LSQHA Blog Reviews

When Twitter announced last week that every public tweet since its inception in 2006 would be archived in the Library of Congress, many people were excited.   "The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life," says James Billington , Librarian of Congress. "Anyone who wants to understand how an ever-broadening public is using social media to engage in an ongoing debate regarding social and cultural issues will have need of this material." Sponsor Developing the Methods to Curate Twitter There is little doubt that the opportunity for scholarship is immense - for cultural anthropologists, for historians of technology, and for academics in any number of fields. But some scholars are uncertain as to whether the resource will live up to the potential. With estimates of over 50 million tweets per day, the Library of Congress archives will contain a massive amount of data. "A MySQL dump from the Twitter database doesn't make an archive," says digital historian Tom Scheinfeldt . Scheinfeldt and other scholars agree that the move could be "tremendously useful," it will only be so if the proper tools and methodology are developed. Scholars are faced with the challenge of designing and building the curatorial tools for evaluating the data in the Twitter archives.  But how will you be able to isolate a single conversation?  How can you isolate the social graph of those involved? What sorts of API will be developed, both for internal and for external research? And while addition of annotations to Twitter will likely help for tracking future tweets, similar tools still need to be devised for archived data.   Is There Commitment to Digital Scholarship? The donation of the Twitter archive seems like a great gesture. However, it remains to be seen if the preservation of social media information, including Twitter, will be a priority, both for the government and the technology industry.   Although the Library of Congress and the National Archives have been committed to digital archiving for a number of years, programs like the Digital Preservation Program , have been historically underfunded . As historian Scheinfeldt notes, the announcement of the Library of Congress's acquisition of the Twitter archives is really just "the beginning of the story." Scholars like Scheinfeldt hope to be an active voice in shaping how the rest of the story plays out. Discuss

More:
Twitter Archive is Nothing Without Tools, Funding

The neighborhood boundary data provider used by Google, Twitter, EveryBlock, CitySearch and other companies has expanded to include top cities in South America, Middle East, Africa and Asia. Norwich, Vermont based Maponics says it now also offers deeper coverage for leading US and Canadian markets, with new neighborhoods in 100 cities. Maponics says it is the first service to provide neighborhood boundaries on every populated continent on earth. Sponsor The company uses a combination of proprietary algorithmic and manual methods to determine where a neighborhood begins and ends; boundaries are updated quarterly. The data becomes most exciting when it's cross-referenced with other data sets. Twitter users, for example, will now be able to geotag and view Tweets by neighborhood in countries all over the world. If you're interested in learning more about Maponics, its sector and its relationship with Twitter, check out the excellent podcast interview DirectionsMag did with CEO Darrin Clement two weeks ago . Discuss

See the rest here:
Maponics Releases "Ultra-Local" Data Internationally

Microsoft revealed a bit more about its container system for data centers, giving us some pause about it as a symbol of the cloud itself. These boxes represent the future of cloud-based infrastructures for both shared and dedicated networks. Microsoft, Amazon, HP and a number of other vendors use these containers to operate cloud networks. They are becoming fully automated systems that physically represent how we are seeing a fundamental shift in how IT services are managed and deployed. Sponsor In his keynote at the Microsoft Management Summit, Executive Bob Muglia featured the company's container system used at its Chicago data center, illustrating the company's new datacenter and cloud management capabilities for mass deployment of virtualized technologies. Muglia said the new container system is 10x less expensive than traditional data center infrastructures and 10x faster, too. "Everything moves faster in the cloud,"Muglia said. The container is an independent, high-speed network optimized with virtualization technology. Muglia said every piece of the data center is tightly fit, almost bound to make one network that stores data and provides raw processing power. The news serves to represent Microsoft's ability to model and deploy applications across platforms. Microsoft owns the management tools, the developer tools, the applications, OS and the cloud platform. That's Microsoft's value statement to data center operators and the new generation of IT professionals and developers who will become wizards of sorts in these new environments. It also shows the move to automate IT. Bing, for instance, has a few hundred thousand servers that are manned by a handful of people. Bing servers do not get patched. Instead, IT will deploys an updated OS image with the apps pre-installed. It also highlights some key trends in cloud computing and data center environments. As Mike Kirkwood wrote in his post today about Hitachi , server management is moving from three steps (OS, network and storage) to one system to orchestrate them all. Microsoft is providing both shard and dedicated services. It's the container model, though, that makes this interesting for us. By offering an automated data network, it opens up in some respects the data center market. It's an OEM environment that can be plugged in to a data center for offering virtualized and cloud-based services. Companies like Hitachi, Microsoft and Eucalyptus are defining a new container model that binds "compute, storage, network" with templates that can allow resources to move quickly. These types of systems will become predominant as virtualization gains mass acceptance. Discuss

