LSQHA Blog Reviews

ReadWriteWeb and Tableau are pleased to announce the winner of the Tableau User Generated Graph Contest : Rina Bongsu-Petersen and her interpretation of U.S. obesity data (see below). The judges - Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb's co-editor; Stephen Few, a leading data visualization expert; and Jock Mackinlay, Tableau's director of visual analysis - found the entry to be not just a powerful tool, but also an indicator of how easy-to-use data visualization is changing the world. Sponsor "This entry was able to provide strong analysis with a view of the data that fits the subject, and the result is an incredible story anyone can discover," Mackinlay said. "People will look at it, immediately select their state and see relevant results." Kirkpatrick sees the contest in a broader context: "Judging this event, seeing data visualization projects from around the world, was a whole lot of fun. I believe that data is a key platform for the future, and stories drawn from data could become one of the next big forms of DIY publishing. Just like blogging changed the world by making text publishing easier than at any other point in history, then YouTube enabled almost anyone to become a video publisher, and then social networks made it simple to put all kinds of content online - so too will other types of content get brought to life by simple publishing tools that will change the world. "It was an honor to get to judge what I'm sure will be just the first of many of these kinds of contests. Look out Internet, data visualization is leaving the confines of experts and becoming another tool that any of us can use to change the world." Rina received more than $3,500 in prizes, including a free trip to Web 2.0 in San Francisco from May 3-6. Editors Note: This post is part of a series ReadWriteWeb produced in partnership with Tableau Software where we examined interesting data sets relevant to technology trends today. Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the Web in interesting and compelling graphs. Download Tableau Public and you can create interactive graphs, dashboards, maps and tables from virtually any data and embed them on your website or blog in minutes. Once on the Web, anyone can interact with your graph and the data. They can re-embed your work, download the data, or create their own visualizations. Check out Tableau's gallery to see some of the cool graphs bloggers have created. Or learn how to do it yourself in this five minute video . Fit And Fat Powered by Tableau Discuss

See original here:
ReadWriteWeb and Tableau Announce Winner of Data Visualization Contest

Despite the now infamous absence of Adboe's Flash, video aggregator MeFeedia says that video on the iPad is a flourishing and growing trend according to the data the company has collected over the past three weeks. The company offers a few stats and postulates that, among other reasons, the "lack of distractions mean people watch more video, for longer." Sponsor MeFeedia added HTML5 video support earlier this month - one of several alternatives available for video on the iPad - and says that its internal numbers show the iPad to clearly be a media consumption device, moreso than other users. The company offers the following observations on its blog, noting that the "iPad was only launched a few weeks ago & this sample is for MeFeedia and MeFeedia Network only." iPad is now the 5th most popular mobile device* *In terms of unique users, trailing only iPhone, iPod Touch, SymbianOS, and Android (in that order) iPad users consume 3X as many videos as web users (up from the 2.5X number that we first reported a few weeks ago) iPad users spend 4X as long watching videos as web users (up from 3X) iPad users consume 5X as many videos as iPhone users (up from 3X) We think that the lack of multitasking as a reason for people to watch more video, longer, is likely a fair point. And, as we've previously argued , the iPad makes a great media consumption (rather than creation) device. Discuss

See more here:
Stats: iPad Users Consume 3X Videos As Other Users

Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy. Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, "is the vector around which Facebook operates." Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview , Zuckerberg said that Facebook's new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today's new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now. Sponsor I believe that the Facebook policy change on storing user data is a net win for the web: it will enable all kinds of new innovation. It was that kind of innovation that I was asking about two years ago when I got the following answer about privacy that just doesn't sound right anymore today. Zuckerberg on Data Portability, March 10th 2008 interview with ReadWriteWeb : "If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends' news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive - then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there's no longer any control over the data for users. " (emphasis added) And today, on the new Developers' Terms of Service : You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data....You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application's user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date ...You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. (emphasis added) One thing that remains the same? "You cannot use a user's friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use." Facebook doesn't want you taking your data out of the Facebook ecosystem, to other competing services, but it doesn't insist that 3rd parties under its shadow check in with you daily anymore, either. It's hard not to feel a little cynical about that. Discuss

