run the Android app from the Android Market. (You can scan this barcode to find it).
Install and run the Desktop app for your OS from the Downloads section.
Ensure both the desktop and the device are on the same network.
If you have a firewall on your desktop, ensure it will allow incoming UDP packets on port 10600
Enable the Wi-Fi notification method on the Android app's settings (enabled by default)
Open the Wi-Fi options in the Android app's settings

Target IP address - this is the IP address notifications will be sent to. While the default (global broadcast) is sufficient for most cases, you may want one of the following options instead:
- Global broadcast - sends notifications to 255.255.255.255 (should work on most networks);
- DHCP broadcast - detects the DHCP configuration of your current Wi-Fi network and uses its broadcast address for sending notifications. If no DHCP information is set (e.g. you're using a static IP), the notifications won't be sent;
- Custom address - allows you to type in a specific IP address to send notifications to (doesn't need to be a broadcast address). This is useful if your network doesn't allow broadcast packets, or you want to prevent others in the network from receiving your notifications.
Wi-Fi sleep policy - this is a system setting from Android which controls when the Wi-Fi will be turned off. By default, it's turned off whenever the screen is turned off - if you want to get notifications when the screen is off, you probably want to change this default to either "never when plugged" or "never" - these options will consume a little more battery, but will ensure notifications are always delivered
Auto-enable Wi-Fi - if you do not wish to keep your Wi-Fi on all the time with the above option, and can tolerate notifications being delayed by a few seconds, then this option will make Wi-Fi be turned on whenever a notification needs to be sent, and then turned off again after it's been sent. The extra delay introduced is the time it takes for your phone to join a network.

Enable the Wi-Fi notification method on the desktop app's settings (enabled by default)
The desktop app will listen to and start displaying events from the Android app.
You can now exit the Android app - the notifications service will be running in the background by default.

Windows, Linux Users: Get This App Too

Because of the popularity of the original application, many users wanted Linux or Windows support. Unfortunately, the original project was not offering these options - it was Mac-only. Another developer released a second program that enables multi-platform support for not only Mac, but also Linux and Windows users (XP and up). It even has 32 and 64-bit options available for each of the supported operating systems.

To install this desktop app instead, head over to the downloads section and choose the appropriate version for your OS. Java 6 is also required.

Another Option for Windows Users

Another option for Windows users is a bit of hack. A third developer created a simple Windows application here that uses the Microsoft Winsock component. You just place this MSWINSCK.OCX file in your C:\Widnows\System 32 folder in order to use it. On your Android phone, you'll need to connect to your wireless network, choose a custom IP and key in the IP of the machine using the program. The program supports PING (testing connection packets), SMS and RING (calls) only.

Do you know of any other programs that do the same? Let us know in the comments.

Discuss

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from inkdroid] Charles Sanders Peirce - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2010-09-07T16:41:21+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from jerrell] http://youtu.be/ZyGOXA1r4K4

2010-09-07T16:39:04+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from inkdroid] How to Make Our Ideas Clear - Wikisource

2010-09-07T16:38:21+00:00

ReadWriteWeb: Investment in 3rd Party Twitter Startups Down 50%, Says Report

2010-09-07T16:30:22+00:00

Although the number of registered Twitter users has grown to over 145 million, a report released yesterday by investment research firm CB Insights notes that that popularity hasn't translated into investment in the Twitter ecosystem. According to its research, investment by venture capitalists and angel investors into pure play Twitter startups has dropped over 50% from June 2009 to May 2010.

"Pure play" startups are those whose product is predicated wholly on the Twitter platform.

Sponsor

From June 2008 to May 2009, CB Insights tracked $21.6 million in investment into pure-play Twitter startups. But over the last 12 month period, that investment figure is down to $10.4 million. While the dollar amount is down dramatically, the number of investment rounds has stayed nearly the same: 11 last year versus 10 this year.

Despite the growing popularity of Twitter, investors (and developers) appear to be uncertain about both the stability and the direction of Twitter. When Twitter purchased Tweetie back in April and acquired Smallthought Systems in June, it signalled to many that the company would be "filling the holes" in its platform itself, rather than leaving them for third-party developers to address.

