Wednesday, March 10. 2010
by Jennifer Van Grove
New location-based social search tool FourWhere shows Foursquare tips and comments using Google Maps so you can search and discover what everyone is saying about nearby places.
Users simply input a location or address into FourWhere, right-click (control click) on the map and select display preferences. The map can display all comments nearby, all venues in the vicinity and/or remove venues without tips.
It’s a simple app with a powerful purpose. For those of us preparing to journey out to Austin for SXSW, FourWhere’s release couldn’t have come at a better time. A search around the downtown area yields comments with insightful information about restaurants and bars. Essentially the application offers a map-based search experience for socialites looking to plan a fun night out.
FourWhere currently only pulls in data from Foursquare, but Sysomos, the company behind the app, has plans to integrate more social data in the future.
Reviews: Foursquare
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Via Mashable
Thursday, February 18. 2010
by Jennifer Van Grove
A new website called PleaseRobMe.com does nothing more than aggregate publicly shared check-ins, but its name and purpose attempt to shed more light on the dangerous side effects of location-sharing.
It’s no secret that when you share your location via Google Buzz and Foursquare you’re exposing information that could put you at risk. Many of us location-sharers get so caught up in the novelty and bonuses associated with our behavior that we forget the implications of our actions. PleaseRobMe.com seeks to make us more aware.
While the functionality of the site is minimal at best, the fact that you can view a livestream of check-ins — with data aggregated from Foursquare and Twitter — and filter by location or Twitter name is meant to be a bit jarring.
The point is driven home with the site-wide terminology, which caters to hypothetical would-be burglars. Check-ins are referenced as “recent empty homes” and “new opportunities,” and the name of the site alone is sure to raise a few eyebrows.
The site was created by three enterprising individuals who aren’t really out to get you robbed. Here’s how they describe the problem created by check-ins and the purpose of the site:
“The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home. So here we are; on one end we’re leaving lights on when we’re going on a holiday, and on the other we’re telling everybody on the Internet we’re not home. It gets even worse if you have ‘friends’ who want to colonize your house. That means they have to enter your address, to tell everyone where they are. Your address.. on the Internet.. Now you know what to do when people reach for their phone as soon as they enter your home. That’s right, slap them across the face.”
These guys have a legitimate point. Stories about status updates leading to burglaries are becoming commonplace. You may remember that video podcaster Israel Hyman was robbed after tweeting that he was out was out town, and there’s even evidence to support the notion that burglars are turning to social media to find their targets.
So are Foursquare, Loopt, Google Buzz and all the others just sites that make us all easier targets? Location-sharing is becoming such a popular trend this year that it doesn’t seem likely that the site will do much to curb the behavior. If there is such a thing as safe location-sharing, however, we hope you practice it.
Reviews: Foursquare, Google Buzz, Twitter
Tags: foursquare, location sharing, Mobile 2.0, social media, trending
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Side effects...
Tuesday, February 16. 2010
An initiative in South London has been working to develop a cooperative community atmosphere by uniting small businesses and entrepreneurs with local citizens since October 2009. Utilizing twenty previously unoccupied stalls in the Brixton market, organizers at Space Makers Agency offer young creative-based businesses three months rent-free to simultaneously offer people imaginative new spaces and foster links to the community. Treehugger reports:
[Space Makers Agency] have been working with the local communities, property owners, local authorities, policy-makers and others to create new ways of "of thinking about the spaces in which we live, work and play. Our approach is to start with what is already there: the stories of a place and the people who live there. Then our role is as a catalyst, bringing out the possibilities which were already present in a situation and making connections which might not have been obvious.
Among the shops taking residence in Brixton include vintage clothing stores, a photographer, a childrens puppet show, and a candy store. With a growing number of empty storefronts in a growing number of U.S. cities, a similar investment in community and creative entrepreneurship certainly seems like it could be possible. What metropolis do you think would be a perfect candidate for a Brixton Village-like experiment?
Photo by B. Alter via Treehugger
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Via GOOD
Wednesday, July 29. 2009
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Association of Neuroesthetics qui regroupe scientifiques et artistes. Garder un oeil là-dessus car les neurosciences, qui décrivent le fonctionnement neuronnal de certains affects ou expériences, sont vraiment une discipline à suivre, y compris pour la perception spatiale (ou artistique). Avec ici la description de quelques projets intéressants.
Wednesday, July 22. 2009
The way data centers devour resources could be dramatically reduced by embracing "community cloud computing." And Wikipedia may be the perfect test bed.
The popularity of cloud computing is rising faster now than at any time in the past. And it's no wonder; accessing services and applications through the Internet rather than storing the necessary data on your own computer makes sense now that links are so fast and reliable.
However, cloud computing has some significant drawbacks. Instead of localizing failures as conventional Internet computing does, the cloud makes failures system wide, say Alexandros Marinos at the University of Surrey and Gerard Briscoe at the London School of Economics, both in the U.K.. If the cloud goes down, as happened earlier this year with Gmail and last year with Amazon's S3 service, entire companies and the industries associated with them can grind to a halt.
So Marinos and Briscoe have come up with an alternative: community clouds in which individuals offer a portion of their computing resources to a virtual cloud. That's not unlike distributed computing ventures such as SETI@home and Folding@home that use processing cycles on idling personal computers to carry out intensive data analysis.
A virtual cloud would be more demanding but could have substantial benefits. Marinos and Briscoe say that Wikipedia might be an ideal test bed on which to try out the idea. At the moment, Wikipedia depends on substantial donations to keep its servers running and to keep the service free of advertisements. An interesting alternative might be a virtual cloud based on computing resources donated by users around the world.
Marinos and Briscoe point out that a virtual cloud should also be greener than the rapidly expanding data centers that are springing up all over the world. The combined carbon footprint of data centers is expected to exceed that of the world's airlines by 2020. Even now, these facilities are challenging the capacity of power grids to deliver enough power to keep them going.
That alone may provide the necessary vision and momentum to get an idea like this off the ground.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0907.2485: Community Cloud Computing
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Via MIT Technology Review
Wednesday, July 15. 2009
Personal comment:
Je dirais "Architecture, art & code" pour fabric | ch! Communauté (et cycle de conférences) à suivre peut-être pour soumettre des approches plus orientées sur le code (Rhizoreality, etc.)?
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