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Just 13 days after it launched to the public, the iPad is the subject of the latest Silicon Valley developers' unconference event. At 5 PM this evening iPadDevCamp kicked off at the PayPal/eBay offices in San Jose. The photo above of developers waiting in line to enter was posted to Twitter by Portland, Oregon based iPhone (and now iPad) push notification service Urban Airship . Build some cool apps in there, folks! Sponsor
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Developers Line Up to Build iPad Apps
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Tom Watson, the digitally literate British parliamentarian and Labour PPC for the West Bromwich East Constituency, has established a series of " digital pledges " in the wake of the Digital Economy Bill in the United Kingdom. Watson was one of the primary opponents of the bill, which makes it possible for the British government to put the kibosh on pesky websites under the guise of copyright infringements. Sponsor "I want to stand on a platform that is avowedly supportive of the generation that seek to use the Internet to make the world a better place," Watson said. He's leaving comments open until April 14 and has created a dedicated site for this discussion in the hope of honing the pledges. The discussion site has a voting function and "I believe that copyright and software patent laws should be reformed to reflect the needs of citizens in the Internet age" is the clear leader so far. Given the proliferation of information-restricting legislation around the globe, we would like to see candidates in every election in every country make similar pledges. How about it? Here's a model for you in Watson's. My (draft) Digital Pledges I will support and campaign for more transparency in the public and private sector. I will oppose measures that unjustly deny people's access to the Internet. Whilst noting the acknowledged limitations, I believe people have the right to free speech on the Internet. I will support all measures that allow people access to their personal data held by others. I further support restoration of control over how personal data is gathered, managed and shared to the individual. I will use my role as an MP to support international free expression movements. The Internet shall be built and operated openly and without discrimination. I will support all measures to bring non-personal public data into the public domain. I will support all proposals that lead to greater numbers joining the digital world and oppose measures that reduce it. I believe that copyright and software patent laws should be reformed to reflect the needs of citizens in the Internet age. Discuss
Excerpt from:
UK MP Solicits Digital Pledges
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digital-economy,
free-speech,
government,
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proliferation,
public,
software-patent
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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt will lead a new British Institute for Web Science with $45 million in government backing. The announcement was not without its critics, but the Institute could have a world-wide impact. The two men collaborated in helping build the excellent data.gov.uk and will now expand upon that work. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of the move : "We are determined to go further in breaking down the walled garden of Government...This Institute will help place the UK at the cutting edge of research on the Semantic Web and other emerging web and internet technologies." Sponsor Understanding the Web of Data Berners-Lee said two years ago last month that all the pieces were in place to build the semantic web, a paradigm based on giving structured meaning to and clear links between otherwise unstructured content floating around the web. Many people believe that a web with semantic structure will be the same type of boon to innovation that common standards like HTML have been. Berners-Lee famously described his vision of the semantic web like this: I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web - the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The 'intelligent agents' people have touted for ages will finally materialize. Today's announcement came along government calls to build super-fast broadband to every home in the UK. Prime Minister Brown claimed that such a development could foster economic development and as many as 250,000 new jobs. As writer Tom Foremski pointed out this morning about the Web Science Institute, however "internet technologies have resulted in fewer jobs created than have been lost -- which is the way of all disruptive technologies." Making the Vision Real is Hard, Too Super-fast broadband to every home is a much easier thing to sell to the public than a future-web of structured, machine-readable data. After years of expectations, the semantic web remains in search of its clearly comprehensible killer-app. Earlier this month, semantic social bookmarking service Twine quietly slid into obscurity and was bought up by news recommendation service Evri . Twine was said to be possibly "the first mainstream semantic web app" two years ago . Founder Nova Spivak raised half as much money for Twine's parent company Radar Networks ($24m) as Berners-Lee's entire new institute is receiving. Twine faltered under poor usability and the leadership of Spivak, considered to be both one of the smartest people in the internet industry and a caustic egotist. Thus is the dilemma for this supposed next stage of the web. Andrew Orlowski tears into today's announcement in The Register , calling it "a confluence of two groups of people with a shared interest in bureaucracy." Orlowski says the Web of Data is a fraud as well: "Of course, most web data is personal communication that happens to have been recorded. Most of the rest is spam, generated by robots, or cut-and-paste material 'curated' by the unemployed or poor graduates - another form of spam, really." That's a funny critique but the truth is probably somewhere in between the superlatives and the condemnation. Critics like Orlowski have already grown jaded about the world-changing impact of the last iteration of the web (easy social publishing) and underestimate the platform potential of this next iteration. "I've always been sceptical of the need for a 'new discipline.' [Web Science]," says leading semantic web consultant Paul Miller . "A significant tranche of funding such as that announced by the Prime Minister this morning will be helpful in tackling some of the issues (both hard and soft) that still remain as we push more and more data out into the public sphere. I hope and expect that Nigel, Tim and others will devote at least as much attention to issues of trust, provenance, licensing etc as to the details of angle brackets, triples and ontologies." Miller did a podcast interview with Shadbolt for the UK's largest semantic web company Talis, here . For an in-depth explanation of Berners-Lee's perspective, see the two-part interview ReadWriteWeb founding Editor Richard MacManus did with him last year . MacManus has said that Berners-Lee's vision of a read/write, two-way web, was a key inspiration behind the founding of the publication you're reading now. We wish the Institute for Web Science the best of luck in delivering on its rich promise. Discuss
