PUBLIC MARKS with search million-gallonsperday(mgd)

The following maps are the first of a series that will be made in order to map out the distinct geographies of Wikipedia. Many Wikipedia articles (about half a million) are either about a place or an event that occurred within a place, and most of these geographic articles handily contain a set of coordinates that can be imported into mapping software.

The City of Nanaimo is not alone in recognising this global need. The US Federal Government has recently committed to embrace OpenID to allow simple access to citizen resources (http://openid.net/government/). As of November 2008, there were over 500 million OpenIDs on the Internet and approximately 27,000 sites had integrated the OpenID standard*. (* see - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID)

Geoplanet is a database of 5.4 million places in a hierarchy. Each entry has a unique, permanent ID (WOEID), a name and a place type. For example, Homerton (20089379) is a Suburb in the London Borough of Hackney (12695808), which is a LocalAdmin in London (44418), which is a Town in Greater London (23416974), and so on.

Even more likely, they were gawking at a very, very large scoreboard — the 160-foot-long, 1.2 million pound, Mitsubishi Diamond Vision true HD display, that is the centerpiece of Cowboys Stadium. This is a spectacular object, this scoreboard. It cost, by itself, twice as much to build as the previous Cowboys Stadium. It is maintained via a ten-level internal scaffolding system and its use requires the services of a full-time, highly trained operations team. Its display capacity is equal to 4,920 52-inch flat panel televisions, and it is illuminated by 30 million pulsing light bulbs. In short, it makes your typical Jumbotron look like a 13-inch TV/VCR.

We had planned for a lot of traffic on launch day and had been load testing the game - in fact, we've been testing and optimizing for a whole month. However, between the enthusiasm of Monopoly fans around the world, everyone who was excited to try out the new experience and non-stop mentions of the game on Twitter, blogs and everywhere else, our servers were overwhelmed. Based on the stats we have, we show a daily rate of about 1.7 million unique visitors, but the figure is likely far higher.

Tough economic times call for innovative approaches. An estimated 51 million people internationally are expected to lose their jobs in 2009, and with the unemployment rate on the rise, how does one find career opportunities fast? One great option is Twitter. Twitter (Twitter) is evolving as another resource, in addition to traditional methods, for both job searching and recruiting.

For example, CAPTCHAs prevent scalpers from writing programs to buy millions of tickets for concerts or sporting events. It is estimated that over 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed every day, each taking roughly ten seconds of human effort - that's 500,000 hours a day. ReCAPTCHA re-cycles this human mental effort into a dual purpose: transcribing books.

On taking over the world, and other things…

It’s been a month of milestones for Tumblr, and we thought it would be a good time to stop and say: Thank you to everyone for making this possible.

We can still remember watching your new posts come in one-by-one the day we launched. Now we’re waiting for five new servers to arrive to help us handle the 330 million (that’s 0.3 billion!!) hits and 20 million new posts we’re projecting for August.

More than anything, you continue to blow us away with the amazing things you do with Tumblr.

As our team gets bigger (we’re up to 9 people!), we promise we’re as committed as ever to making Tumblr the greatest place for everyone in the world to share the stuff they love and create.

We love you