I never expected to associate a “tweaser” with The Wolverine. (I assumed Wolverine’s healing powers would always extrude any splinter.)
That changed yesterday, when James Mangold, the director of the most recent cinematic treatment of the comic book hero’s adventures, tweeted the first “tweaser” of the new century. He used Twitter’s new Vine app to share the short clip, a tightly edited 6 seconds of footage from the upcoming film. You can watch Vine’s big moment in tweet embedded below.
Twitter certainly has come a long way from txt messages. As Lily Rothman quipped at Time, the emergence of a 6 second tweaser that can be retweeted, tumbled and embedded gives “new meaning to the intersection of Hollywood and Vine.”
Jen Yamato has the backstory behind 20th Century Fox’s debut of a 21st century tweaser over at Deadline, including credit to Fox executive Tony Sella for the coinage:
Last week FilmDistrict was the first studio to use Twitter’s new looping app as a marketing tool. Here’s an even buzzier use of Vine: A 6-second “tweaser” (that’s Twitter teaser, or “TWZZR”) previewing Fox’s July 26 superhero pic Wolverine.
I suspect that at least a few of the tweasers that go flickering by on Twitter, Vine and blog posts will lead people to do what I did: become aware of the upcoming and film and look for a longer version of the teaser trailer elsewhere online. If a tweaser comes with a custom short URL, so much the easier.
To that point, If you want to watch a higher quality “full-length” version of the teaser, there’s now a teaser trailer available on the iTunes Store and a YouTube version:
… which, it’s worth pointing out, can also be embedded in tweets.
Hopefully, history remember will remember “The Wolverine for more than being the subject of the world’s first “tweaser.” Then again, our attention spans may not be up to it, particularly if the length of the interactive media we consume continues to shorten at this rate.
I sat down for an interview with the “Don’t Worry About The Government” folks earlier today to talk about government as a platform, open data and more. (Bonus: I’m still sporting my summer beard from Maine.)
The interview request was triggered by my post on whether government innovation can rise above partisan politics. In an ideal world — which we of course do not live in — this presidential election would focus more upon what role government should or should play in our society, at the city, state and federal level, and whether and how we the people should finance it.
Over the last century in the United States, the size of the federal government has grown immensely, from entitlement programs (Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security) to the immense defense budget. Technology provides new opportunities to both save taxpayers dollars and detect and prevent corruption and fraud, but the larger question of the role government itself should play in society is one that should occupy more of the national conversation, frankly, than Representatives skinny dipping on foreign trips, campaign trail gaffes or the latest celebrity foibles.
“Yes, saw news @acarvin retweeted from Tunisia. On it. Please @reply from @StateDept. – Hillz”
Last month, Federal Computer Week reporter Alice Lipowicz interviewed me about how federal officials and Congressmen in the United States government were using Twitter. She ended up using just one quote in her article on Feds using Twitter, regarding the reality that the division between “personal” and “professional” accounts has become quite blurred in the public eye, regardless of disclaimers made.
Look no further than the Congressional staffers who were connected to tweets about drinking during the workday and subsequently fired. With millions of people on the service and the DC media listening closely, there’s simply a higher likelihood that a bad error will be noticed and spread — and corrections never travel as far as the original error. An offhand comment, even if meant to be funny, can be taken out of context.
If a government executive or editor shared pictures of cute puppies and dogs on an official Twitter feed, they do run the risk that some people may not take their professional leadership as seriously. Then again, citizens and colleagues might connect with them as a fellow ‘dog person,’ like me. I set up a Twitter account for my greyhound some time ago. (He doesn’t tweet much.)
Alice and I talked about much more than risk, though, and since I have notes from the conversation, here are a few other observations I made. (The caption above, for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is 100% fiction.)
First, we talked about Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who writes cryptic tweets but appears to be doing something some of his colleagues may not: listen. He told the National Law Journal that he pays attention to reactions to his tweets.
“Twitter’s a new way to communicate with constituents,” said Senator Grassley. “The real-time feedback and contact with the grassroots that Twitter offers is a real value.”
Even though some of his more partisan tweets have drawn controversy at times, he is a notable example of a lawmaker in the Senate demonstrating personal use of social media, including typos, text speak and messages that his staff might prefer he hadn’t sent, like his recent comments concerning the President.
