Tobias Escher at the OII

So there is this nice guy Jeff Gilfelt, a software developer from Reading, who has made some headlines with his iPhone/Android application called ASBOromoter which gives you simple access to government data on the number of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders that were handed out and other anti-social stuff in the area you happen to be with [...]

My right honourable friend Wolf Richter (who is actually on the left of the picture) and I gave a presentation at last week’s re:publica08 in Berlin entitled: “The Performance of Distributed News Aggregators”. Well, we might need to work at the title a bit as it might not be immediately clear what we are on [...]

Today I gave a presentation to the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information (APPSI), the independent body that advises government and its departments on how to make best use of the information they produce. This public sector information (PSI) includes data on legislation, geographical maps, weather data, financial spending – all kinds of information the [...]

Just listening to the wrap up of this really interesting two-day conference that has been taken place in York in the last two days. I have been giving a presentation here about the Geography of (Online) Social Networks which is analysing friendship networks on social network sites such as MySpace in respect to where the [...]

In a recent post about the legality of rating sites such as RateMyTeachers and PatientOpinion I concluded: “Last but not least, the subject under public scrutiny does matter as professors might well be made to face personal criticism in their role as public figures while teachers and nurses might have to be treated differently.” Well, [...]

Whatever name you prefer for the current state of the Internet (user generated content, Web 2.0, the social web etc.), it clearly seems like a good time for consumers of goods, even of those we still rather reluctantly consider as such like healthcare or education. The opinion of the general public is in high demand [...]

The “first public conference to discuss the current state of play of Internet filtering worldwide” is in full swing in St. Anne’s college in Oxford and there are already some online accounts of the main findings of the study (see their main website if indeed you are able to access it). (update:for a near live [...]

Andreas Gehret of Xing (used to be OpenBC) was sharing some insight from the internal development at Xing of an API that would eventually enable other people to write software that interface with the data that Xing holds. Apart from requests from the community, reasons for this development include opportunity for firms to let others [...]

One of the last session the day before yesterday evolved around Mash-up. Panellists included Gregor Hochmuth (who uses APIs to create mash-ups), Bernhard Reiter (who works for the FSF Europe and does a lot about Free Software/Open Source and also geo data) as well as Joachim Glaubrecht from Google. Not too much news from this [...]

I am currently attending the re-publica conference on blogging and digital culture in Berlin (Wednesday till Friday). It brings together presentations, panels and workshops on issues surrounding blogging and the social web. Apart from the brilliant location and interesting programme it is a perfect opportunity to network with people that do research on the Internet [...]