Courtesy my Facebook feed and District of Columbia CTO Vivek Kundra here’s a fantastic example of a government agency actively trying to stimulate new ideas and innovation. Yesterday Kundra’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) released data representing more than 84,000 3D buildings for inclusion in Google Earths’ Cities in 3D program.
The release is meant to allow citizens, whether development experts or simply concerned city dwellers, a greater role in conversations and plans about the city’s future. Want to propose a new development? These 3D images should go a long way in allowing all parties a better, and simpler, platform upon which to build.
Over at the Google Earth blog, Barney Krucoff, the GIS Manager for OCTO, highlights why they released the data. I’ve cut the highlights of his remarks - visit the LatLong blog for the full version:
1. It is the right thing to do. Fundamentally, the District Government believes that data created with public funds should be available to the public. Read More »
As popular as wikis have become, they aren’t yet in use across all mediums. Case in point: music. However, a company called Sonoma Wire Works appears to have solved this problem. Sonoma Wire Works has announced the launch of RiffWorks T4, an online music-collaboration application. With RiffWorks T4, musicians can record ideas, use drums and guitars, and add effects to quickly create songs. Most importantly, users do this online, and can easily collaborate with peers around the world — all for free! When finished, their tunes can be broadcast on RiffWorld.com.
Technology empowers users. Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship). A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music). GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically “playing tennis” with works in progress. However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.
RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based. It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators. It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible. RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music, I wonder what it will sound like.
Editor’s Note: Chris Yeh Vice President of Enterprise Marketing at PBwiki, a hosted wiki solution platform used by more than 30,000 customers — including 1/3 of the Fortune 500. He writes to share a story from PBwiki about how the use of a wiki had life saving results.
When skeptics express their doubts about wikis, Web 2.0, and Enterprise 2.0, they often scoff that all these shiny new technologies are flashy, but don’t solve real problems.
Well, what problem could be more real, more tangible, and more important than trying to defend your convoy from deadly attacks by insurgents in Iraq? If wikis can help keep soldiers alive, it sure seems like they should be able to help your company be more productive.
Frank Rath at the University of Wisconsin needed to find a better means of collaboration. Some of the world’s leading polymer scientists were working together with Resilient Technologies on an $11 million project to develop a new kind of airless tire for Humvees. Read More »
The same problems that plagued 1.0 resources like phone books and encyclopedias still plague even the best of their 2.0 successors. These legacy issues mainly regard reliability as it pertains to accuracy. After a phone book is published and distributed, it is instantly out-of-date as phone numbers are disconnected and addresses changed.Unfortunately, this is an issue developers have yet to circumvent.
As documented in The New York Times’ article about Urbanspoons, a free Apple iPhone application that helps users “find restaurants by neighborhood, cuisine or price,” reality may be quite different from what Urbanspoons tells you. The writer’s Urbanspoons search led him to a restaurant that had been closed for six months, yet it still appeared highly recommended in the application. Inconvenient at worst, Urbanspoons’ inaccuracy is easily forgotten over a glass of wine at a restaurant that is actually still open for business.
On a more sinister level, outdated materials can be damaging to one’s (or one’s neighborhood, and by extension, their property value) reputation. Take, for example, rottenneighbor.com, “the first real estate search engine of its kind allowing you to rate and review good and bad neighbors before and after you move so you can make a smart real estate decision.” From the get-go, many users walk a fine line between honest, albeit negative, reviews and pure defamation. So what happens to reviews of neighbors after they move? The reviews stay with the location, so the new neighbor moving in will turn up in a search as a bad neighbor. And some of these reviews are quite unsavory, think “cat killer.” In a search of my neighborhood, I found a review of a man who was a resident of an apartment in 1999. While it is highly unlikely either party still lives in the building, the building will turn up, nine years later, as the home of a “freaky porn addict and nudist.”
Users of online directory resources should beware of outdated reviews and content. It’s common sense, but that shiny new iPhone may cloud better judgment. In the meantime, I will continue posting reviews of all of my least favorite neighbors and take reviews of others with a grain of salt. You never know, they may or may not still be there.
Thanks to Nicholas for this post - it’s refreshing to be called an exception in a good way - and to Luke for commenting on the post and directing people to the site. There is a 96.3% chance your life will improve if you follow their lead and send readers my way (you mean you don’t remember my first mash up?)
As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. Click on the Dilbert tag below to see all 52 of my mash ups (and counting…).
On Monday, the online microblogging website, Twitter, announced its acquisition of Summize, a search engine for online conversations. According to the Twitter blog, “there is a perfect technology fit, vision fit, and cultural fit.” Twitter is one of the fast approaching social networking websites that keeps you instantly in touch with co-workers, family, and friends. I personal enjoy the text messages from ESPN, so I’m always informed on the daily sports news. But, with all the information Twitter accumulates, for new users it sometimes becomes very cluttered and unattractive to use. With the addition of Summize, built from the passion of three designers, having a search capability that accumulates relevant information to you will be the next step in the development of Twitter.
