2012-01-27
post/16596658651
If you’re upset by twitter’s per-country filtering announcement, you know much less about doing business online than you think you do.
But posting such a thing without laying out “things you should know about doing business online” is, frankly, smug and irritating. So, here goes. ”
Simon Batistoni: What you need to know about Twitter’s new filters.
Well worth a read, because he knows what he’s talking about.
2012-01-06
post/15408051073
2011-09-22
post/10511627545
2011-09-14
post/10179603214
JSON payload sniffing and surveillance photographs of cars, from Troy Hunt’s post about Bondi Westfield’s iPhone “find my car” app and its privacy failings:
That URL for the service endpoint we looked at earlier contains a number of parameters – filters, if you like – and removing these readily provides the current status of all 2,550 sensors. This includes the number plate of any car currently occupying a space and as you can see, it’s available by design to anyone.
(via Tom Carden)
2011-07-13
post/7551582367
Cellphone Calls Reveal The United States’s Invisible Ties at Co.Design, via new-aesthetic (although it’s been all over for a while), originally from Sensable City’s Connected States project.
One noteworthy part, for me anyway, is that Alabama and Georgia are grouped together, despite the fact that they span a timezone boundary.
2011-05-24
post/5812502488
Dead Yet Alive - the top five historical figures mentioned on BBC TV. (From Ladies and Gentleman, this is the BBC at technogoggles, wherein subtitles are grist for data mining.)
2011-03-24
post/4066628370
John Batelle, arguing Why Color Matters: Augmented Reality And Nuanced Social Graphs May Finally Come of Age.
I know that for the hip young kids, Flickr might as well not exist, but it’s had Places pages for a while. They let you get recent photos from, say, New York.
Now, there’s probably a lot more that could be done with these (I can think of two little changes off the top of my head). But compared to Color - who reportedly spent $500,000 on domain names, only to serve a single page - Flickr’s already got hundreds of millions of geotagged photos, and the infrastructure to search and display them. If I wanted to build something looking at the history of places over time, I know which service I’d look at.
2011-02-23
Baidu Maps and the Edges of the World
Baidu’s cute isometric 3d city renderings are doing the rounds again, but they’re not the only thing interesting about the Chinese website’s maps.
When you first go to the home page, the map defaults to China. This isn’t that odd: so does Google China’s Maps, and most of the Google country domains do the same thing. What is odd is that barely anything outside China is shown.
A portion of the screen for the default view of Baidu Maps.
Unlike Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ovi, you can’t drag the map past the international date line. Instead, there’s a hard edge.
If you do scroll westwards, the lack of detail becomes clear. I assume the labels are for continents, not countries. What’s certainly true is that when you zoom in merely one step from the default, the coastlines (and labels) vanish, turning the entire map grey.
I wonder whether this reflects some sort of official thinking (“the rest of the world might as well not exist”), or a more prosaic technical difficulty (perhaps problems in sourcing data). Still, I thought that both the hard edges and lack of detail were worth noting.
