Neville’s posterous

To benefit IT charitable education projects in India. The video explains it all nicely. Deadline for 'nominations' is Oct 9. Still looking for more sponsors.

Full story at TechCrunch Europe: http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/10/03/witn-london-tech-startups-go-semi-nude-for-a-tech-charity-in-india/

LONDON - The Financial Times chief executive, John Ridding, has said newspapers should find ways to charge for online content in order to preserve the future of quality journalism.

"To preserve the future of quality journalism"? Preserve the future of a business model that's broken, more like.

Disappointing to read that quote from the FT.

The Conservatives start gearing up for the general election.

The web is going to play a huge role in connecting people with campaigns, ideas, issues and other people.

One start from the Tories. Wonder what Labour is going to do.

One prediction: if you think junk mail - the paper stuff that comes through your letterbox - is a pain, just wait until online campaigning gets going.

[...] we need to have the ambition of a Laporte and build the new and better media enterprise.

Can the mainstream media be as nimble?

If the H1N1 swine-flu pandemic arrives this fall, one thing that may break under the strain is the Internet. Emergency planners say that school-age children and telecommuting adults could be accessing the network simultaneously, potentially overloading the public Internet’s capacity.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates absenteeism during a pandemic could peak at 50% during a six-week period. Many businesses have created emergency plans that assume that absent employees will be able to work from home. It’s not clear, however, that the Internet will behave in a crisis the way it does during typical days.

Studies of daily Internet traffic show that there are two periods of time when people access the network: during the workday (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.) and immediately afterward (4 to 11 p.m.). During the first period, usage is at or above 50% of network capacity. Later in the day, the network use shifts to more high-bandwidth entertainment traffic, such as video, multimedia and gaming, which pushes usage well above 50%. During this period, most of the Internet traffic is generated by children and young adults who are no longer in class.

During a pandemic, schools are among the first institutions to close. In New York, where the number of infections reached 800,000 this spring, 60 schools closed. An influx of school-age children accessing the Internet would change traffic patterns — increasing traffic during normal work hours — and tax the network in residential areas, where the infrastructure is designed to handle one type of traffic at a time.

Assessment of what things might be like in the US. I bet the picture would not be hugely different in the UK.

[...] As I recently shared, a new study indicated that 20 percent of tweets published on Twitter are actually invitations for product information, answers or responses from peers or directly by brand representatives.

Consumers are now brand stakeholders and as such, it is our responsibility to listen, learn and adapt.

Airline Hotlist August 2009
brought to you by PeopleBrowsr and Brian Solis

In August 2009, consumers continued to take to Twitter to share their experiences and feelings tied to their favorite and least favorite airlines. Many of the airlines did indeed pay attention, with some engaging directly in the public timeline.

The Players

For the month of August 2009, we monitored the inbound and outbound activity related to 14 airlines.

The players included:

@aairwaves
@alaskaair
@aloha_airlines (airline defunct, but the aloha spirit lives on)
@continental
@deltaairlines (Inactive as of July 2009)
@jetblue
@flyhawaiian
@frontierstorm (Inactive as of July 2009)
Northwest Airlines (Appears inactive)
@southwestair
@spiritairlines
@unitedairlines
@usairways (established, but essentially inactive)
@virginamerica

Excellent case study of 14 US airlines and what they're doing with Twitter.

The High Court has given permission for an injunction to be served via social-networking site Twitter. The order is to be served against an unknown Twitter user who anonymously posts to the site using the same name as a right-wing political blogger.

The order demands the anonymous Twitter user reveal their identity and stop posing as Donal Blaney, who blogs at a site called Blaney's Blarney. The order says the Twitter user is breaching the copyright of Mr Blaney. He told BBC News that the content being posted to Twitter in his name was "mildly objectionable".

Mr Blaney turned to Twitter to serve the injunction rather than go through the potentially lengthy process of contacting Twitter headquarters in California and asking it to deal with the matter. UK law states that an injunction does not have to be served in person and can be delivered by several different means including fax or e-mail.

Danvers Baillieu, a solicitor specialising in technology, said it was possible for anyone to approach the court about any method of serving an injunction if the traditional methods are unavailable.

"The rules already allow for electronic service of some documents, so that they can be sent by e-mail, and it should also be possible to use social networks," he said. Mr Blaney decided to use Twitter after a recent case in Australia where Facebook was used to serve a court order.