While investment in and development of the Twitter ecosystem as a whole will continue, it seems unlikely that investment in pure play Twitter startups will rebound to meet the levels cited in another CB Insights report: the one that tracked a 220% increase in pure play iPhone and iPad app startups.

Discuss

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] Microsoft bod scoots over to BBC iPlayer job

2010-09-07T16:23:58+00:00

From The Register (NR)

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] R&D at IBC: Presentations in Conference

2010-09-07T16:21:12+00:00

From BBC Research and Development blog (NR)

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: http://km.aifb.kit.edu/projects/btc-2010/

2010-09-07T16:18:38+00:00

http://km.aifb.kit.edu/projects/btc-2010/

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: Pre-SKOS RDF Thesaurus work

2010-09-07T16:18:38+00:00

danbri: Part of this was separating the bits of thesaurus-ism that RDF just does from the bits that we didn't cover with the core RDF/RDFS specs
danbri: "Many vocabulary systems have a tacit or unarticulated semantic model obscured behind relatively uninformative relationships such as 'broader' and 'narrower'. It is usually impossible to mechanically derive a richer set of relationships from a system based around these vague, generic relation types."
danbri: "General hierarchical relationships are frequently used to indicate one of several actual relationships. The relationships 'is a', 'has instantiation', and 'has part', for example, might all be encoded using the less informative 'narrower' relation."
danbri: "The simpler 'core' relations are best thought of as being relationships between named concepts or terms, rather than as relations between real world (or abstract) entities. In other words, while we might say that "Fido is a dog" using a rich, semantic relationship, we would say that "the-term-Fido has-broader-term the-term-dog"."

(2010-09-07 15:19)

Slashdot: NYT Password Security Discussion Overlooks Universal Logins

2010-09-07T16:18:38+00:00

A recent NYT piece explores the never-ending quest for password-based security, to which reader climenole responds with a snippet from ReadWriteWeb that argues it's time to think more seriously about life beyond passwords, at least beyond keeping a long list of individual login/password pairs: "These protective measures don't go very far, according to the New York Times, because hackers can get ahold of passwords with software that remotely tracks keystrokes, or by tricking users into typing them in. The story touches on a range of issues around the problem, but neglects to mention the obvious: the march toward a centralized login for multiple sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot: The Gaping Holes In the UAE's Net Firewall

2010-09-07T16:18:38+00:00

Barence writes "The United Arab Emirates has its own Chinese-style firewall to weed out pornography and other 'unsavory' content. But as PC Pro's correspondent has found out, the firewall has more than a few holes in it. ISP helplines routinely suggest proxy server software that circumvents the filters. Access to Flickr is blocked, in case citizens' eyes should fall upon a naked buttock, but The Pirate Bay, which 'offers a range of bottoms to suit every need, including midget and donkey bottoms for anybody having a really slow afternoon – remains blissfully undisturbed.' 'Ultimately, I'm quite glad the UAE's authorities block websites, and thrilled that they're so inept at it,' concludes PC Pro's writer. 'Just like everybody in Dubai, all they've done is made me a master of internet chicanery.'" Guess that depends how closely they're watching the evaders.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ReadWriteWeb: The Good Stuff Machine: My6Sense Comes to Android

2010-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

Using algorithms to give personalized recommendations is hard. A lot of online services try to leverage their users' social graphs to determine the stories, books, songs or movies that are potentially of interest to them. Given that your own interests can be quite different from those of your friends, though, these systems are often limited. my6sense, on the other hand builds a personalized and constantly evolving profile for all of its users and provides recommendations purely based on what its algorithm thinks is most likely to be interesting to you. Starting today, Android users will be able to find the most interesting items in their RSS, Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz feeds with the help of My6Sense.

Sponsor

My6Sense: The Basics

At its core, My6Sense is a recommendation engine that focuses on highlighting the best stories in your feed subscriptions. The software can also point you towards the most interesting stories that your friends have shared on social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz (support for Buzz is currently only available in the Android app). It learns about your reading habits by evaluating a number of signals while you are using the service. Among other things, these signals include which stories you click on, how long you read a story and which stories you share. Instead of just giving you a chronological list of recent stories, my6sense does away with this traditional feed reader model and uses its "digital intuition" to organize your streams according to your interests.