In general, if Congress is going to draft legislation that leads to rulemaking about social media, it makes sense that Senators and Representatives should have some basic familiarity with these tools and what’s being said on them or down with them, given the role that they’re now playing in the new public square.
Their staffers certainly realize that by now, tethered by BlackBerrys and iPhone and Android devices to a 24/7 newscycle that has compressed to 24 minutes — or even 24 seconds — from 24 hours. The modern workplace may reward working long hours outside of the office, or at least the appearance of it. Late night and early morning emails are part of Washington working culture. It takes a specific attitude, boundaries and discipline to find a healthy work-life balance in the context of pressure.
That’s certainly true of officials as well, like federal CIO Steven VanRoekel, who is a father to several young children. He is an unapologetically geeky guy who has been learning to use Twitter better, as Alice described, to go “direct” in answered questions from the government IT media.
He and his colleague, US CTO Todd Park, are actually both more advanced in their use of Twitter at this point in their tenures than Vivek Kundra and or Aneesh Chopra, their respective predecessors, neither of whom were tweeting when they began work. (Both men continue to tweet now, after they’ve left government, with Chopra much more active.)
VanRoekel tweeted infrequently as the managing director of the FCC, although he demonstrated that he both knew the basics. Using hashtags for comedic effect in his tweets now strongly suggests he’s learned something about the culture of Twitter since then. Yes, it was a bit of inside baseball, since you’d need to understand the context of Molly’s column to understand his comment, but the tweet was a reply to a specific column.
I thought that he was trying to be funny, with respect to confirming that APIs would be part of the federal government’s digital strategy using a “#specialsauce” hashtag and “#thereIsaidit.” At least for my (admittedly) geeky sense of humor, I think he succeeded.
I still see a perception in some quarters that Twitter is a fad and a waste of time — and currently, given the political context around taxes, the federal budget and spending, conversations about government wasting anything trend pretty negatively. Even with 100% of federal agencies on the service, I find that it still takes a demonstration of how Twitter is useful to accomplishing a mission before an uninitiated person’s eyes open to its value. Searching for topics, events or the name of an employer or agency is often effective.
That’s true for every other social network or tool, too. In 2012, I’m still enjoying exploring and experimenting with what the right approach to each platform, from blogging to Twitter to having family, friends and subscribers on Facebook and Google+ to tumbling or staying LinkedIn to my professional network or sharing video on YouTube. The same is true of federal officials.
The video above shows a series of experiments performed with a team of “nano quadrotors” at the GRASP Lab in the University of Pennsylvania. These wee vehicles were developed by KMel Robotics.
Today, more than a quarter of a million people* watched the first Presidential Google Hangout with President +Barack Obama from +The White House. The archived video, below, comes courtesy of Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa, whose shared his review of President Obama’s first Hangout at Reuters.com. For the best reporting I’ve seen on the participants and questions, read Sarah Lai Stirland on President Obama’s Hangout.
My immediate takeaway? The forum featured real questions on significant issues, with genuine citizen-president interactions, with back and forth conversation. That was precisely the promise of the platform that I considered ahead of time, when I asked whether a Google+ Hangout could bring the president closer to the citizens he serves.
Earlier in the afternoon, I joined Google’s Daniel Sieberg on our own Google+ Hangout to talk about the potential impact that online video, hangouts, and live broadcasts between citizens and their elected officials could have on the political landscape.
The moderator, Google’s Steve Grove, gave the participants (2 men, 2 women and one classroom of young people) the opportunity to follow up on their questions to the president. There will be much more analysis of the questions asked and the president’s answers tonight, as there should be.
Here’s a quick recap, distilled from my notes: The forum began with a video question to the president about promoting a living wage for students working their way through college. The second question came from the Hangout, on why the White House doesn’t expand expanded H1B visas for foreign workers at the expense of skilled labor with the U.S. President Obama told the wife of a semiconductor engineer (who asked the latter question and, critically, got to follow up in the Hangout) if she sent him her husband’s resume, he’d be happy to find what’s happening.
One could dismiss it as pandering — or celebrate it as a citizen cutting through the morass of bureaucracy to tell the nation’s chief executive that the system wasn’t working as he said it should. Such followups in the Hangout are what made this different than the past YouTube and White House interviewed. Politico talked to Jennifer Wedel, of Forth Worth, Texas, who asked the question during the presidential Hangout:
“I’ll have to take you up on that,” Wedel said of the president’s offer to help her husband, Darin, who lost his job at Texas Instruments three years ago.