“In 2008, we discovered Twitter as a source of the most timely and relevant opinions on trending topics. We immediately embarked on a plan to develop the best Twitter search and discovery application to serve the Twitter community and burgeoning Twitter ecosystem,” says co-founder Jay Virdy.
With the addition to Summize it will be interesting to see the response and potential growth of Twitter. It’s a great tool for teams scattered across the US, because remember in Web 2.0 people are always connected no matter where they may reside.
Yesterday, the Ontario Government announced that they wouldn’t be putting a gas-fired generator on a Mississauga Lakeview site after a citizen developed waterfront plan was enthusiastically endorsed by the Mississauga city council.
The site was home to a coal power plant until 2005, and was to be replaced by a gas-fired generator before the community led Lakeview Ratepayers Association stepped in.The 800 member group came up with a plan that called for a 200 hectare mixed use community with medium-rise buildings, residential, employment and educational sites, and a “destination” waterfront area devoted to trails, parks, an aquarium or stadium, and a pier with entertainment and educational features.
This amazing feat brings the “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) opposition to a new level.Will Dick wrote about direct democracy last week. In a world like that, how is the NIMBY problem solved?NIMBY relegates power plants, airports, and other high polluters farther and farther away from population centers where they are more useful.Even though high voltage AC transmission lines try to minimize energy loss when transporting electricity, they still lose about 20% per 1000 km.
Is this a loss we can deal with when giving citizens more power in planning their respective communities?
P.S. Sorry Wikinomics Report Card fans, I don’t have another entry this week, but if you missed my last entry on De Beers, you can find it here. The Report Card will return next week, better than ever!
In the last 20 some odd years corporate security has made some headway. Companies are now at the point where they are reasonably efficient at keeping ‘hackers’ out and letting employees in. The problem is that to get to this point the enterprise has had to put up walls in the name of safety and security, but at the cost of functionality and logic.
The current Jericho model of security (fitting name) is great a putting up impermeable walls to keep to dangers outside at bay, but not so at quickly adapting and reconfiguring them. Even inside the walls of the enterprise security has largely been based on group permission. Which is just a step up from the one size fits all XXXL t-shirts that get blasted out of an air gun at sporting events.
The problem is that organizations today need to be agile, reconfigurable, be able to leverage partners and third party expertise. Unfortunately to operate in this new environment security and permissions need to be dynamic and flexible both internally and externally. To become a next generation enterprise it will be increasingly important to both empower and trust employees when it comes to information and security decisions. Read More »
Today I got presented with a clever/nefarious fake login page at hotmail.
Early this morning I did a check of my webmail and found a message supposedly from support@mydomain.com with the subject heading “Registration renewal for your domains”. While I didn’t have any domains there, I didn’t think much of it until I clicked to open the message.
Immediately, out of the blue it appeared to log me out of hotmail and present me with a new hotmail login screen. The font looked a little odd, so I checked the URL in the browser (which showed me all was well and that I was on: http://…mail.live.com/ However, when I right clicked to get the properties for the page I found that the actual site I was on was:
(note: I don’t suggest going to the kbs8.cn site, no telling what’s there)
Anyway, I emailed hotmail security about it. I’m curious to see what they’ll tell me. This seems to be a pretty serious security bug though. Not sure how an email can take over the entire hotmail interface leaving the main URL intact but presenting with an arbitrary web page.
The only other explanation that I can imagine for this is if microsoft runs the kbs8.cn site itself. However, I’m not going there to find out. And if they do own it, it’s probably not a good choice of URL to frame in a login page. I’m glad I didn’t log back in again when I was mysteriously logged out. But with scams like these, it’s getting much harder than it used to be to know when you’re being phished or not.
I’ll report back with any news I receive from hotmail’s security staff in case they have advice on browser settings or how to avoid this security issue. UPDATE: response from Microsoft is that they’re looking into it and a report was made to their passport group about the issue. They have since followed up saying the phishing site will be taken down shortly.
Have you ever been taken in by a phishing scheme before? How did you know? What did you do?
Any experts have recommendations or best practices on how to avoid these risks?
For those that might not know about it, mashable is a great site for social networking news. Today they announced a nifty little “contest”: they are giving away one full month of free advertising, to three lucky start ups, in their new “Start Up Pricing 90×90 advertising zone”. The zone itself is a cool idea, designed to offer more affordable advertising for startups which might not be rolling in cash. The contest is also a cool idea - just leave a comment with your company name / URL, a 20 word description, and 20 words on why your startup is right for the Mashable audience. What I don’t quite understand is this next part:
Winners will be selected at random through a random integer Web app, please leave a valid e-mail address.
Why random? Wouldn’t it be better to select from the submissions based on merit - perhaps even using a community voting application? At minimum, wouldn’t this provide more incentive for companies to really crystalize their ideas in a compelling way, and make the post (and comment section) that much more interesting to readers?
