With the help of simple tools introduced by Internet companies recently, millions of people are trying their hand at cartography, drawing on digital maps and annotating them with text, images, sound and videos. In the process, they are reshaping the world of mapmaking and collectively creating a new kind of atlas that is likely to [...]
Data is not information unless you can find it. But information can’t be applied to knowledge in the absence of the means by which to use it. Access must yield meaningful information in order to turn bits of code into valuable and actionable business information. I like to think about it this way: libraries house [...]
In May, Lucasfilm announced plans to enable fans of the “Star Wars” series to “remix” “Star Wars” video clips with their own creative work. Using an innovative Internet platform called Eyespot, these (re)creators can select video clips or other content and then add images or upload new content, whether images, video or music. Eyespot is [...]
Looking over the landscape of recent blog posts on open social networking, it’s clear that folks are interested in connecting together some of their disparate accounts on a wide range of social networks. The dream is that distributed social networks will mesh with individuals–each who are on multiple social networks–and that the whole thing kind [...]
Increasingly popular social-networking sites such as MySpace, YouTube and Facebook are accounting for such huge volumes of DNS queries and bandwidth consumption that carriers, universities and corporations are scrambling to keep pace. The trend is prompting some network operators to upgrade their DNS systems, while others are blocking the sites altogether. Moreover, the “MySpace Effect” [...]
Two weeks ago, a judge ruled that BitTorrent search engine Torrentspy was required to enable server logs and turn the information over to the MPAA as part of the discovery process (the MPAA is suing Torrentspy for contributing to copyright infringement). That ruling was based on the theory that the information in question is already [...]
Among other things, Paul English is the founder of Kayak.com, a site where you can book your airplane flights and hotels. It was a relatively late entrant into a market dominated by Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz. But Kayak decided to do to those sites what they had done to the individual airline sites. Kayak aggregates [...]