View post:
Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years

At its annual F8 conference today, Facebook announced its new Facebook for Web Sites platform. Besides the new Graph API and all the plugins and new features Facebook developed on top of this, the company will also offer a new version of its Facebook Insights analytics service. Currently, Insights provides users data about their Facebook fan pages and social ads. Now, however, Facebook is taking this a step further and will also give users who implement Facebook's new features on their sites data about the people who share content from these sites, "no matter where those shares originated." Sponsor Note : Facebook will share more information about these new analytics features during an F8 breakout session at 3:30pm PT and we will update this post once we learn more. The new Insights page is already live and getting it to work involves nothing more than adding a short meta tag to your site. Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level This new service, according to Facebook , will give developers "detailed analytics about the demographics of [their] users." Today's web analytics systems like Google Analytics can give publishers detailed information about how many people come to a given site and where they came from. A developer who uses Facebook for Web Sites will be able to gather more detailed demographic information about these users. With this update, Facebook Insights isn't just about Fan pages and Social Ads anymore (where Facebook already gives publishers very detailed demographic data), but it also allows publishers to track what happens to a link once it is shared. Partly, this also connects to Facebook's new caching policy , which now allows developers to store their users' Facebook data permanently. Until today, developers who used Facebook Connect had to delete this data after 24 hours. Now, however, when users grant an application permission to store their profile data, they give these developers their age, location, gender, number of friends and a number of other data points about them. Privacy Implications? This update will surely have some interesting privacy implications. Thanks to the new permissions dialog, however, it should now be easier for users to see which information they will share with a third-party application. Discuss

Read more:
Facebook Insights: Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level

We've entered an era where the cost of sensors, processors and transmitters are so low that it's fast becoming cost effective to put them inside everything, even the clothes we wear. Even our own toothbrush may soon sense and communicate socially about where it is and how it's being used in space and time. Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling has coined the term " spime ", to describe objects that can be "tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object." David Orban, the creator of the iPhone app WideNoise , also offers WideSpime , which helps developers build mass data collection services for real-time data management in a way that maintains the autonomy of both the data and the object generating the data. Sponsor In our most recent Internet of Things post Objects Aren't Social , Orban comments that objects " ...are going to form their own independent social networks, which are going to be fundamentally incompatible with human communication." These new machine networks will be so redundant and reliable that we will be freed from most of our machine-operating duties. We will get to be human again. We will soon see cars that don't rear end each other because onboard sensors won't allow it. Or how about a vacuum cleaner that knows about a mess your cat made and cleans it up before you even notice your machine-network's admin message about it. Also, consider an Internet of Things home that tracks your habits so well it knows which rooms to heat and light because it knows what you'll be doing on that particular day. Orban's dream is that thousands of years of human subservience to machines will end because we will teach our machines how to not only take care of themselves, but how to take care of us as well. But what if someone wanted to manipulate these systems for an unethical advantage? Or even worse, what if these manipulations were built into these new machine networks at the earliest stages? On Sunday night, ReadWriteWeb reported on a presentation by Tim O'Rielly regarding the future Internet of Things. In his presentation he said, "You see increasingly the giants of the Internet are trading for their own account - they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that; we have to work for openess in that web." That's why Orban stresses the importance of autonomous machine networks, which are built on open-sourced standards. Another open-source Internet of Things project we're excited about is Pachube ( pronounced patch-bay ). What WideSpime and Pachube share in common are real-time global maps, which present data generation in a fair and open way. Because these projects aspire to a high level of transparency and user adaptability, we may have a chance to achieve Orban's dream of all us machine operators getting a chance to be human again. Free To be Human Video Free To be Human PowerPoint David Orban - Free to be human View more presentations from Mobile Monday Amsterdam . Discuss

See the article here:
Internet of Things Can Make Us Human Again