An article on CNN.com explains the growing trend of web 2.0 usage in Congress. Leading the way is Rep. John Culberson of Texas. He uses twitter.com, qik.com, and utterz.com to reach his constituents. Culberson’s goal is to “Shine sunlight in every dark corner of the Congress, to make the Congress and the government as transparent as humanly possible.” Culberson isn’t alone. Many members of congress and politicians from all areas of the government have been utilizing the amazing networking potential of web 2.0 applications. I’m sure you have all seen or at least heard of McCain and Obama’s use of Youtube for the presidential election. Use of web 2.0 sites has allowed politicians to communicate more effectively with their constituents. Online videos and blogs have proven far more effective and cost efficient than billboards and bumper stickers.
The growing use of web 2.0 has also led to a growing concern by many. The House Franking Commission, which regulates the uses of taxpayers’ money for communicating with constituents, has considered restricting use of sites like youtube and qik. The concern of inappropriate usage of taxpayers’ money is legitimate, but I for one think that we need more transparency in the government. Web 2.0 sites provide a very cost efficient means of creating this transparency through increased communication.
Culberson is on the right track and I hope the Franking Commission doesn’t thwart his positive efforts. In response to this concern Culberson said, “They will not stop me. They can no more regulate the Internet than they can regulate the wind.”
I don’t know if his gunslinger mentality is right… but I like it
A little while ago I wrote a two-part series called “Looking into the blogosphere through a sporting lens” (part 2 is here). The purpose of the series was to look at some questions underlying a Costas Now program, which itself was supposed to be an insightful look at the role of the blogosphere in relation sports reporting. While the video itself devolved into something far less thoughtful then it could have been, the questions it raised about the role and value of comments in the blogosphere continue to be quite interesting to me.
What leads me to bring this up again is blatant self-promotion are two very interesting posts, with wildly divergent perspectives on the comments issue. The first is from social media expert Chris Brogan, entitled “Musicians play for tips - The importance of comments“. In the post Chris reminds readers that comments are important, presents his rough calculations on the percentage of readers who comment (roughly 1/4 of 1%), and admits that his own personal commenting habits are roughly in the same ballpark.
As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. To celebrate my 50th mash up on the Dilbert platform, I thought that it was about time that I started branching out into a new genre - action films. The graphic below is not for the faint of heart, but it was recently revealed that Hellboy overpowered Hancock in the US, so somebody had to take a stand north of the border…
A darling of the Wikinomics blog (1,2,3), Radiohead has impressed before, and with their latest video for House of Cards, they do so again. Maintaining their promise not to make any conventional music videos for their anything but conventionally released In Rainbows, the band’s latest video was made using Geometric Informatics and LIDAR (think radar, but with light) technology normally reserved for geographic mapping and catching speeding cars, among other things.
It’s pretty humorous (and either slightly sad given what doesn’t happen despite the available tools or slightly scary to think that Steve Jobs may be planning a coup).
My favourites:
There would be a three hour wait to get the latest $5 bill. It would also feature a web 2.0 gradient.
Instead of a Social Security number, all newborns would receive a free MobileMe account.
The cabinet would add the Department for Ergonomic Design, including a new position called theSecretary of Feng Shui. The office would debate the merits of using Arial versus Helvetica on street signs. Additionally, the Lincoln Bedroom would be upgraded with a mini rock waterfall and tiny Bonsai trees.
Steve Jobs’ face would inexplicably appear next to Roosevelt’s on Mt. Rushmore.
“In God We Trust” would be changed to “Getting Things Done”.
I thought I’d take it one step further and theorize what would happen “if the United Nations were run by Google.”
The Chinese and Russians would withdraw their vetoes against sanctions on Zimbabwe after Googling “Mugabe” ….
The Kyoto Protocol would be restructured with targets for member nations tied to the number of servers each country possesses.
The Russians would attempt to buy Google with oil money.
The Security Council would fail to come to agreement on “Don’t be evil” and would instead adopt “Google first, Act later.”
*Authors’ note: The Promethean Institute is a libertarian public policy think tank based in Orange County, California. I am neither libertarian nor Californian and by virtue of being Canadian, less good looking but definitely more in-touch with my socialist side.
We’ve all heard it before. The nay-sayers doubting the benefits of social technology. However, Jive Software CMO Sam Lawrence has posted a series of 10 charts on his blog Go Big Always illustrating many of the unsaid (or unexpressed) truths of organizations’ views regarding Web 2.0 tools.
Although comedic in nature, these diagrams give you something to think about. How much of the criticsms of Enterprise 2.0 out there are well-founded? Argued by people who have actually tried to use the technology, and how much of it is just ‘hot air‘ based on peoples’ perceptions.
As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. If these themes keep up I’m going to have to add “random violence” to the tag cloud.
Whether you’re a regular reader, or just pop in occasionally, it’s not always easy to keep up with our Wikinomics blog content. With this in mind, we have created the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, to try and capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog from the past week.
- and to Luke for commenting on the post and directing people to the site. There is a 96.3% chance your life will improve if you follow their lead and send readers my way (you mean you 