Later, Wedel told POLITICO that she and the president had a “pretty crazy interaction” that she hadn’t expected when she asked about the federal government granting H-1B visas to skilled foreign workers while U.S. citizens such as her husband are out of work.
“I don’t think he was trying to be condescending or anything,” said Wedel, who never completed college and was a stay-at-home mom before her husband was laid off, but now has a full-time job at State Farm to help make ends meet. “I just think I stumped him a little and he wanted me to hush about it.”
“I think he knows pretty well that the H-1B is an issue because — it’s kind of like the Occupy movement — big corporations are putting up the money to get the visas” and choosing lower-paid foreign workers over domestic ones, Wedel said. “I don’t think what he was telling me was true, and I think he knew it, and that’s why he offered to take my husband’s resume,” she said, adding that her husband has kept it updated.
Another question from YouTube featured a video taken from an #Occupy protester in Portland. A question taken from within the White House Hangout asked about the president’s plans to help small business and to restructure government, which the Washington Post covered this month.
Another question posed within the Hangout about a lack of dialogue with children about the financial crisis offered the president a human moment, where he said that he tries to explain what’s happened with economy to his daughters over the dinner table.
There were incontrovertibly tough questions asked tonight, including one from a homeless veteran who asked why the U.S. is sending money to Pakistan and places that are known to give money to terrorism. In answer, the president said that the U.S. only spends 1% of its budget on foreign aid, and that it pays off in a lot of ways as part of the country’s national security strategy. What we don’t want is countries to collapse, have to send in our guys at huge potential risk and cost to taxpayers, he said.
The President was asked a video question from YouTube that cited a New York Times story on the use of drones in Iraq, which the president called “overwritten. The drones have not caused an unusual number of civilian casualties, he said, stating that it was a targeted focused effort aimed at Al Queda, not for other purposes.
I was personally glad to see that Grove asked a question on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), noting that both were hot within the YouTube community. Needless to say, that part of the transcript will be carefully analyzed by the people whose collective online action changed Washington.
We need to use tools we have, he said, noting recent takedown action by the Justice Department. At the same time, when SOPA came up on the hill, said the President, “we expressed some concerns about the way the legislation had been written.” Now, he said, the content and server sides need to come together for strong IP protections that preserve basic architecture of the Internet.
While the top-rated question was asked, concerning the extradition of a British national, there were no questions posted about legalizing marijuana, which once again rose to the top of CitizenTube (perhaps Grove and his colleagues at YouTube felt it had been asked enough?) nor any question was asked about the National Defense Reauthorization Act, which many other users on YouTube wanted to see addressed.
UPDATE: When I followed up with Grove on Google+ about the process behind the questions, he made the following comment:
We chose the questions from among the top-voted questions on YouTube… it’s always a fun challenge to ensure you get a broad range of issues and perspectives into these discussions from amongst the top-voted questions, but I hope people feel that we did a good job of listening to community votes. We asked several of the top-voted questions, including the #1 voted question on YouTube. Some people asked why we didn’t ask about marijuana legalization… as an FYI, we asked the President about it last year (see here: Drug Policy – President Obama’s YouTube Interview 2011).
As far as the hangout participants, we also selected them based off of the questions they had submitted to YouTube — again looking for a range of Americans… that part had to happen a little earlier during the submission process, so we could prepare for the Hangout today.
President Barack Obama participates in an interview with YouTube and Google+ to discuss his State of the Union Address, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Jan. 30, 2012. The interview was held through a Google+ Hangout, making it the first completely virtual interview from the White House. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Overall, I can honestly say that we saw something new in the intersection of government, technology and society. From where I sat, plugged in within the Sunlight Foundation, it felt like a good thing, not just for the White House or the president’s campaign or Google (although all certainly benefitted) but for the promise of the Internet to more directly connect public officials to those that they serve, with all of their real problems, concerns, doubts and fears.
At the end of the event, there was a moment of unexpected human connection, when one of the women on the hangout invited her three children to come meet the president.
They stared and smiled, left a bit wide eyed by the President of the United States smiling out of the computer screen and bidding them to obey their mother and do their homework. We could do with more wonder in the world, where such unexpected encounters occur online.
