I’ve created a quick and dirty Yahoo! Pipe that aggregates news from Google News and Yahoo! News about the ongoing swine flu outbreak and plots it on a map.
And here is a dynamic graph showing Twitters mentioning “swine flu,” “flu,” or “influenza.”
[Also posted at Transformation Tracker.]
Technorati Tags: swine flu, flu, influenza
Ah, April Fools. As far as holidays go, its only slightly more official than Arbor Day. And yet it gets so much more air time, largely in part due to our improved means of communication. How improved? Here’s a cool video on how the internet has re-popularized the April Fool’s prank. Good stuff, enjoy!
Oh dear. XNA (and the more closed DS and PSP) might actually have a run for its money, in the form of an “open” game platform on the iPhone. Admittedly there are all sorts of less than open issues associated with the iPhone, but for $99.00 you get registered and make games for the iPhone. The same price oddly enough for full XNA tool usage on the Xbox 360.
While the development environment forces you to use Objective-C, you can use OpenGL ES and OpenAL, which is also more open than DirectX 10 on XNA. So there are some interesting aspects to this device. I’ve also heard people making jokes about it being a Wii that you can make phone calls on.
Gamasutra - Apple Unveils iPhone SDK with Spore, Monkey Ball
Using the iPhone SDK, “third party developers will be able to build native applications for the iPhone with a rich set of APIs, including programming interfaces for Core OS, Core Services, Media and Cocoa Touch technologies,” leveraging iPhone aspects such as its Multi-Touch user interface, animation technology, storage, three-axis accelerometer and geographical location technology.
This is why “the game industry” doesn’t get any better at what they do. Because there is no opportunity to share and grow. Instead everyone must homegrow every piece of technology. Web developers on the other hand? Looks like they remember those lessons about sharing momma told them. Nintendo? Did momma never sit you down and talk about sharing?
Joystiq - Unofficial Wii Opera SDK now Available
An unofficial software development kit for making Wii-compatible browser games is now open to the public, thanks in large part to the work of Daniel Gump. More than simply tracking the position of the Wii-mote cursor, the custom Javascript libraries will detect the remote’s distance from the sensor bar, the pressing of any remote buttons, and the movement of the device along the Z-axis.
The SDK can be found here.
It would be the super cool service known as Silobreaker. In addition to aggregating the latest news in a number of categories, such as Global Issues, Science and Technology, and Business, Silobreaker aims to place news stories into a wider context by providing links to related articles, real-time network views of the relationships between people, organizations, etc. mentioned in an article, short “fact sheets” and biographies about people and organizations mentioned in an article, customizable graphs of trends in media coverage of an issue, and news stories plotted on a map.
Silobreaker is currently in beta and is free. The folks at Silobreaker say that, in the future, they will maintain a free service in addition to several levels of paid, premium service. When it initially launched, it was only fee-for-service, with the fee a whopping $400 per year. So, take advantage while it’s free! Head on over and give it a try. Other news sites pale in comparison after some time spent exploring the features at Silobreaker.
–Sean
Technorati Tags: OSINT, Silobreaker, faceted browsing, current awareness, Google News
Well, it probably isn’t as cool as Hector’s self promotion, but I recently did an interview which has become a two-part podcast. The pages linked have both the actual podcast and associated transcripts. Wes Unruh of Alterati ran the interview. He’s recently developed an interest in DIY (Do it Yourself) forms of media production. In this case he and I are talking about DIY game development, particularly on consoles.
"The Industry", (co)production, Mergers/Acquisitions, intellectual property, videogames, web2.0
iTnews is reporting that some enterprising Israeli journalists chose to use Babelfish to translate an email into dutch. Apparently the Dutch foreign ministry didn’t take too kindly to the innuendo from the creative translation.
Online translator sparks diplomatic row
“The beginning of the email read: ‘Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian.’”
-ray
Oops...unintended consequences, That's not what I meant, web2.0
After years of trying to get HTML code into a valid XML form, now the specter of HTML 5 is lurking on the distant horizon. From what I have read thus far it sounds like WHATWG (www.whatwg.org) is making the strict nature of XHTML a thing of past, harkening back to the “tag soup” days of coding. This is supposed to help eliminate parse errors that render XML pages useless (which sounds like a good thing). Additionally the new specification doesn’t even offer support for atrocities like <blink> or <font> tags (which IS a good thing), but somehow all of the really cool new stuff in the specification sounds like it will help with ‘eye-candy’ and perpetuate poor quality coding at the expense of making smarter content.
The conformance requirements of the draft specification make concessions for WYSIWYG editors which don’t require semantic integrity. Knowing how many folks spend their days carefully pouring over the (X)HTML of their pages I have to wonder if this specification will compound the data clutter problem in the long run? I’d like to see how this specification and projects like the Semantic Web work together.
Then again, with WHATWG forecasting implementation of HTML 5 to take about 10 years what am I worried about.
-ray
There are a couple of new services which allow for more interactivity in blog comments, in particular threaded discussion, ranking of comments, and reputation for those leaving comments. Webware has written up reviews of both of them, Intense Debate and Disqus.
Any interest in trying one of these out on this site? I think it could be a worthwhile experiment…you know, considering we’re hip young Internet researchers and all.
Technorati Tags: disqus, intense debate, commenting, blogging, web2.0, participation, interaction
Hector Postigo at Temple University