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Hyperlocal news aggregator EveryBlock is set to announce a new content partnership with government 2.0 mobile app and website SeeClickFix later today, according to an article by PaidContent . Sponsor Everyblock aggregates public records, blog posts and other content about very specific geographic locations, automatically. SeeClickFix acts on a similarly hyperlocal basis, giving its users the ability to report issues to their local government using their smartphone. EveryBlock just went "Web 2.0" last January, by allowing its users to make contributions to what was previously a editor and algorithm created compilation of block by block news. For now, the addition of SeeClickFix will be a one-way street, only adding more news into the content stream. Unfortunately, it doesn't currently allow users to do what we would really hope for in a partnership between these two companies - report issues to the local government in the most hyperlocal of newsy apps. Update : As noted by EveryBlock CEO Adrian Holovaty in the comments below, the lack of updatability is due to SeeClickFix not having a writable API, a problem that is likely to be solved in the near future. This sort of reporting is SeeClickFix's bread and butter, but for now EveryBlock is set to remain firmly in the read-only realm. While you will now be notified when someone down the street uses SeeClickFix to get the road crew to come fix that pesky pothole, you'll have to switch apps or dial trusty old 311 to get the same done. According to PaidContent, SeeClickFix has seen 14,000 issues, from potholes to clogged drains to crosswalk requests, over the past six weeks, which can be passed directly on to local government officials. EveryBlock was purchased last August by MSNBC and is currently available in 16 cities. EveryBlock competes in hyperlocal automated news publishing with Fwix , Outside.in and NozzlMedia . SeeClickFix competes in mobile municipal reporting with CitySourced . Discuss
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EveryBlock Going Government 2.0 With SeeClickFix
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YouTube said in a blog post today that it is "committed to supporting new forms of original creativity, protecting fair use, and providing a seamless user experience", offering what seems like a response to the drama over the past few days involving a number of parody videos on the site. Sponsor In what the Electronic Frontier Foundation called "overbroad takedowns of legal content", a number of video parody remixes of Hitler ranting, dubbed over from the movie The Downfall: Hitler and the End of the Third Reich (aka Der Untergang) , have been removed from YouTube as part of its " Content ID " copyright protection service. YouTube notes that Content ID isn't perfect, writing in its blog that "Content ID can't identify context (like 'educational use' or 'parody')" and that "rights holders are the only ones in a position to know what is and is not an authorized use of their content, and we require them to enforce their policies in a manner that complies with the law." The blog then details how users can "dispute inappropriate claims", noting that every claim notification includes a dispute form, which immediately puts the content back online and gives the claimant another chance to review the content according to DMCA policy. In essence, YouTube seems to be stepping in and saying that its automatic system works, but isn't perfect, and that any disputes should be handled by the parties involved. In short - children, behave and follow the rules. Discuss
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YouTube Weighs In on Hitler, Parodies, Mashups & Fair Use
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Over the past 20 years the two people most prominent in the world of personal computing have been Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Sometimes they've worked as partners, mostly as the opposite. So in the end who wins? ReadWriteWeb wants you to be the judge. After viewing these 10 videos, it's up to you to decide who gives a better graduation speech, who makes the best cartoon character, and who is better at being funny. Who's the bigger alpha in the dating game, who's better at saying nice things about their opponent, and finally, who is better at leaving their business? Sponsor Tell us in the comments who wins! SuperNews!: Gates vs. Jobs 2,640,083 views Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Together: Part 1 1,498,231 views Bill Gates Speech at Harvard (part 1) 1,044,381 views Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address 1,789,794 views Bill Gates' Last Day at Microsoft - CES 2008 625,730 views 1983 Apple Event Bill Gates and Steve Jobs 278,333 views All-time favorites - all about Steve Jobs.com 402,058 views Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates Buy Discount Shoes 117,490 views Prizefight: Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs 60,212 views Bill Gates - Biography (Part1 of 6) 35,374 views Discuss
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Top 10 YouTube Videos About Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs
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An anthropology professor from South Africa has successfully used Google Earth to find a new human ancestor. To be exact, he found two partial skeletons, dating from between 1.78 and 1.95 million years ago, that belong to the species now known as Australopithecus sediba . "Professor Lee Berger from Witswatersrand University in Johannesburg started to use Google Earth to map various known caves and fossil deposits identified by him and his colleagues over the past several decades," according to the Official Google Blog . Sponsor Berger developed a correlation between the appearance of caves in satellite images and the presence of fossil deposits. He started with 130 cave sites in the region around the Cradle of Humankind area northwest of Johannesburg, and about 20 fossil deposits. Using Google Earth's high-resolution satellite imagery, he was able to identify 500 previously unidentified caves and fossil sites. It was at one of those sites he found the new hominid. Discuss
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Scientist Uses Google Earth to Find Ancient Ancestor
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In May last year we wrote about the state of Linked Data , an official W3C project that aims to connect separate data sets on the Web. Linked Data is a subset of the wider Semantic Web movement, in which data on the Web is encoded with meaning using technologies such as RDF and OWL. The ultimate vision is that the Web will become much more structured, which opens up many possibilities for "smarter" web applications. At this stage last year, we noted that Linked Data was ramping up fast - evidenced by the increasing number of data sets on the Web as at March 2009. Fast forward a year and the Linked Data 'cloud' has continued to expand. In this post we look at some of the developments in Linked Data over the past year. Sponsor Governments Get on Board The most high profile usage of Linked Data over the past year has come from two governments: the United States and United Kingdom. The U.S. was first to open up some of its non-personal data for use by developers, with the May 2009 launch of Data.gov . In January 2010, the U.K. government announced Data.gov.uk - with the help of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. At launch, Data.gov.uk had nearly 3,000 data sets available for developers to build mashups with. At the time it was more than three times as much data than the U.S. site offered. Following on from the launch of Data.gov.uk, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a new British Institute for Web Science along with $45 million in government backing. The Institute will be led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt. This was great news for Linked Data, because according to Prime Minister Brown, the Institute "will help place the U.K. at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies." Commercial Applications There have been commercial success stories too, such as OpenCalais for media, MusicBrainz for music and GoodRelations for e-commerce. There are also many commercial sites tapping into the general knowledge data store at dbpedia.org . However it's relatively early days for commercial applications of Linked Data. We're beginning to see smart people explore potential use cases, such as this list for news organizations , but much of the early implementation is being done by publicly funded entities such as the U.K.'s BBC. The latest version of the Linking Open Data dataset cloud , as at July 2009, maintained by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. Just Get The Data Up There To reiterate, Linked Data is data that has been marked up using Semantic Web technologies such as RDF (Resource Description Framework) or RDFa (a simpler variation). Minus the acronyms, Linked Data is simply structured data . However one of the reasons the Semantic Web hasn't yet been widely adopted, at least commercially, is that it's often difficult or time consuming to mark up data semantically. RDF in particular has a reputation for being painful to code. With that in mind, the past year has been as much about prompting governments and organizations to put their data up on the Web in whatever form they can . Indeed when I interviewed Sir Tim Berners-Lee last July , he told me that he'd be happy if governments "just put data up in whatever form it's available." He mentioned that "Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular." He'd be much more happier if it was semantically marked up data, using the likes of RDF, but conversion can happen after it's been uploaded to the Web. So overall, Linked Data is still early in its adoption curve. However it's undeniably become a solid on-ramp to the wider Semantic Web and world of structured data. For a good technical overview of the current state of Linked Data and the Semantic Web, see this presentation by Davide Palmisano. Discuss
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The State of Linked Data in 2010
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