Diving deeper on my current obsession with data portability and legacy datastores, here’s an idea that someone’s probably already working on and that should definitely see the light of day (with a nod to my friend and colleague Dave Naffziger for inadvertently planting the seed last April). First, a pair of assertions: Humans are peer-obsessed; continue…
I read with interest (and even some excitement) this week’s announcement from the Data Portability Workgroup that both Google and Facebook had signed on to (in principle at least) make their users’ social graphs and other information portable across applications. It makes perfect sense that these Web leaders would be among the first to see continue…
Here’s an excellent, timely addendum to my recent post on mining and remixing your personal data silos: Marshall Kirpatrick at Read/Write Web just did a piece on an MIT researcher named Sandy Pentland who – with funding from cellphone giant Nokia – is mining hundreds of thousands of hours of cellphone call data – including continue…
One of the big ideas we were exploring at Judy’s Book was the topic of tacit or latent knowledge. Everyone’s head is filled with a richly personal blend of facts and opinions: where to get the best burrito in San Francisco, my current favorite band, the name and contact information of my childhood friend who continue…
I love my BlackBerry and I love Google’s suite of productivity and communications apps, but until recently I’ve had to rely on apps I don’t love at all (like Microsoft Outlook and BlackBerry’s own desktop sync) to make the two play nicely together. It was a great day when Google released Gmail for the BlackBerry, continue…
After 3+ years in the trenches on the topic of local + online content and advertising at Judy’s Book, I’m fascinated by the possibilities for what Alex Iskold has called “Life Digital“, a location-specific data and functionality overlay on our physical lives. (I imagine it as an invisible location grid sitting over the entire earth, continue…