We have been tracking the development of my6sense for almost two years now. Most recently, we covered the hire of Louis Gray as the company's VP of Marketing and first U.S. employee. As Gray told us yesterday, launching the Android version of my6sense is an important step for the company, as it will allow a wider variety of users to experience My6Sense's abilities. Until now, My6Sense was only available on the iPhone.

New on Android: Support for Google Buzz

When you think about successful social networks, Google Buzz is probably not on the top of your list. As Gray noted, no matter the popular perception of Buzz, the quality of the stories that its users are sharing on the service is very high. Because of this, adding support for Buzz in the Android app makes sense for my6sense.

Besides support for Buzz, the Android app also features a number of nice tweaks that will hopefully make it to the iPhone app as well. You can now, for example, add a time filter to any stream, so that you won't see items that are more than 24 hours old, for example. The Android app also does a better job at displaying messages from your friends on the various supported social networks.

Looking Ahead: The Power of the My6Sense API

As a personalized RSS reader, my6sense is already a very interesting product, but the real power of the company is in its APIs. For now, my6sense only has a few partners (a business social networking site in the UK and the largest mobile operator in Israel), but the company's technology looks to be flexible enough to make sense in a variety of contexts. As Gray pointed out when we talked to him, the mobile apps are really just demos for the powerful back end that the My6Sense team has developed. It's not hard to imagine places where the my6sense API could help. Wouldn't it be nice if you could come to a site like ReadWriteWeb or the New York Times, for example, and just see the stories that would be of interest to you?

Discuss

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from inkdroid] Facebook Search Now Displaying Top “Liked” Stories from Across the Web

2010-09-07T15:55:53+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from mischatuffield] حامد صابر را آزاد کنید: حامد صابر را آزاد کنید

2010-09-07T15:35:28+00:00

Delicious/network/moustaki: [from bbccouk] FOIA - Internal Review - IR2010026

2010-09-07T15:32:41+00:00

From szlwzl’s posterous (NR)

ReadWriteWeb: Getting Up and Running Faster with zfKit

2010-09-07T15:30:00+00:00

You've heard about Zend Framework (ZF). You've watched the screeencasts. Yet, you haven't put your toe into the ZF waters. Why? Most likely, you saw it as a lot of work to get started or perhaps you ran into issues with the demo that came packaged with the ZF you installed.

You are not alone. Others had that exact same frustrations and created zfKit as "a starter kit for ZF to enable a productive 'out of the box' experience". Let's take a look.

Sponsor

Along comes zfKit

zfKit was designed to be a download away from getting you up and going faster with some best practices on ZF. From the zfKit about page:

zfKit provides Doctrine 1.3, PHPUnit and ZendFramework 1.10 in a ready to run package.

You might imagine that zfKit streamlines the process of getting up and running. In fact, the instructions might have you wondering what is missing -- but it really is this simple to get started:

Done!

Alternatively, you can visit the github repository for zfKit to get started.

Behind zfKit

The zfKit creator and developer, Michael Kimsal, shared the following with RWH regarding the project goals, approach, and planned enhancements:
"zfKit aims to provide a starter kit for Zend Framework to enable a productive 'out of the box' experience."
RWH: What led you or prompted you to create zfKit?

Kimsal: Every time I'd used Zend Framework before, there was always a large amount of setup that I needed to do (decisions about what libraries to use, configuration options/settings, etc). zfKit was an effort to distill those decisions down to a reusable project.

RWH: Why did you choose github to host zfKit?

While I'm not a git guru, I'm liking git more and more because of the offline-nature. I can commit and branch locally as much as needed, and only push out the changes that really matter. github simply makes it easy to get started with git, but they also make it extremely easy to fork and modify other projects, then share those changes back. I recently had someone branch zfKit and add in some configuration options he finds handy - I wasn't even aware of them. :) That level of transparency, openness and sharing was not something I'd ever seen with sourceforge back in the olden days.

RWH: What do you plan to add to zfKit in the future?

