PUBLIC MARKS with search leave

A couple of good things to remember here: #1 resolving 1 bottleneck can open another bottleneck that is much worse. #2 is to understand that not all API’s are created equal. Additionally the configuration and setup that works well on one system may not work well on another. Because of this people often leave lots of performance on the table. Don’t just trust that your current API or config is optimal, test and make sure it fits your application.

VoCamp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time creating lightweight vocabularies/ontologies for the Semantic Web/Web of Data. The emphasis of the events is not on creating the perfect ontology in a particular domain, but on creating vocabs that are good enough for people to start using for publishing data on the Web. The intention is to follow a "paper first, laptops second" format, where the modelling is done initially on paper and only later committed to code. The VoCamp idea is influenced by BarCamp, although the emphasis is different. Whereas BarCamps are oriented to demos and presentations, VoCamps are oriented to hands-on technical work and practical outputs; any presentations and demos should be short, highly on-topic to the vocabulary development process, and limited in number, to leave plenty of time for hacking on new vocabularies.

After yesterday's first part of my report on Parrworld. The Collection of Martin Parr, here's a quick (and very sloppy i'm afraid) focus on his private collection of photographs. The artist's interest in social themes finds an echo in these documentary photographs. I'm going to leave aside the international part of this collection and concentrate only on the images from Great Britain.

These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services.

You can read the full API documentation here: BlockChalk API v0.6

So what does this mean? It means that BlockChalk is now more than just a nifty GPS app for your iPhone. It’s an open platform for storing and accessing user-generated content within a geographic context.

What makes the BlockChalk platform unique?

* It’s dead simple. There are no badges, medals, points, unicorns, pirates, or other viral gaming craziness. BlockChalk is about locations and the messages people leave there, that’s it.

What people don’t do is leave it there, undecided. But they do about e-mail. They also do it by paper. That’s why most people are highly voice-addicted, and most cultures are voice-addicted. That’s why interruptitis is so huge out there, because if you have something you consider timely and meaningful that somebody needs to know and hear, you’ve got to deliver it to them by some sort of auditory means, because that’s the only thing they’re processing.

Well, I just go, “Duh! Somebody give me the rationale for this.” And there is none. E-mail wouldn’t be a problem if it blew up like your answering machine did once you got more than a screen full.

Los ojos del mundo (the world's eyes) illustrates the photos people visiting Spain leave behind them as evidences of contemporary tourism in the country. What do they see? What do they enjoy? Where do they travel to? Where do they come from? In order to answer some of these questions, and make tourism a more quantifiable phenomenon, the authors used flickr's large pool of photos (and its inherent metadata) to produce a set of 3 alluring visualizations mapping different behavioral patterns across Spain: (un)photographed Spain - density and flows of photographers in the Iberian Peninsula; Spaces of Diversity - Britons weaving their path in Barcelona; and finally, Spaces of Activity - photos from Barcelona with tags related to 'partying'.