Posts tagged Open Source
Chrome overtakes Internet Explorer as the Web’s most popular browser
Filed under that didn’t take long. Chrome’s first public, stable release was in December 2008. The first version of Internet Explorer, 1995.
In 2002-2003, IE controlled about 95% of the browser market.
More info via The Next Web.
Image via StatCounter.
MySQL is the persistent storage technology behind most Twitter data: the interest graph, timelines, user data and the Tweets themselves. Since we believe in sharing knowledge and that open source software facilitates innovation, we have decided to open source our MySQL work on GitHub under the BSD New license.
The Twitter Engineering Blog. MySQL at Twitter.
Wikipedia: Goodbye Google Maps, Hello Open Street Maps
Wikipedia joins a growing list of high profile organizations leaving Google Maps and moving to the open source Open Street Maps. The move comes after Google announced in March that they would begin charging Web sites that receive more than 25,000 requests per month for use of their maps.
Via Wikipedia:
Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMap - an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as ‘Wikipedia for Maps.’ This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications.
OpenStreetMap is used in both iOS and Android, thanks to the amazing Leaflet.js library. We are currently using Mapquest’s map tiles for our application, but plan on switching to our own tile servers in the near future.
Also, via Techspot, a look at mapping economics:
In March, Google announced it would be charging high-volume users for its once gratis Google Maps service. Developer accounts which pull in fewer than 25,000 requests per month are not considered high-volume and thus have remained free. However, for accounts that exceed 25,000 views, developers must pay between $4 to $10 for every additional 1,000 views generated. For popular websites and apps that rely on Google Maps APIs, this can add up pretty quickly…
…Although some may be quick to call out Google for its decision to charge a premium, Google Maps has really been the only mapping service to offer its product to everyone without cost. Traditionally, companies like NavTeq and TeleNav have always licensed their map data to third parties. It costs a lot of money to put together accurate maps and Google took some risk offering theirs free of charge. As a result, Google Maps has become the go-to place for many companies and users alike. In fact, comScore found that over 71% of Americans had used Google Maps in February.
Data in the Newsroom
The Data Journalism Handbook is a free, open sourced reference book that’s being released at the end of April at the International Journalism Festival in Italy.
If you want to be alerted when the book is released you can do so here.
This poster was created by Lulu Pinney based on illustrations in the book by Kate Hudson.
H/T: Jonathan Gray.
Timeline
I’ve been playing with a delightful timeline creator developed by Zach Wise, a multimedia producer and Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School.
Called Timeline, the open source software was created as a project within the Knight News Innovation Lab, has support for media types such as Twitter posts, photos from Flickr, video from YouTube and Vimeo, audio from SoundCloud and Google map embeds.
Timeline creators use JSON for authoring or — and this is very clever — enter data into a Google spreadsheet and Timeline will pull it from there. On Twitter, Wise suggests a Timeline plugin for WordPress is coming soon. — Michael
The Timeline Web Site | Download Timeline from GitHub.
Images: Timeline screenshots showing a few types of content types that can be used.
New York Times Releases Collaboration Plugin for WordPress
Via Poynter:
More and more journalists use blogging platforms to write and edit stories, but those text editors are pretty basic: It’s not easy to see what changes others have made to a post. And two people can open the same post, overwriting one another’s edits.
The New York Times has solved those problems for online journalists by building a tool that will track changes in a browser-based text editor. The tool, called ICE (for Integrated Content Editor) was built so that it will work with a variety of text editors; the Times has already built plugins for WordPress and TinyMCE, a common text editor used in blogging platforms…
…A demo of the Times’ text editor shows how it works. Changes made by different users are marked with strikethroughs or highlights. A user can press a button to accept or reject a particular change or all of them. It looks a lot like revision tracking in Microsoft Word.
ICE is more sophisticated than the “track revisions” function in WordPress, which shows the previous version of a story but doesn’t highlight the exact changes. And while WordPress shows those revisions on another screen, with ICE they appear in the text editing window, right where you add links and boldface text.
ICE Demo. Download ICE from GitHub.
Image: Screenshot from the ICE demo page showing highlighted updates. When a user mouses over yellow text, they see who inserted the changes.
WordPress 3.3 is released.
Called Sonny (after jazz legend Sonny Stitt), the update addresses a number of usability issues.
It also includes a Tumblr importer… not that anyone wants to leave the cozy confines of here to head over there but it’s a nice option to have.
Note that this update is for the self-hosted, open source WordPress, not WordPress.com.
Can You Peer Review the Internet?
This is the question that Hypothes.is raises. The non-profit startup hopes to provide tools so that communities of people can evaluate and comment upon content they come across online.
This falls outside normal commenting systems. Instead, it’s a tool that readers bring with them as they visit sites.