The blogger, who is also a lawyer and owns the firm serving the order, said that he thought that it was the first time Twitter had been used to deliver a court order.

The injunction - known as the Blaney's Blarney Order - is due to be served at 1930 BST and will include a link to the text of the full court order.

So many established things being turned upside down. Another one, legal issue this time.

See the plaintiff's perspective: http://donalblaney.blogspot.com/

[...] the London Evening Standard, after 181 years of people paying for it from newsagents and street vendors, will now be given away for nothing.

The Standard is describing it as a "pioneering strategy" - printing 600,000 copies a day to get it into the hands of more than double the current readership. And owner Alexander Lebedev reckons that it will be so successful that he is "sure" others will follow.

This ploy is an innovative, albeit brazen tactic to arrest the Standard's slide in readership. It will steal the thunder (and readers) of existing free evening paper, London Lite - and questions loom over how that publication can last.

[...] Many are reluctant to hand over the 50p cover charge when they have plenty of other things to entertain and inform - not least mobile phones and the huge range of news websites.

[...] "One thing about the freesheets is that people tend to read them and discard them quite quickly. But if you have a quality newspaper, you have a captive audience and they'll be able to read that over time and that's very attractive to newspapers.

"This gives us a much greater chance of an economic model which works."

Another proposition for a business model, wholly the opposite to other mainstream media like Rupert Murdoch's organization which wants to charge you for all content.

No one has the answer yet.

Technorati is about to make some big changes to the way it measures how important bloggers are. That means its top-100 list of the most influential bloggers is going to change. Some bloggers may be delighted by the changes, while others who drop in the rankings may howl in protest

Basically, the company is going to reduce the costs of indexing the blogosphere and reporting the results on its Technorati.com site, which is a major blog search engine. It is not going to index the blogosphere just for the sake of saying it can do so. It is also going to put more emphasis into its business which pays the bills: the Technorati Media ad network, which serves ads to more than 400 sites, not just Technorati.com

“We were spending way too much money,” said Richard Jalichandra, who became chief executive of the San Francisco company in 2007 (see his guest post). “This is a turnaround situation. The company had business, but it was in a small amount of trouble. The company was conceived for a different kind of Internet. Now, besides blogs, there is Twitter, social networking, and the real-time web.”

The processing requirements for the index have grown dramatically as the blogosphere has blossomed into hundreds of millions of blogs. And of the 300 million plus blogs out there, only a fraction of them are updated often.

In the past, Technorati used about six months worth of data to determine its authority rankings. Now it will use a few weeks, but it will capture the slices of data more frequently to keep up with real-time changes. That’s based on the notion that 90 percent of the searches yield information that is less than six months old. In a way, Technorati is dropping out of the race with Google and other search companies that are trying to build the infrastructure necessary to capture everything that happens on the web.

Technorati is also going to emphasize “relevancy.” The index will try to capture changes in the blogosphere that are relevant to people who are searching through the blogs. The results should deliver relevant results from authoritative sources, not just the latest inane Tweets. Technorati will divide the index into more relevant categories, such as sports blogs.

[...]

Breathing new life into an old horse. Could be its saviour. Glad to see this and wishing Technorati good luck with this evolution.

Read VentureBeat's complete post for more detail.

Cyclopedia ($2 App store) is a new iPhone application that allows to to view geo-tagged Wikipedia articles in a augmented reality browser.  The browser uses the iPhone's camera to create a backdrop while the Wikipedia articles are displayed around the backdrop of the view.  

Check the video for more.

From the developer:

Cyclopedia uses the iPhone camera, compass and GPS together to created an augmented reality of the world by overlaying Wikipedia information over the viewfinder. By moving the iPhone around you will see articles pop up according to the direction you are pointing, You can then click on the title to get a quick overview article and, if you want to know more , you can then dive deeper into the full article.

You can also display the entries on a regular top-down map and search the whole of wikipedia for anything you want.

[...] There are currently 65,000 entries in Wikipedia that have geotagged information included in them and all of these are available to you through the system. If you find a location that you don’t feel is included. Go and add the gps data directly into Wikipedia yourself and it will eventually pop up in the app. That’s the beauty of Wikipedia.

Tip of the iceberg. Another terrific example of utility on the iPhone 3GS. Gotta upgrade :)