“An Internet service cannot be considered truly successful until it has attracted spammers.” – Rafe’s law I’ve been thinking about comment spam a lot lately, and more generally spam in any kind of user-uploaded content. Here’s a story. Back in 2008, we at OpenPlans developed a site for the Orton Family Foundation called communityalmanac.org. It’s a Read more…
I spent last Friday at ScraperWiki’s Journalism Data Camp NY, hosted at the Columbia School of Journalism. ScraperWiki is a really interesting project. There is a lot of data on the web that isn’t readily machine-readable. Turning this data into something that can be made more useful to the public – for example, by putting it Read more…
The Boston Hacks/Hackers Meetup is hosting a hackathon for building apps based on OpenBlock, to “figure out what cool things we can do with Boston data”, as Joel Abrams of the Boston Globe puts it. Even if you don’t live in Boston, it might be worth a trip if you’re interested in hacking with OpenBlock. Read more…
This year we again updated our whoismygov web service for Transportation Alternatives‘ 2010 candidate survey. TA was in the drivers’ seat for this project, doing all the work on the survey and the website. We just provided a back-end service that handles looking up candidates based on a user’s address. There were only a few Read more…
If you’re interested in the OpenBlock “hyper-local news” project, we want your help! Our first goal is to make the OpenBlock software easier to install and use for newspapers in the 25k-100k circulation range. If you or somebody you know works at such a paper, please take a look at this short survey. The results will help Read more…
June 17th I was at MIT to attend the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference. Civic hackers galore. More specifically I was there because of the “Data into Action” panel. Nick Grossman, my boss, was on the panel — among other things, announcing OpenBlock.
What’s OpenBlock? In a nutshell, we’ll be leading the effort to make the technology behind everyblock.com more accessible to newspapers that don’t have a huge web budget. So a local paper could put up maps of “hyperlocal news” – stuff you care about happening in your neighborhood, down to the block level. Read on..
Recently, TOPP Labs embarked on a joint venture with Transportation Alternatives to build a “Candidate Survey” website, showing New York users how their local political candidates responded to a TA survey. TA is going to build the public-facing site, and TOPP is going to build a back-end service that does geographic lookup of candidates based Read more…