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What's New in O'Reilly Answers - Interacting with government, Building a baseball database, Windows Live Apps, and much more!

2009-12-15T16:15:31Z

Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Government 2.0: Five Predictions for 2010-12

2009-12-15T15:35:30Z

Under no pressure from anyone, I’ve forced this obligatory “end of year predictions” post upon myself. People always ask me where I think Government 2.0 is going anyway, I may as well get some writing mileage out of it, right? So, here are some non-exhaustive, somewhat creative, and entirely debatable trends and ideas that I foresee taking shape in the next three years or so:

Local governments as experiments
The rise of Citizen 2.0
Mobile devices as primary devices
Ubiquitous crude video content
Always on-the-record

Four short links: 15 December 2009 - Open Source Imagery Analysis, GPL Lawsuits, Small World, Regina v Internet

2009-12-15T11:00:00Z

Best Buy, Samsung, And Westinghouse Named In SFLC Suit Today (Linux Weekly News) -- the Software Freedom Law Center is suing them for selling GPL-derived products without offering the source. They've been unresponsive when contacted outside the legal system. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Innovation from the Edges: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps - Developer Challenge offers big prizes for best apps using new APIs

2009-12-14T15:00:00Z

Two enduring tenets of Web 2.0 are "A platform beats an application every time" and "All the smart people don't work for you." Online payment giant PayPal took those bits of wisdom to heart and recently announced the PayPal X APIs, a new group of developer APIs designed to enable new applications that can more tightly integrate with PayPal services. To encourage developers to create some awesome applications with the APIs, PayPal is offering prizes $100,000 and $50,000 (in cash plus waived transaction fees) for the best new applications. We caught up with PayPal's director for their Developer Network, Naveed Anwar, and he filled us in on what the new PayPal APIs bring to the table for application designers.

5 Tips For Version Controlled Site Deployments

2009-12-14T14:00:00Z

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips For Version Controlled Site Deployments. After relaunching my own blog I thought it would be a good idea to share some of the techniques I have used on larger sites and how they can be applied to smaller ones. Blogs and small sites are excellent times to practice version controlled deployments. This post will discuss what I have learned and recently implemented.

Apps Per Seller Across the US iTunes Categories

2009-12-14T12:00:00Z

Measured in terms of number of unique apps, the Top 5 categories in the U.S. app store have been Games, Books, Entertainment, Travel and Utilities. But comparing categories in terms of number of apps doesn't capture the challenge of developing applications in different categories. As I noted in an earlier post, it's much easier to develop a Book app than an interactive game. One crude measure for the relative complexity of developing apps across categories is to compare the number of apps per seller.

Four short links: 14 December 2009 - Archival Footage, Interesting Visualization, Year of Ideas, Zoomable Time Graphs

2009-12-14T11:00:00Z

Videos from the vault of the National Archives -- the public domain US government videos that public.resource.org have been scanning. Check out China's Great Leap Forward (the Beijing landscape has changed!), John James Audubon's Birds of America, and Nature's Half-Acre. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Make Magazine Weekend Project: Alien Projector

2009-12-12T00:13:22Z

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Featured O'Reilly Answers Video: How Twitter followers propagate information

2009-12-12T00:05:46Z

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2009-12-11T17:58:21Z

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Four short links: 11 December 2009 - Real Time Text, NoSQL Reading List, New data.gov, and a Breakdancing Robot

2009-12-11T11:00:00Z

It's Official, data.gov 2.0 is Coming -- pointer to the design and philosophy document for the next iteration of data.gov. Interesting to see so much activity on US open government happening now: open government directive and progress report were released, along with a request for ideas on open access to publicly-funded science research. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Happy Birthday Internet!

2009-12-10T23:04:09Z

I love a celebration (who doesn't like cake) - especially for those who really deserve to be recognized. The Internet, as you probably know, turned 40 this month. Maybe it's the mother in me, but I would like to take a moment and reflect on how far it has come since its infancy. It's hit quite a few milestones!

Visualizing and Categorizing the 911 Wikileaks Data Set

2009-12-10T20:42:41Z

On November 25th, Wikileaks released 500,000 text pager intercepts from the 24 hours surrounding the horrific 9/11 attacks. The personal, corporate and governmental come from the Washington D.C. and New York City areas. These can be found on their own subdomain at http://911.wikileaks.org/ and are released under the CC-BY-SA license. As with the AOL search logs and the Enron email archives this data set will be examined and visualized.

Happening Today: Gov 2.0 Online Conference - Facing Challenges and Winning: Five Gov 2.0 Examples

2009-12-10T15:47:55Z

When citizens interact with their government, powerful things can happen. It means doing more with less people. It means breaking down too-familiar "cylinders of excellence." Web 2.0 is the industry which has shown that transparency, participation, collaboration add up to increased efficiency. Gov 2.0 harnesses this for the public good, as we'll explore in these sessions:

28 Rich Data Visualization Tools

2009-12-10T14:00:00Z

All of our clients have data rich applications and need equally rich data visualizations to help their end customers analyze data quickly and effectively. What makes my job really interesting is that these clients are in different industries and are using different technologies. So we have pulled together a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.