See the article here:
Microsoft: Everything Moves Faster in the Cloud

Yesterday, Hitachi took the wraps off their Unified Computing Platform by introducing its open data center platform. It is aimed at consolidating the enterprise functions of networking, storage, and compute into an orchestration layer. Virtualization is still guiding the evolution of the data center, in this case all the way to the physical form. If you like consolidating your systems into big iron with lots blinking lights, Hitachi has you covered. And if you like open systems that connect to your existing infrastructure, Hitachi believes that playing nice with others is in the domain of unified computing. Sponsor If you're interested in this idea, check out the video summary of the platform . The company shares us a deeper view of this product line and the problems it is intending to solve. Many of the opportunities targeted address budgets, for example, how to remove operating expense through the orchestration of resources. Orchestration is the Huddle on Third Down Orchestration merges network, system, and storage resources as a single unit to be managed and reported in. An analogy might be found in football. In the huddle, the quarterback might call "the slant 6" and all eleven members of the team interpret that play and perform their respective jobs. Orchestration, as Hitachi describes it behaves in a similar way. It will respond to plays like "scale up for product launch". All the members of the team (disk, server, and network) go to their respective places and do the jobs needed. And, if needed, adjust appropriately to the conditions on the field. Hitachi leverages a partnership with Microsoft's System Management tools to closely align the plan and reality to bring more intelligence into the equation. The Computing Stack is the Team This product is also about abstracting systems through software. The company is betting that the coordination of the tasks of operating systems, storage and networking within a single framework provides a lot of value to the business. Hitachi takes the point of view that it is best to harmonize existing assets though open standards and looks at computing as a utility to be shared in the organization. Some of the features the product contains make it easier for organizations to achieve scale across functions and environments. It is designed to support this modern data center principles: Multi-tenancy Charge back for resources Distributed physical data centers Public cloud resources through open APIs Hitachi Unified Compute Platform looks like an impressive physical device. It brings together resources normally held in separate racks and hosts them in a single location and reduces a lot of the work of wiring up data centers. As we unfold another chapter in computing, Hitachi is leveraging its strength in consolidation to meet the trend of massive growth of data. At a glance, there are a lot of reasons why IT managers might choose unified computing products: cost, ease, agility. Looking out a few years, it is easy to imagine growth in this category overall. Is Hitachi well positioned for aggregation of data center resources with its Unified Computing products? How will EMC, Cisco, IBM, and HP fare in the movement towards unified computing? Photo credit: idovermani Discuss

Read more here:
Hitachi's Unified Compute Platform Goes for the Endzone

A letter sent today from leaders from 10 countries criticized Google's handling of privacy concerns when rolling out new technologies, such as Google Buzz and Google Street View, saying that the company launches new products "without due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms." The letter , first reported by CNET , is addressed to Google CEO Eric Schmidt and signed by "Privacy Commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, and the heads of the data protection authorities in France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain and the United Kingdom". Sponsor The letter starts out by acknowledging Google's role as a technological innovator, before continuing to say "we are increasingly concerned that, too often, the privacy rights of the world's citizens are being forgotten as Google rolls out new technological applications. We were disturbed by your recent rollout of the Google Buzz social networking application, which betrayed a disappointing disregard for fundamental privacy norms and laws. Moreover, this was not the first time you have failed to take adequate account of privacy considerations when launching new services." It then calls for Google to set an example to other companies in regards to user privacy, making the following requests: collecting and processing only the minimum amount of personal information necessary to achieve the identified purpose of the product or service; providing clear and unambiguous information about how personal information will be used to allow users to provide informed consent; creating privacy-protective default settings; ensuring that privacy control settings are prominent and easy to use; ensuring that all personal data is adequately protected, and giving people simple procedures for deleting their accounts and honouring their requests in a timely way. While Google was sued in the U.S. following its roll-out of Google Buzz, the letter notably lacks any U.S. representation. In all, the letter makes some reasonable requests of a company that likely knows more about us than our closest of friends, and we are looking forward to reading Google's response. Discuss

View post:
Ten Countries Call On Google to Respect Privacy