Kimsal: I'm planning on adding in support for Doctrine2 in the near future, and would like to have a basic user/role/group management system in place by the end of the year. Beyond those, I'm open to requests or contributions from the community.

Do you plan to try out zfKit or do have you have other starter projects you've enjoyed using? Let us know in the comments below!

Discuss

ReadWriteWeb: How to Make Your Location-Based App a Success: Reward People for Their Activities

2010-09-07T15:18:36+00:00

Location-based mobile applications, also now being called "check-in services" to differentiate themselves from other geo-aware apps like Google Maps, are the hottest new social applications on the mobile scene today. The lineup includes game-based applications like Foursquare and MyTown, which each provide points, credits and/or badges for "checking in" (registering your physical presence) with a particular venue. There are also dedicated shopping-related check-in services like Shopkick, which rewards retail customers with discounts and deals for patronizing select establishments.

But almost all of the check-in apps integrate some form of mobile advertising. After months of experimentation with various formats, marketers are starting to discover what strategies actually work.

Sponsor

Despite the media craze for apps like these, some analysts are rationally advising caution to marketers who are tempted to jump on this latest bandwagon - after all, only 4% of U.S. adults have ever used location-based check-in services and only 1% out of those that use them do so more than once per week. But businesses, hopeful of reaching their most engaged customers, see check-in apps as a big opportunity for marketing initiatives, not to mention a rich resource of consumer data ripe for mining.

Case in point: analyst firm ABI Research has just released a new study that finds businesses are primed to spend $1.8 billion on location-based ads in 2015, a somewhat surprising number given the small crowd of early adopters currently using check-in apps.

According to ABI Research's Neil Strother, check-in apps may raise privacy concerns among some users today, but those issues can be overcome by offering consumers deals, discounts and rewards. The "value-exchange" of receiving these rewards will be high enough that consumers won't mind giving up privacy in order to take advantage of the benefits. "If you care about getting discounts or being rewarded for shopping," he explains, "you'll accept having your whereabouts known."

So What Sort of Benefits Actually Work?

Marketing news site Clickz has uncovered strategies that have, so far, proved successful for location-based advertising, both on mobile and elsewhere.

On mobile platforms, they agree with ABI, the clear winner is the reward system.

Specifically, they find that activity-based advertising, which rewards consumers for taking specific actions, has done well. Although Clickz cites examples that have been proven successful on the iPhone, they could easily be successful on other platforms as well, we think, there just haven't been as many mobile applications with which to test this strategy.

Clickz specifically cited two examples of reward-based systems, the first being TV network Bravo's Foursquare promotion which awarded badges to Foursquare users who checked in to venues associated with the network's shows. The other example was wireless charging company Powermat's MyTown promotion involving a sweepstakes. Users could enter to win a Powermat by interacting with the product in the store.

ABI's research report analyzes even more cases studies including clothing company H&M's virtual goods in MyTown, Chili's Foursquare promotion, Sharpie's badges on Brightkite and more.

We've reported on several other such initiatives ourselves, including Shopkick's incentive program, SCVNGR's partnership with shoe company Journeys, NYC-based hyperlocal location/group-buying startup, GroupTabs, travel rewards for frequent travelers from TopGuest, white-labeled geofenced text messasaging service ShopAlerts and many, many others.

Now that app makers and marketers know rewards are the key to success, it's a great time for companies and advertisers alike to experiment with various reward systems, promotions and deals to figure out what types of incentives actually work.

Discuss

Semantic Web Interest Group Scratchpad: SKOS editor based on protege4

2010-09-07T15:18:22+00:00

gromgull: Not all that pleasant if you are not used to protege

(2010-09-07 15:11)

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Front Cover

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: IEEE Computer Society Digital Library house advertisement

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Call for Papers

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Table of Contents

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Closing the Open (Face) Book

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Editor in Chief Fred Douglis discusses the pros and cons of removing a social network presence.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Something's in the Air: Broadband Advances Depend on Wireless

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

As the worldwide demand for faster Internet connections continues, regulatory agencies are pushing for more radio spectrum. Wireless broadband networks are expected to deliver great advances in ubiquitous connection and speed very quickly in both the US and the EU. Deploying new wireless-based networks could be increasingly critical as customers desert first-generation broadband technologies in ever-larger numbers.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Trust and Reputation Management