Viewership estimate via Google’s Steve Grove, who said at the end of the netcast that a quarter of a million people were watching on YouTube. Given the White House’s own livestream, the number could be higher.
Almost exactly this time last year, I went to see a book reading by William Gibson, one of the greatest science fiction writers of our time.
After he did a reading from his most recent novel, Zero History, he answered questions from the audience at Politics and Prose, a wonderful independent bookstore in Cleveland Park in Washington, D.C.
Appropriately, given that I filmed the questions and answers and subsequently uploaded the videos to YouTube, one of the questions posed to Gibson was about living in a digital panopticon. BoingBoing recently published an excellent interview with Gibson, if you’d like his most recent thoughts on our historical moment.
I saw a Google Chrome commercial twice tonight that struck a chord with me. The extended version, embedded below, has been online since May.
On the one hand, it’s a slick ad for a search engine giant’s Web browser that features a glowing treatment of a megacelebrity and her happy fans.
On the other, it’s a view into a changed world that still feels very much of the moment, months after its debut. It reminded me that the Internet has fundamentally changed how we can directly connect with the people who inspire us and on another.
There’s something both deeply joyful and poignant seeing Lady Gaga’s fans dance and sing along with her to that particular song.
On a night where I also saw so much pain, anger, fear, cruelty and misunderstanding flow over the same global electronic network of networks, it felt good to be reminded of how much more connected we can be. If we choose, we can reach out and connect to hundreds of other millions of humans, who are both different and fundamentally the same, looking at a growing mobile Web of billions of screens, small, medium and large.
We can see, share and celebrate the best of human nature in real-time or mourn, censor and condemn that which is worst in us. We go online and find ourselves, for good or ill, and leave a Web that is what we make of it.
Every time we log on, we have an opportunity to change how we think or connect with someone else around this pale blue dot.
Thank you for sharing that journey and teaching me something new, every day.
The digital video transition has been a long time coming. It’s still early, early days. Many of dreams of the .com boom that shattered upon technical, social or financial reality a decade ago, however, are finally coming to pass.
When the world can watch live rock events and cricket matches on YouTube.com, livestreams from revolutions in the Middle East and watch the President of the United States announce the resolution to a Congressional budget impass on a smartphone, it does feel like a bit has flipped.
As usual, a famous observation by William Gibson (@GreatDismal) feels apt: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
Live will allow selected users, like Pop17, to livestream channels directly to YouTube platforms. According to YouTube, the world should expect “thousands” of livestreams to go online in the months ahead.
With the move, YouTube Live will further collapse the line between what used to be “television” and the Internet, with billions of small screens and networked flatscreens complementing the broadcast networks and CRTs that dominated the end of the last century.
YouTube enters a market where uStream, Qik and Livestream.com that have been exploring for years in the private sector. In the public sector, Granicus has been supporting open government video initiatives for going on a decade.
If YouTube Live is as integrated as tightly into the Android mobile platform as Google Maps has become, this entrance could be disruptive on a worldwide level. The Android operating system is now on a plurality of smartphones in the United States, with rapidly growing global marketshare that puts it at #2 behind Symbian.
Given the explosive growth in livestream-capable iPhones and Android devices, mobile broadband providers will likely see increasing demand on upstream bandwidth. That in turn that many more people will be left wondering what “reasonable network management” by telecommunication companies will mean in this context.
Esperanza Spalding won a Grammy for Best New Artist tonight. She’s an extraordinary talent. Moments after her win, White House new media director Macon Phillips congratulated her on Twitter and linked to a video of her performance at the White House Poetry Jam on YouTube:
Shortly after that, the White House account shared the same video, along with a link to all of the performances on the White House YouTube channel.
It’s good to know there are some music fans down the road at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Congratulations to Spalding for the well-deserved recognition.
Some days, a joyous video can bring a tear to your eye. (That happens even more easily to when you’re planning your own wedding.) This “flash wedding” in Prudential Center last December in Boston did just that, riffing on the idea of a “flash mob.”
Unlike many flash mobs, however, this one had a point. Mazel tov, folks.