Via Hypothes.is:
Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site.
It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O’Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.
Via ReadWriteWeb
It’s a peer review system to check, verify and critique content all over the Web - and beyond. “Improving the credibility of the information we consume is humanity’s grandest challenge,” [Hypothes.is founder Dan] Whaley says. Topic experts will be enlisted in addition to crowdsourcing, a reputation system, browser plug-ins and APIs are on the roadmap and all the data will be stored at the Internet Archive.
It sounds very interesting but I wonder if people are up for leveraging it. For example, a few years ago Google launched Sidewiki as a browser-based annotation tool. Recently, the company announced it’s discontinuing the project. Which is another way to say that people weren’t really using it.
Here’s hoping Hypothes.is learns from that example because the idea of having a crowdsourced verification system is amazing. — Michael
Mapping Language Communities
Via Flowing Data:
Eric Fischer maps language communities on Twitter using Chrome’s open-source language detector. Each color, chosen to make differences more visibly obvious, represents a language. English is represented in dark gray, which is used just about everywhere, so it doesn’t obscure everything else.
It’s interesting to see that language forms national boundaries via the data as Fischer did not actually include formal boundaries when creating his map.
Filed under: Creative use of tools and APIs of the day
The early mistake I made in WordPress development was trying to do it all myself, even though it was an Open Source project. In the WordPress community a consistent theme has been that the more people contribute their best work the better the end product is, and my primary job is just to get out of the way. It took me a while to learn that, but now it’s ingrained.
The Open Source Publishing Workflow
Maine’s Bangor Daily News pimped out WordPress in order to create a single editorial workflow for online and print.
Via Mediabistro:
The Bangor Daily News announced this week that it completed its full transition to open source blogging software, WordPress. And get this: The workflow integrates seamlessly with InDesign, meaning the paper now has one content management system for both its web and print operations. And if you’re auspicious enough, you can do it too — he’s open-sourced all the code!
The newspaper’s reporters and editors initially write their articles in Google Docs and when ready to publish send it over to WordPress in a single click. Once in WordPress, it’s just a matter of categorizing and adding some additional metadata.
They then leveraged WordPress’ APIs to create an InDesign plugin that sucks content out of the CMS and into that program.
Click through to watch a short screencast, and check out the plugins they’ve open sourced so you can play with it to.
Journalists increasingly use visualization techniques to map out relationships between people, companies and government agencies they’re investigating.
The goal is to be able to step back and see who knows who, what the relationships are and what type of influence actually exists in those relationships. The practice is encouraging but does have its issues.
As OWNI’s Nicolas Kayser-Bril explains:
Network analysis has become a popular topic in several newsrooms. Channel 4 produced Who Knows Who, a database of relationships linking British personalities. In Hong Kong, the South China Morning Post launched Who Runs HK?, a similar project. These interfaces, although run by journalists, remain closed, and cannot be linked to open formats.
On the geekier side, Little Sis is another database of relations. It’s collaborative, open and has its own API. 57,000 people appear in there, with close to 300,000 connections. The only problem that remains is the bits of information in Little Sis are not validated and only an alert mechanism (flagging) allows for fighting disinformation. Given the sensibility of such a project, it is very likely that lobbyists will take over and, at some point, game the system.
So what to do? How about create your own? And make it Open Source.
OWNI teamed up with Transparency International, Zeit Online and Obsweb (Metz University) to develop Influence Networks, a self-described “open-source, collaborative directory of relationships between people, institutions and companies. Each relation has its own level of trustworthiness, so that facts can be distinguished from noise.”
The code-savvy among us can download the source over on GitHub. The rest of us can use the collaboration’s install at InfluenceNetworks.org.
For details on how all this works, check Kayser-Bril’s post announcing the launch. In it, he gives examples of how it can be used, and how the information submitted to it is verified.
Knight, Mozilla Partner to Bring Innovation to the News
Kudos to Knight for specifically looking to partner with an organization that understands and does Open Source.
Via the Knight Foundation Blog:
Today we announce the Knight-Mozilla News Technology partnership, a $2.5 million project, featuring news technology fellowships and an innovation challenge. The partnership will accelerate media innovation by solving technological challenges, developing new news products and services of the Web and embedding technologists in news organizations. Everything done through the Knight-Mozilla Innovation Challenge and by Knight-Mozilla Fellows will be open, providing knowledge, solutions and open-source products that are valuable and useful to the whole field.
This partnership spurs media innovation and helps news organizations facing the same or similar challenges understand how to solve them. Strategically, this aligns with recommendation number one of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy to direct efforts toward innovation that promotes quality journalism.
Pilot programs will be run with the Boston Globe, the BBC, The Guardian and Zeit Online, among others.
