Jeffrey McManus

The New Thing

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Entries Tagged as 'Collaboration, Content, Community'

Why Location-Based Systems Will Have No Effect On Crime

February 18th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Collaboration, Content, Community, Web/Tech

I’ve been watching the reaction to this service that uses the Foursquare API to tell the world when someone isn’t home, with the implication that criminals will be firing up their expensive laptops to go find people to rip off. This is nonsense, and it’s kind of surprising that it’s gotten so much attention. I’m [...]

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Crowdsourced document analysis and MP expenses

December 20th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, News, Work

My former Yahoo! colleague Simon Willison is doing some amazing work setting up near-instant crowdsourced content analysis systems for government documents in the UK. He and his team are developing vital knowledge about what works and what doesn’t in these kinds of systems, and he’s shared it on his blog:
News-based crowdsourcing projects of this nature [...]

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Because Russian Money is Clearly Worth Less, Somehow

December 16th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, The NY Times Valiantly Attempts To Report on Technology, Web/Tech, Work

Link: Russian Facebook Investor Adds Stake in Zynga – NYTimes.com
Digital Sky Technologies, or D.S.T., an investment firm with offices in Moscow and London, is leading a group that is buying a $180 million stake in Zynga, a fast-growing San Francisco company whose online games, like FarmVille, Café World and Mafia Wars, are extremely popular on [...]

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How Not To Describe Your Platform

December 14th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Platforms, Web/Tech, Work

Link: PayPal Taps the Developer Community to Build Next-Gen Payment Apps
We haven’t actually released new APIs; what we have done is that we announced a set of APIs on November 3rd, which was our adaptive suite. Adaptive suite APIs include adaptive payments and adaptive accounts. Then we also announced our authentications and permissions API. What [...]

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Building the Virtual Academic Computer Lab

August 20th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Collaboration, Content, Community, School

I’m taking a few computer science courses this year, partly for fun and partly to backfill some of my skills. I’m almost completely self-taught as a programmer, and while I’ve been coding in various capacities for nearly 20 years now, I have had almost no exposure to academic computer science and very little experience with [...]

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Lego Prohibits Use of Product in Spinal Tap DVD

August 11th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, The Kids

Link: Lego Prohibits Use of Product in Spinal Tap DVD – NYTimes.com
As final editing was being done on a concert DVD of the tour, which included footage from the video projected on stage, Lego declined to grant permission to use its figures, which are protected by copyright.“We love that our fans are so passionate and [...]

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Plug-In Comment Systems Suck

July 18th, 2009 · 4 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Web/Tech

I do a lot of commenting on other peoples’ blogs, so I pay a lot of attention to the user experience for comments. In the last year or so I’ve been noticing the rise of third-party plug-in comment systems such as Disqus and Intense Debate. I understand the value of these systems (single sign-on, presence, [...]

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The Associated Press Discovers Tagging

July 12th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, News, Web/Tech

The Associated Press is floating the idea of creating a tag taxonomy that would provide metadata about their news stories to automated crawlers.
Setting aside the fact that this would appear to be an attempt at creating their own niche set of copyright regulations, I’d be surprised if the AP will even be able to pull [...]

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Matt Mullenweg: “Wordpress Themes are GPL, too”

July 2nd, 2009 · 5 Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Open Source, Web/Tech

Link: WordPress › Blog » Themes are GPL, too
One sentence summary: PHP in WordPress themes must be GPL, artwork and CSS may be but are not required.
I don’t see this doing much to calm the shitstorm over commercial Wordpress themes (missives from attorneys seldom do); it definitely draws a line in the sand and clarifies [...]

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Testimony to the New York City Council on Intro 991, Proposed Legislation for Open Data Standards

June 29th, 2009 · No Comments · Collaboration, Content, Community, Politics

Link: Testimony to the New York City Council on Intro 991, Proposed Legislation for Open Data Standards
Beyond a permissive regime around the availability of data, the City will also need to allow companies to make a market, and to charge, for the value-added services they build on top of the public platform. Certainly, companies should [...]

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