afraid it's going to get worse before it gets better!

nice graphic http://rww.readwriteweb.netdna-cdn.com/Anatomy_HTML5.jpg

"The story of the Internet has been deflationary from Amazon to Craigslist to iTunes.  And so too will be Factual.  They have built algorithms that automatically crawl the web for the world’s best structured data and use heuristic techniques to ensure the quality of the data.  They have built tools to store the data but also to allow 3rd-party developers to rapidly consume or even write data to their tables.<br />
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"Learning from our Mistakes: The Failure of OpenID, AtomPub and XML on the Web"

"As part of their research, women were given bags to carry around a local mall for an hour. Several were given Victoria's Secret bags, while others toted plain pink shopping bags. The study surfaced an interesting connection. Those women who carried Victoria's Secret bags felt more feminine, glamorous, and good-looking. On the contrary, those with the pink shopping bags felt indifferent. These studies represent a harbinger of the importance of personal relationships and how they're fostered in brand experiences. Businesses must bring their companies and products to life. As other studies show, social networking is incredibly emotional. As I wrote in a recent post, "Once More With Feeling," some experiments show that as we Tweet, our levels of oxytocin rise."

"We will still be annoyed by people who pun, but we will be able to show them mercy because punning will be revealed to be some sort of connectopathic glitch: The punner, like someone with Tourette's, has no medical ability not to pun"

Nice analysis of OK Cupid data on trends in photography equip, technique, and attractiveness. Also an example of a social bar that pops up at the bottom of the post.

Nice example of the eBay API status page (slide 15) and API adoption trends w/ numbers (slides 5-10)

this could be big...

"And right now, the future is not about new and better digital tools, or their prolifieration - it is about what we do together with them - the new self-organising future that dawns."

"Cutler and his colleagues also surveyed cooking patterns across several cultures and found that obesity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income. Other research supports the idea that cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not."

uses pipes to scrape, reeader to store/compare, and gdocs to graph

"Magazines and newspapers were perfect businesses for a moment of time, but they wouldn't have worked in 1784, and they're not going to work very soon in the future either. We're always going to need writers, but the business model of their platform is going to change. People will pay for content if it is so unique they can't get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people. We'll always be willing to pay for souvenirs of news, as well, things to go on a shelf or badges of honor to share."

" female names were jettisoned from popular use more quickly than male ones, although the reasons behind this faster turnover are unclear […] To find out why, Berger and Le Mens gauged the reactions of 661 expecting parents to a list of 30 names. They found that the parents were less likely to give their children names that had seen the sharpest recent rises in popularity, regardless of how popular the names were overall. This was mostly because they viewed these names as short-lived fads; when the duo adjusted their results for this perception, a name's rise in popularity no longer affected its attractiveness . These results highlight the capricious nature of fame and popularity. Public concern that something's popularity is fleeting can make it seem less attractive, and ensure that its popularity actually is fleeting! It's a self-fulfilling effect - a meteoric rise to stardom can generate the very conditions that cause an equally swift downfall."

"“It might only take 5 days of World of Warcraft to create Wikipedia,” considering the vast number of players. “There’s no reason why we can’t take real world work and real world problems and seductively conceal it in a game world. Gamers have no problem doing work and doing collaborative things, you just have to figure out how to make them care about it.”"

list of influential pieces on where this is all going

damning indictment of today's advertising situation

"the modern newspapers started about 1836. There were newspapers for a hundred years before that, but they were relatively expensive. In 1836 somebody "invented" the steam-driven printing press ... But anyway, paper was cheap, so putting together a little engine and a little printing press enabled anybody with a small investment to start his own newspaper. Every significant city by 1845 had dozens of little newspapers, which were much closer to Blogs than to modern newspapers. … We're back to 1836 now, in a sense; everybody who wants to has his own "newspaper", and it's tough to know who is good and who is reliable and who isn't, but the same processes are still running. The blogs will get bigger; the good ones are hiring a second helper and a third and fourth, and we'll spend a century or more sorting things out and re-creating the market. It's hard, but it's not a bad thing. It's a good thing."

an aesthetic sampler

"By year end 2012, physical sensors will create 20 percent of non-video internet traffic. We are all familiar with CCTV systems for monitoring traffic movement, license plates and many other applications, but how about collecting data from the hard-disk shock sensors in your notebook to collect data to better understand earth tremors and earthquakes? The extent and diversity of real-time environmental sensing is growing rapidly as our ability to act on and interpret the growing volumes of data to capture valuable information increases. Gartner says organisations should consider how use of the growing volume of real-time data might create new business models and enable better informed business decision making."

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem

"we're forced to contend with a society in which things are being truly reconfigured. ... this creates all new questions about context & privacy, about our relationship to space & to the people around us. Specific genres of social media may come & go, but these underlying properties are here to stay. We won't turn the clock back on these. Social network sites may end up being a fad from the first decade of the 21st century, but new forms of technology will continue to leverage social network as we go forward. If we get away from thinking about the specific technologies & focus on the properties & dynamics, we can see how change is unfolding before our eyes. One of the key challenges is learning how to adapt to an environment in which these properties & dynamics play a key role. This is a systems problem. We are all implicated in it - as developers & policy makers, as parents & friends, as individuals & as citizens. Social media is here to stay. Now we just have to evolve with it."

twitter zeitgeist

"An unbook is more like software: 1. An unbook is never finished, but rather continually updated, based on feedback from users andtheir evolving needs. 2. An unbook is released in versions. As in open source software, version 1.0 of an unbook is a significant milestone, indicating that it is stable and reliable enough for use by the general public. The significance of a new release is indicated by the size of the gap: For example, the difference between 1.1 and 1.1.3 is minor, while the difference between 1.1 and 2.0 is major. 3. An unbook is supported by a community of users who share their experiences and best practices with each other, and help each other troubleshoot problems encountered in their practice areas. An unbook’s community is a very real part of the unbook’s development team."

