STRANGE WORLD

futurejournalismproject:

Microsoft’s Grasp of Language

Words taken directly from the Visual Studio 11 Beta site.

Via Matt Gemmell.

Select to embiggen.

emergentfutures:

Paul Higgins: That is just fantastic

and it reminds me of the story about the turkey by Nassim Taleb. All the available evidence the turkey has is that humans are a benevolent and caring species that houses and feeds turkey until one day ……….

futuristgerd:

(via Facebook Changes – Everybody Panic! — TweetFindTV)

So true: WE are the content of Facebook the broadcaster- it’s free but they sell our information!!

onaissues:

Facebook Privacy Policy Change Paves Way For Off-Facebook Advertising - Forbes

In case you missed it, Facebook has revamped their “data use policy” to make it clearer that it can use information about you to display ads to you outside of Facebook. 

futurejournalismproject:

Things You Can Do That You Never Used To

Via Archive.org:

For over a decade, CNN (Cable News Network) has been providing transcripts of shows, events and newscasts from its broadcasts. The archive has been maintained and the text transcripts have been dependably available at transcripts.cnn.com. This is a just-in-case grab of the years of transcripts for later study and historical research.

So if you can’t get enough of whatever it is they’re trying to do in the Situation Room, a one gig tarball of text is waiting for your download.

H/T: Flowing Data

theatlantic:

The Founder of the Web Wants to Protect You From the Web

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has moved into a new role: the defender of the World Wide Web. And, more specifically, the defender of the users of the World Wide Web. In an interview with The Guardian, the innovator-turned-advocate argued that users should demand their personal data from the companies that would try to contain them.

That’s not surprising; Berners-Lee has been a staunch and vocal and passionate proponent of keeping the open web actually open — and data ownership is a part of that. What’s interesting, though, is the way Berners-Lee is framing his argument for openness. “My computer has a great understanding of my state of fitness, of the things I’m eating, of the places I’m at,” Berners-Lee told reporter Ian Katz. “My phone understands from being in my pocket how much exercise I’ve been getting and how many stairs I’ve been walking up and so on.” Katz summarizes the inventor’s argument like so: “Exploiting that information could provide hugely useful services to individuals.”

Hugely useful services. Yes. And while that line of logic creates as many questions as it answers — what, actually, would those services look like? — it’s worth noting how Berners-Lee is presenting it. We tend to think about data and privacy and all the rest in, generally, negative terms: Your data need protection. Your data need to be feared for. Do a quick search of “personal data” on Google News; odds are, the headlines served up will contain words like “concerns,” “trust,” “privacy,” “theft,” etc. And our data demand vigilance, the logic goes, because they are, in a very real sense, an extension of who we are. Our info, ourselves. Our data trails, we assume, must be kept safe from others because they lead, in the end, to our identities.

But what Berners-Lee is doing, in all his talk of the utility of data, is shifting the value proposition of personal information. He’s reframing digital data as something that has a direct value to the users who generate it — not as some kind of fuzzy extension of identity, but as information that has a pragmatic worth. And that’s important, especially at this moment that finds us in the midst of a culture-wide — and cross-culture — reframing of privacy as a construct.

Read more. [Image: Flickr/ninasaurusrex]

theatlantic:

Facebook’s Suprisingly Humble, $1 Billion Acquisition of Instagram

If you’re a Facebook user, you should be ecstatic. One assumes that Instagram’s vaunted photo filters, which make everything look a little cooler, will make their way into Facebook’s photo tools and mobile app. 

If you’re an Instagram user, you may be wary. First, Instagram is a relatively closed network that operates very differently from Facebook. Sure, you can link it to Tumblr or Facebook or Twitter to publicly post photos, but you can also keep Instagram photos  off the open web. That closedness allows me to post more intimate looks into my life than I might feel comfortable with on other platforms. Second, any time one big company acquires a smaller one, it’s natural to worry that Facebook would absorb the Instagram tools and then shut the actual service down. 

But, based on Zuckerberg’s post, I don’t think Instagrammers have to worry. At least not yet. His note about the acquisition is shockingly humble and seems designed to assure users that Facebook is not plotting to close down Instagram. […]

I’m going to float an idea about why Zuckerberg strikes, what seems to me, the perfect tone. I think Facebook and Zuckerberg really do “get social.” I bet he understands that social networks have to develop organically and that the actual software itself is a tiny piece of the overall social network proposition. What really makes Instagram (and Facebook) work is the time that people have invested tuning their connections based on what they do on these services. To ram a social network that users built doing one thing into a different social network built just doesn’t work. 

It’s smarter, in other words, to figure out why Instagram’s users built their networks on the service rather than try to dump those users into Facebook.

All that means is that Zuckerberg appears to be coming to the Instagram acquisition not as conqueror, but as student.

Read more. [Image: Alexis Madrigal/Instagram]

theatlantic:

Can Tunisia Become the Silicon Valley of the Arab World?

TUNIS — Last November, dozens of young Arabs lined up for the chance to meet him. When he spoke of his struggles and triumphs, they hung on his every word. And when only one of the 50 attendees was chosen for training, some of the young Arabs grew frustrated and complained of being excluded.

A jihadist back from battling Americans in Afghanistan? A recruiter for al Qaeda’s North African affiliate? A Hamas member looking for volunteers to attack Israel?

No, the visitor was a Tunisian-American eBay executive who has worked for Apple and Oracle, and founded two Silicon Valley startups. His audience? Young Tunisian entrepreneurs and programmers who dream of turning this city into the Arab world’s Silicon Valley.

“There is a lot of potential,” Sami Ben Romdhane, the eBay executive, told me in a telephone interview this week. “I don’t see any difference between students who are graduating there and students who are graduating here and in Europe.”

Read more. [Image: Reuters]

theatlantic:

‘Everything Is Automated’: How Web Start-Ups Attack the Offline Economy

It’s no secret that most information is now internet accessible, including scientific facts, movie schedules, even the shape of personal networks. The degree to which the offline has online representation may have reached a tipping point, however, and a wave of startups are reacting to take advantage of it.

AirBnb’s documentation and brokerage of spare bedroom capacity is worth one billion dollars. ZocDoc allows the research and reservation of physician services. And any eatery from Michelin cuisine to the lowly taco truck has not only a digital footprint with hundreds of reviews, but increasingly delivery and ordering integration with startups such as OpenTable and ZeroCater. In short, the ecosystem of real world objects that can be tracked and manipulated electronically has reached the critical mass to allow totally new methods of product selection and purchase. I run a used car search engine, Carsabi, and in getting the company off the ground, I’ve learned three lessons about the new online economy. […]

With the physical world increasingly visible online, software can replace large teams to creating scalable business. Autotrader took decades to assemble the relationships required to list 1.6 million vehicles (about 64% of the market) in its web catalog — presenting dealership inventory involved individual outreach to each franchise. However, because most dealerships and classifieds are now online, Carsabi can crawl them directly and automatically, resulting in more than 1.8 million vehicles per month from the effort of two engineers and a few computers.

Read more.