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Inventor of the Web Gets Backing to Build Web of Data
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Here's an idea for you: instead of slowly amassing followers, like on Twitter, or carefully culling your friends list over time on Facebook, making sure everyone is in their appropriate list and category, collect and dispose of friends like you ask for the time or a spare cigarette on a busy city street. That's what Lokast , the self-described "disposable" social network lets you do - carry your throw-away lifestyle over into the digital world. Sponsor The LoKast iPhone app was released earlier this week at the South By South West festival in Austin and is the perfect app for finding yourself among throbbing masses of the technologically inclined. But what is this disposable thing? From the email we received this week on the app's release: Disposable? Yes. That means unlike Facebook which is friends and family, this app is about finding random people in close range and being able to share and see parts of their public digital profile including downloading their public-share videos, music and pictures. The best part, is that after you're in that close range, you may never see them again. IE: Disposable. According to the press release, the name is short for "local casting", as opposed to broadcasting, and "aims to eliminate the need for physical media sharing, thereby eradicating physical CDs, plastic cases, video DVDs or waiting to get back to a PC computer to share and experience content." We have to agree that SXSW seems like the perfect venue for this type of app and we'd say why not give it a shot? We haven't made it all the way downtown yet to be close enough to give it a full whirl, but it looks more than capable from toying with it. Now, the thing is, we can't see a lot of people using this outside of big, hi-tech cities or conferences. Where does this fit into our day to day life? Are we really going to run around town staring at my screen trying to see if someone else with the same app is nearby? We don't think so. For now, though, we'd say give it an install and run around collecting some demos and see what people are listening to. Discuss
Link:
LoKast : The Disposable Social Network
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If you like Electronic Music , you might like Musique Concrète . If you like Cartography , you might like Map Projection . Into Head-mounted displays ? Check out Organic light-emitting diodes ! These are a few of the recommendations I've received this week from semantic, social recommendation service Get Glue and I'm pretty excited about it. If you like books, music, movies or wine, then Glue could be the social network for you. I just like to browse Wikipedia entries and it's making a big impact on my day. Sponsor This long-running browser extension, prominently featured in both Firefox and Chrome official extension galleries, recently created a companion website that made use of the service skyrocket. Today Glue announced a new version of its extension that inserts links to see recommendations for related content on pages all around the web, from Google search pages to Facebook. Anywhere you find a link to a known website, that link will be augmented with a Glue link. There is one privacy setting you should change from the default, but do that and you'll be ready to roll. Get Glue recognizes when you're looking at a website about a musician, a book, a bottle of wine, a movie or many other types of stuff . Then it makes it easy to look up additional info about that item across other websites like Last.fm, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. It does all of this unobtrusively, with social streams, recommendations and a game. The newest version of the service recognizes links on search results and social networks, allowing you to invoke a handsome pop-up overlay on those pages as well. Check out the little grey "G" below. Hover over it and you'll get a pop-up filled with options for learning more quickly and easily, without leaving the page. Privacy Concerns Glue tracks the pages you're visiting, which is ok, but by default it exposes topics you look at on your public profile. You can turn that off and only expose the topics you interact with on Glue, like giving them a thumbs up or thumbs down. Yesterday I found an entry for a disgusting medical condition on my public Glue profile, because someone else (I swear) used my computer to look the condition up on Wikipedia. I wasn't very happy about that. I now have the setting to expose visits turned off, but the company could explain even that better. Glue is smart enough that it ought to be able to tell when I'm looking at web content that involves health, sex, money or other touchy topics and ask me if I want to expose those visits. This is just another example of the running debate around passive tracking, over sharing, privacy settings and default social software design. It's not hard to change this setting and once you do you then you'll probably be pretty happy. It's a shame it's an all-or-nothing thing, though. I'd be happy to expose my browsing history to friends if the types of topics above could be excluded. Get Glue is pretty awesome and the company adds new features all the time. My profile on the site is here . Come friend me up and we can be nerds together. Especially if you like looking up trippy stuff on the internet. Disclosure: Glue CEO Alex Iskold is a long-time friend of ReadWriteWeb and one of the nicest, smartest people in the industry. (Read his heart warming personal story here .) His product was also something I disliked using for years until recent updates, so I feel pretty objective about my perception of it. Alex has particularly good taste in books and can be found here on Glue. Discuss
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Get Glue is a Nerd's Dream Come True, Now Available Everywhere Online
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