Last night we attended a great talk given by Amy Walters (political analyst for CNN) about the upcoming US elections and the ongoing democratic primaries. Because of recent private changes I got somehow involved into US politics. Even though I’m just an observer from outside, it’s interesting to watch the political process and how the political landscape of the US seems to change (oh, there it is, the “c” buzzword!) right now.
Anyways, I found especially one quote of Amy Walters interesting. The discussion was about how many people one politician attracts to come and fill up civic centers compared to the other. It’s often seen as indicator for popularity. But, as polls show, it’s not. At least the number of people going to civic centers doesn’t reflect the polls in any sense. It’s a matter of the target group: civic centers are filled up by the “rally people”. People who have time and money to go there.
It made me think about the hype around Web 2.0, the next big thing to generate millions page views and create so much more awareness about your product.
Most Web 2.0 services still only attract the “rally people”: people who have time to spend online and participate in whatsoever web service or people who are somehow professionally involved (mostly techies and PR guys). Or people who spend their saturday afternoons to write blog posts about themselves instead of doing their weekly grocery shopping.
I think all the countless Web 2.0 services, all the effort, still focuses on a very limited group of society.
Although it’s fascinating to see politicians heavily using Web 2.0, their real business, collecting votes, lies outside the web. That’s what polls teach us. The next president isn’t going to be elected by YouTube views, Facebook friends or Blog subscribers, but by real people with real issues they are concerned about.
Adobe’s Photoshop Express is a great online photo editor, no doubt about that, but it’s not free (as in free beer). In exchange for using Photoshop Express, Adobe wants your photos.
If you read the General Terms, you’ll find under point 8. Use of Your Content. letter a. the following paragraph [via SPON]:
Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.
As I understand it, Adobe, for instance, reserves the rights to sublicense your photos in Adobe Stock Photos to third parties. Without sharing the revenue with you of course. After all, Adobe already offered you its service Adobe Photoshop Express for “free”.
To me, that’s a show stopper for using Adobe Photoshop Express. Luckily there are other excellent online photo editors around who don’t claim such farreaching rights on your content like Adobe does: picnik, pixer.us or flauntR to name only a few of them.
or Twitter is the reason for not filling up this space here with more content recently.
Seriously, when Twitter was released I never would have thought that the 140 character messages will catch my attention. As I used to say LOST is not my thing and now I’m into the 4th season.
Guess I was wrong.
Twitter is fascinating, it’s simple and quick – no title, no abstract, body, trackback, category or comment, basically just a line. It makes you post micro-fragments of your day and read other’s. Mostly unimportant and meaningless, sometimes resulting in short conversations.
It’s not the single message stuffed into 140 characters which draws so much attention. It’s the stream, the ongoing sum of tweets what makes it so interesting.
These are very exciting news: CloudMade, a commercial service based on the collaborative mapping project OpenStreetMap, got funded and now they announced “a year of mapping”, an open call for ideas to improve OpenStreetMap.
The grants (£100 – £1000+) are probably aimed to enthusiats rather than companies, but they will make life for everyone involved in OSM easier and help to spread the project. Application sounds very easy and uncomplicated:
I’ve just heard in the All Points Blog podcast, that the iPhone SDK doesn’t allow access to the dock connector. That means some third party hardware developers, like Gomite and their locoGPS module, have to find such weird workarounds like transmitting a signal from the plugged-in GPS module over WiFi back to the iPhone application. Sounds pretty complicated (and battery intensive) to me.
By releasing Core Location as part of the iPhone SDK, Apple is actively promoting LBS on the iPhone. GPS or no GPS on mobile devices isn’t just black and white, there are shades of gray like A-GPS for instance. While cell tower triangulation might provide sufficient accuracy for some LBS (“find pizza nearby”) in urban areas, for others, like navigation, it doesn’t.
Seriously, why would you want to disable navigation on a mobile device with that screen and user interface?
What I found a little surprising on Google’s “give us your 3D models and we bring you tourists” initiative is that last week I read something about Hamburg’s and Berlin’s 3D models in Google Earth at Geografitti (in german):
Both cities do offer 3D models for Google Earth. Since their server capacity is limited, the 3D data doesn’t load fast enough for a smooth user experience and users keep complaining at Google (!!) for the poor performance. So the question was to put the city 3D models onto Google’s infrastructure and achieve better viewing results in Google Earth. But the problem for local governments and the reason why they couldn’t eventually find a solution was that apparently Google wouldn’t allow them to access and control their data (e.g. for updates) once it’s loaded on Google’s infrastructure.
Google Earth is an amazing geo-browser and the public would definitely benefit if more public geodata would be accessible through it. On the other hand, local authorities are sometimes strange to deal with and I have my doubts if the listed points (like “Boosting tourism”) are appealing enough for them to let their data go (to a company who is not evil but based on selling targeted advertising).
Last night we attended a great talk given by Amy Walters (political analyst for CNN) about the upcoming US elections and the ongoing democratic primaries. Because of recent private changes I got somehow involved into US politics. Even though I’m just an observer from outside, it’s interesting to watch the political process and how the political landscape of the US seems to change (oh, there it is, the “c” buzzword!) right now.