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Trust and reputation management research is highly interdisciplinary, involving researchers from networking and communication, data management and information systems, e-commerce and service computing, artificial intelligence, and game theory, as well as the social sciences and evolutionary biology. Trust and reputation management has played and will continue to play an important role in Internet and social computing systems and applications. This special issue addresses key issues in the field, such as representation, recommendation aggregation, and attack-resilient reputation systems.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Trusted Cloud Computing with Secure Resources and Data Coloring

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Trust and security have prevented businesses from fully accepting cloud platforms. To protect clouds, providers must first secure virtualized data-center resources, uphold user privacy, and preserve data integrity. The authors suggest using a trust-overlay network over multiple data centers to implement a reputation system for establishing trust between service providers and data owners. Data coloring and software watermarking techniques protect shared data objects and massively distributed software modules. These techniques safeguard multi-way authentications, enable single sign-on in the cloud, and tighten access control for sensitive data in both public and private clouds.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: The Impact of Churn on Uncertainty Decay in P2P Reputation Systems

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Reputation systems rely on historical information to account for uncertainty about users' intention to cooperate, but accumulating experience over long time periods is challenging in many situations. In peer-to-peer (P2P) systems, this operation is particularly hard due to churn—the continuous process of node arrival and departure. In this article, the authors examine the impact of churn on the perception of newcomers and identify the key factors that help uncertainty to decay slowly. The authors provide experimental results to illustrate the impact of churn on uncertainty reduction.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Advanced Feedback Management for Internet Auction Reputation Systems

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Electronic auction reputation systems have improved in recent years. However, most don't rely on user feedback but are still bound to old-fashioned comment counting while substantial information embedded in those comments is omitted. The authors' system manages and learns from user feedback and considers auctions' context, possible types of complaints, and the structure of connections between those complaints. They propose amplifying a reputation system algorithm to estimate the reported complaints' harmfulness. Their results are based on a real-world dataset from a leading Eastern European online auction provider.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: A Formal-Semantics-Based Calculus of Trust

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Building trust models based on a well-defined semantics of trust is important so that we can avoid misinterpretation, misuse, or inconsistent use of trust in Internet-based distributed computing. The authors present an approach to a formal-semantics-based calculus of trust, from conceptualization to logical formalization, from logic model to quantification of uncertainties, and from quantified trust to trust decision-making. They also explore how to apply a formal trust model to a PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) system to develop decentralized public-key certification and verification.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: IEEE Internet Computing call for papers for track articles

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Revising WSDL Documents: Why and How

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Although Web service technologies promote reuse, Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents that are supposed to describe the API that services offer often fail to do so properly. Therefore, finding services, understanding what they do, and reusing them are challenging tasks. The authors describe the most common errors they've found in real WSDL documents, explain how these errors impact service discovery, and present some guidelines for revising them.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: Agropedia: Humanization of Agricultural Knowledge

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

Due to a lack of precise and exact terms of reference, the Internet features very little content related to agriculture. Agropedia, one of the world's first agricultural knowledge repositories built from semantic, collaborative, and social networking metaphors, bridges this gap via agricultural knowledge models. Creating vibrant and diverse communities requires careful planning as well as an open, yet flexible, protocol. Agropedia, through its peer-reviewed scientific content contributed by agricultural research institutions and its community-generated interactive folk knowledge, brings together the expert community and the user community. The full article is available online at http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2010.108.

Internet Computing, IEEE - new TOC: A Survey of First-Person Shooter Gaming Traffic on the Internet

2010-09-07T15:18:06+00:00

As online games become significant contributors to Internet traffic, practitioners must look to measure and understand game traffic in order to provision for it. Despite gaming's significant implications for the Internet, no general framework exists for validating various and sometimes contradicting game traffic models. Practitioners must therefore find and study dozens of reports and papers, some with conflicting measurements, to understand traffic characteristics and use this information in their systems. This survey looks at the most representative first-person shooter (FPS) game traffic to provide a one-stop shop for practitioners. The Web extra contains two tables of summaries related to the article.