@johnmcquaid I used to share a lot of posts from Google Reader into Buzz. Once upon a time, that was a good social space. 7 hours ago
@NickKristof …if you're on flat trails? I'd never recommend hiking mountains in Maine, VT or NH - or bits of the AT - without proper boots. 7 hours ago
Yesterday, Los Angeles city councilman Eric Garcetti won the Los Angeles mayor’s race. Garcetti, at 42, is the youngest LA mayor in half a century and will be the city’s first Jewish mayor. LA’s new mayor is also a former … Continue reading →
“…one of the things we’re doing to fuel … more private sector innovation and discovery,” said President Barack Obama is to make the vast amounts of America’s data open and easy to access for the first time in history.” That … Continue reading →
“The total embedding of analytics in New York City has just really passed the tipping point,” related Michael Flowers, in an email last week. Flowers, the Big Apple’s first “chief analytics officer, discussed how predictive data analytics were saving lives … Continue reading →
“Inevitably, there will be questions about what we are each prepared to sign up to,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron in January, in his letter to his fellow G8 leaders. For months later, Russia has made clear it clear … Continue reading →
I’m on the brink of having a Howard Beale moment. This morning, Al Thompkins wrote that the Justice Department ‘better have a damned good explanation’ for seizing AP phone records. The nation is still waiting. So is the world. This … Continue reading →
Archon Fung has published a new paper” [PDF] on open government, information and democracy. The abstract includes a useful breakdown of the components of democratic transparency: In Infotopia, citizens enjoy a wide range of information about the organizations upon which … Continue reading →
On Wednesday, President Obama issued an historic executive order making open data the new default for releasing information in the federal government. The president announced the order on a trip to Austin, Texas, where he delivered the following remarks on open data at Applied … Continue reading →
This morning, President Obama issued an historic executive order making open data the new default for releasing information in the federal government. The president announced the order on a trip to Austin, Texas, where he visited Manor New Tech High School, visited … Continue reading →
This morning, the White House released a new executive order from President Barack Obama that makes “open and machine readable” the new default for the release of government information. The White House also published a memorandum regarding the policy that … Continue reading →
Maryland joined 39 other states in the union when it officially launched its open data inititive on Wednesday. Governor Martin O’Malley unveiled Data.Maryland.gov at a panel discussion in Annapolis on Wednesday, at a panel discussion hosted in conjunction with the … Continue reading →
The White House has responded to an e-petition asking the Obama administration to stop the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). "The President has been clear that the United States urgently needs to modernize our laws and practices relating to cybersecurity, both for national security and the security of our country's businesses […]
Given the increasing penetration of technology into the lives of billions of people around the world, context for how we think about intersection of diplomacy and civil society is shifting. No one has been more central to that discussion than Alec J. Ross, the senior advisor for innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who in many ways defined the p […]
Last week, New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman launched NYOpenGovernment.com, a new website that his office touts as a means for "voters, the media and government watchdogs to hold state government accountable" by providing the public online access to government data on campaign contributions, lobbying, and state contracts. "Secrecy […]
In the 21st century, federal government must go mobile, putting government services and information at the fingertips of citizens, said United States Chief Technology Officer Todd Park in a wide-ranging interview this week: "That's the first digital government result, outcome, and objective that's desired." To achieve that vision, Park an […]
Code for America is working on a 21st century recipe for urban renewal: Find half a dozen cities struggling to deliver services to citizens in the context of reduced resources. Add a handful of civic coders, a heaping serving of open data and foundation support, start incubating a civic accelerator for startups on the side, and then fold in a brigade of enga […]
The challenges and opportunities presented by the digital revolution continue to disrupt journalism. In an age of information abundance, journalists and citizens alike all need better tools, whether we're curating the samizdat of the 21st century in the Middle East, like Andy Carvin, processing a late night data dump, or looking for the best way to visu […]
A colleague asked me today for a crash course on the "Stop Online Privacy Act" (SOPA). I sent him my feature at the O'Reilly Radar, where I wrote about how Congress is considering anti-piracy bills that could cripple Internet industries and harm digital innovation. The thing is, that post is about 6,000 words long and is now a month out of dat […]
If freedom of expression, privacy and innovation online matter to you, it's time to pay attention to what's happening in Congress right now. There's a gathering storm over bills proposed in the United States House of Representatives and Senate that have the potential to significantly hinder innovation, free speech and cybersecurity on the Inte […]
If you're a developer or entrepreneur and want to help others in that space, you may find a new challenge of interest: Apps for Entrepreneurs. If you're unfamiliar with the idea of challenges, read up on collaborative innovation in open government. The big question that such contests are helping to answer is whether the vision of participatory demo […]
The White House may not quite be up to real-time disclosure, but as the Obama administration continues to step up its online engagement efforts in the real-time political debate online, we can take away some important lessons from the results. The hyperpartisan atmosphere in Washington has replicated itself online with both predictable outcomes, like hot rhe […]
The White House wasn’t kidding about posting animated GIFs to its new Tumblr. Earlier today, however, a mechanical engineer named Claudio Ibarra commented on a Google+ thread that he thought that the animated GIF was a “waste.” Is that true? The White House has had a communications staff for a long time. What’s wasted time — [...]