We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems.

As ordinary physical items enter the same network, it’s not going to be about virtual or physical activities anymore. Both will be different faces of the same coin. It’s not going to be about context or not. Context will be the primary component of everything. The primary device will no longer be a “mobile”, but more like something that interacts with the network in a highly contextual way. Ideas, people and physical objects will be part of the same network in a very literal sense

"How people spend their discretionary income – the cash that goes to clothing, electronics, recreation, household goods, alcohol – depends a lot on where they live. People in Greece spend almost 13 times more money on clothing as they do on electronics. People living in Japan spend more on recreation than they do on clothing, electronics and household goods combined. Americans spend a lot of money on everything."

Somali students comprise only 6 percent of the Minneapolis school system, but one-quarter of the children in the city’s early childhood autism programs. Health officials are baffled.

"What the GOP realized was that Obama did come across different than the average American, but not so much because he was black as because he was effortless. The very set of supercharged talents and qualities that allowed Obama to levitate past the boundaries of race and class make him different than those who haven't rocketed upward on the strength of their intelligence and charisma and charm... Obama, in other words, is elite. As in 'A group or class of persons enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status.' Obama isn't an economic elite, but he is a social and intellectual elite. "The Obama campaign, similarly, has realized that McCain is an elite, and that voters won't believe that a guy who has so many houses that he can't keep track of them will care if they lose the small condo they call home. This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to decide which type of elite voters hate -- or fear, or mistrust -- more: A social elite or an economic elite?"

Stephene Downes indulges his futurist-slash-scifi side. Some good stuff in here.

imagining a future transparent device that demonstrates context-aware applications

"Walter Benajmin believed that modern media permitted a revolution in perception that made us prey to dictators and false gods. He might have been talking about Facebook." "the difference between "follow[ing] with the eye, while resting on a summer afternoon, a mountain range on the horizon" and experiencing that same mountain range at a remove (imagine a picture postcard) makes it harder to appreciate the real thing ("Gosh, this mountain is beautiful! Just like a postcard!"), social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection, facsimiles of friendship. By ignoring that difference, as Shirky mostly does, we keep moving heedlessly toward a future where the basic human social activities that these new technologies are modeled on--talking, being introduced to new people by friends--are threatened."

"I'd like to put out two guidelines for anyone adopting this "link to myself" strategy: 1. Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.) 2. Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide." Hear, hear!

Infographic showing the global variation among most popular social networking services

Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition. The phrase, which comes from sociology, is often used to describe the information we acquire and then trade

That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree.

looks like i'll be ok at least until I.T. 3.0

talk with Larry Johnson, Alan Levine and Rachel Smith of the New Media Consortium. We discuss the 2008 edition of their Horizon Report, exploring both their methods and the wide-ranging implications for Higher Education of their findings.

Raw cases consist of hundreds, even thousands, of “pages” of data. So, in addition to the lateral synthesis of many disparate piece of information, part of the student’s assignment is determining the most effective allocation of time and attention i

"Sometimes an idea is so awesomely stupid, it passes through a conceptual looking-glass and becomes stupidly awesome." (via: woot) Icanhasmanbabies?

Imagine if kids had peppered the town with [NFC ]tags. They could then leave each other messages in different areas, messages that only those that were 'in', owning the right tag readers, could see. This would be like hiding secrets in plain sight.

"enabling that kind of behavior, where the fans are the ultimate arbiters of what gets played and what gets popular, is the end game for all of this."

clever fellow uses IMAP in Gmail to visualize email trends

"presents our list of the 10 technologies that we think are most likely to change the way we live."

an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It's intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

Michael Golbhaber "proposed an economy that left money behind and ran on attention. At first it seems utopian, but I've come to regard it as a viable scenario for the future"

Big shops are using elaborate technology to monitor and influence the behaviour of their customers

the computer biz is overdue for commoditization

An ego-centric social network places the individual as the core of the network experience (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster) while the object-centric network places a non-ego element at the center of the network. Examples of object-centric networks i

Interview w/ William Gibson (supposedly excellent according to BoingBoing. Bruce Sterling suggested questions)

the evolution of human society is as much about old things disappearing as new things appearing

"familiarity with functions across the organization and the ability to translate and make connections between them is a much-underrated talent" hear, hear!

'The future is already here,' he is fond of suggesting. 'It is just not evenly distributed.'

Sci-fi author knew all about the Web, global warming, and more

Points out that while the S&P has made numeric gains, the decline in the value of the dollar has negated them over the last decade

set of images and stats on digital media, growth of the net, gaming, etc.

Worldmapper is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.

What's the difference between Seattle and Salt Lake City? There are many differences, of course, but here's one you might not know. In Seattle, there are nearly 45% more dogs than children. In Salt Lake City, there are nearly 19% more kids than dogs.