Data Unbound

I think that there is certainly an important role for professional journalism, which can act as an invaluable filter. Overload! : CJR:

To win the war for our attention, news organizations must make themselves indispensable by producing journalism that helps make sense of the flood of information that inundates us all.

In the same issue of CJR is a call to visualize news data — Picture This : CJR in reference to the example at Metrics – In the Shadow of Foreclosures – NYTimes.com

In several weeks, I'll be giving a talk to campus IT staff. I've long wanted to talk up the value of such services as Amazon EC2 and S3. Whenever I bring them up, I have tended to talk in the abstract of all the possibilities. I just came across a nice example in a blog that I just learned about: Self-service, Prorated Super Computing Fun! on open.blogs.nytimes.com, a blog about open source at the NY Times. The post describes how the author used EC2 and S3 to convert millions of files to PDF files:

I then began some rough calculations and determined that if I used only four machines, it could take some time to generate all 11 million article PDFs. But thanks to the swell people at Amazon, I got access to a few more machines and churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances, and generated another 1.5TB of data to store in S3. (In fact, it work so well that we ran it twice, since after we were done we noticed an error in the PDFs.)

Wow, we as individuals have access to more and more computing power at lower prices all the time. I've long wanted to make use of the EC2 and S3 infrastructure.   I don't think that many people on campus know about EC2 and S3.   Researchers who need a lot of computational power might build their own clusters or access the central campus services — or they may start using things like EC2 and S3.  (That's my argument). So far I've not had any need for S3 and EC2  — but I'm pretty sure that this year will bring some projects my way that will give me an excuse to use EC2 and S3!

(BTW, I'm thrilled to learn about open.blogs.nytimes.com, which lets geeks who are also fans of the Times  get a glimpse into the IT technology behind an important online paper.)

‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’ – New York Times captures some of my own experiences on Facebook and might make a good piece for my Building Next Generation Web Applications course:

So last week I joined Facebook, the social network for students that opened its doors last fall to anyone with an e-mail address. The decision not only doubled its active membership to 24 million (more than 50 percent of whom are not students), but it also made it possible for parents like me to peek at our children in their online lair.

I'm glad to hear that the current Youtube API will evolve on top the Google GData API: YouTube API Blog: The Future

I didn't know about the Ruby-based API to Sketchup: SketchUp Ruby – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I follow EveryBlock with great interest. (See also Knight Foundation grant Holovaty.com — and Poynter Online – E-Media Tidbits, which has more preliminary details about EveryBlock.)

It is important to remember that JavaScript code is case sensitive. I couldn't get an event handler to fire because I wrote alink.onClick and not the correct alink.onclick