You could spend a long day listing all of the organizations or individuals who are putting government data online, from Carl Malamud to open government activists in Brazil, Africa or Canada. As many conversations in the public domain over the past few years have demonstrated, there are many different perspectives on what purposes “open data” [...]
Putting a dollar value on clean water, stable markets, the quality of schooling or access to the judiciary is no easy task. Each of these elements of society, however, are to some extent related to and enabled by open government. If we think about how the fundamental democratic principles established centuries ago extend today purely [...]
In an age where setting up a livestream to the Web and the rest of the networked world is as easy as holding up a smartphone and making a few taps, the United States Supreme Court appears more uniformly opposed to adding cameras in the courtroom than ever. SupremeCourt.gov provides online access to opinions, orders, docket, court calendars, transcripts, sche […]
On January 10th, 2013, the OpenGov Hub officially launched in Washington, DC. The OpenGov Hub has similarities to incubators and accelerators, in terms of physically housing different organizations in one location, but focuses on scaling open government and building community, as opposed to scaling a startup and building a business. Samantha Power, special a […]
Last September, I gave a 5 minute Ignite talk at the tenth Ignite DC. The video just became available. My talk, embedded below, focused on what I’ve been writing about here at Radar for the past three years: open government, journalism, media, mobile technology and more. The 20 slides that I used for the Ignite were a condensed version of a much longer prese […]
After years of steady growth, open data is now entering into public discourse, particularly in the public sector. If President Barack Obama decides to put the White House’s long-awaited new open data mandate before the nation this spring, it will finally enter the mainstream. As more governments, businesses, media organizations and institutions adopt open da […]
There are few ways to better judge a nation’s character than to look at how its children are educated. What values do their parents, teachers and mentors demonstrate? What accomplishments are celebrated? In a world where championship sports teams are idolized and superstar athletes are feted by the media, it was gratifying to see science, students and teache […]
Creating the conditions for startups to form is now a policy imperative for governments around the world, as Julian Jay Robinson, minister of state in Jamaica’s Ministry of Science, Technology, Energy and Mining, reminded the attendees at the “Developing the Caribbean” conference last week in Kingston, Jamaica. Robinson said Jamaica is working on deploying w […]
Last winter, around the same time there was a huge row in Congress over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), U.S. Attorney General Holder quietly signed off on expanded rules on government data sharing. The rules allowed the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), housed within the Department of Homeland Security, to analyze the regula […]
When I went to the 2013 SXSW Interactive Festival to host a conversation with NPR’s Javaun Moradi about sensors, society and the media, I thought we would be talking about the future of data journalism. By the time I left the event, I’d learned that sensor journalism had long since arrived and been applied. Today, inexpensive, easy-to-use open source hardwar […]
GitHub has been gaining new prominence as the use of open source software in government grows. Earlier this month, I included a few thoughts from Chicago’s chief information officer, Brett Goldstein, about the city’s use of GitHub, in a piece exploring GitHub’s role in government. While Goldstein says that Chicago’s open data portal will remain the primary m […]
When it comes to government IT in 2013, GitHub may have surpassed Twitter and Facebook as the most interesting social network. GitHub’s profile has been rising recently, from a Wired article about open source in government, to its high profile use by the White House and within the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This March, after the first White House […]
This week, I found that one of my Facebook updates received significantly more attention that others I’ve posted. On the one hand, it was a share of an important New York Times story focusing on the first time a baby was cured of HIV. But I discovered something that went beyond the story itself: someone who was not my friend had paid to sponsor one of my pos […]
Microsoft principal researcher Kate Crawford (@katecrawford) gave a strong talk at last week’s Strata Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. about the limits of big data. She pointed out potential biases in data collection, questioned who may be excluded from it, and hammered home the constant need for context in conclusions. Video of her talk is embedded below: […]
