Plazes launches location-based blather
119899
Share where you are, as well as what you're doing The Twitter generation can now go beyond telling the world what they're doing, and can now tell the world where they're doing it - though whether the world cares is open to question.â¦
741398
(InfoWorld) - Holding focused meetings, also known as "sprints," over several days to develop, test, and document software is proving very helpful to the open-source Plone community in quickly adding more functionality to its content management software. The project was started in 2000 by Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi, who now works at Google in the user experience team, and has proven popular particularly because the software supports more than 50 languages. Plone helps users manage documents, files, and images through a Web interface and also lets them publish that content to the Internet or to an intranet. The latest Plone sprint is in full swing at the Boston offices of the daily newspaper the Christian Science Monitor, attracting more than 20 attendees, including one apiece from Germany and Finland and seven remote participants based in Australia, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the U.S. The aim by close of play Sunday is to have produced release 1.0 final versions of Plone4Artists Audio and Calendar software and a beta version of the Video component. Work will center on improving how the Plone content management software handles audio and video files and images. In putting together a sprint, one of the hardest things to prioritize is what's achievable over the three or five days that the event will last, according to Nate Aune, one of the leaders and organizers of the Boston sprint. You need to take into account the skills levels of the participants and the features both they and the community as a whole are clamoring for. There have been around 30 Plone sprints since the first such event took place in Berne, Switzerland in February 2003. Tres Seaver, a senior software developer, begun to use sprints in 2002 as a way to speed up the development of Zope 3, an open-source Web application framework that's written in the Python programming language. The idea is to have small groups of developers, say two to three individuals in each group, working on specific issues over several days. Plone is built using Zope, and so it was natural for the community to also embrace the concept of sprints. Plone sprints aren't limited to coders though, Aune said. Participants with other skills, for instance, writing documentation and software testing, are also welcome. As the event begins, sprinters tend to naturally gravitate into small groups, and event organizers only have to help that process a little by doing a spot of matchmaking, Aune said. For instance, encouraging people with the same interests, say calendaring, to sit next to each other and start talking. There's "a huge geek factor" among the sprinters, Rocky Burt said, meaning there can be some social awkwardness, but in his role as Boston sprint leader and provider of technical assistance he makes sure he talks to everyone. The event also kicks off with a group meeting to define goals, and each day ends with a similar get-together where all participants report on what they've been doing. "Sprints really help the momentum of the project," Burt said. As with any volunteer-led development effort, people will lose interest from time to time, and sprints can provide a real boost to Plone as community members become re-energized about the work. That not only applies to the participants but also to other Plone users who can tune into what's going on at sprints by live video and audio feeds. Sprints vary in how they're run. Some organizers insist upon sprinters clocking in at a particular time each day. The Boston event is less formal with people rolling in whenever they choose. Typically, the day gets underway around 9 a.m. and finishes up around 6 p.m. "It can be hard to make people stop," Aune said. "You sometimes have to coax them out with food." Aune and Burt said they've learned from past sprints what tends to work and what doesn't. Having the necessary IT infrastructure in place is vital to ensure a productive environment, and that involves plenty of up-front liaison with the organization hosting the event. In the case of the Boston sprint, Aune and Burt made it very clear to the Christian Science Monitor that they needed wireless access, all outgoing Internet ports open, some wired connections, and plenty of power strips. They were also able to work through IT issues in advance of the sprint during two days of Zope 3 training Burt headed up in the same location. About half of the sprinters also attended the training. Previous sprints have called for ingenious workarounds to resolve technical limitations. At one event in Austria held in a remote mountaintop hut, the participants has to use a power generator and a satellite Internet connection to ensure they could work online. Remote sprinters communicate in real-time through a text-based channel on the IRCÂ server network. Aune noted that it's proven very difficult at previous sprints to fully integrate remote participants into the proceedings. "They tend to feel a little bit isolated," he said. In order to counteract that tendency, there's a remote sprint facilitator at the Boston sprint, an onsite individual who's constantly mediating between the physical and remote participants. Plone has held some fully remote sprints, but those events can't yet duplicate the benefits of a physical event where members of the widely dispersed community can come together to collaborate on the software, exchange skills, and get to know each other better. After the coding's done for the day, being able to go out for a beer with other sprinters can really help cement a rapport to enhance future working together whether remote or onsite, Aune said. There have been several sprints where the video feeds have also been available in Second Life, thanks to Plone developer Christian Scholtz, who's created a virtual Plone Conference area in the virtual world. In future as virtual environments evolve, Aune thinks the Plone community might use those meeting places more for collaboration. It's important to get corporate sponsorship for the sprints to cover the event's costs and also often pay for some participants to attend. The Boston event is being sponsored by its host the Christian Science Monitor and Jazkarta, the Plone-focused development and consulting company Aune heads up, as well as Friends of the Earth, The Nature Conservancy, New England Wildflower Society, Oxfam America, and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The number of Plone sprints is steadily increasing with recent events taking place in Barcelona, Spain; Berlin, Germany; Sorrento, Italy, and in Mountain View, California at Google's headquarters. The next sprint focused on multimedia and following up on the progress made at the Boston event is scheduled to take place in Naples, Italy, in October straight after the annual Plone Conference in the same location.
25857
CAMBRIDGE -- A new friend-spotting software program will debut on the MIT campus today, allowing people to enjoy the social benefits of sharing their location without showing up on Big Brother's radar screen. The iFIND project turns every laptop into something like a precise Global Positioning System unit that can spot users -- down to the room they're sitting in ...
199964
Fluery still roots for JBoss...Edward Tufte mostly likes iPhone interface...mysteries of Linux's /proc files...multicore compression...Actually *using* mammoth telephotos
217608
New software allows recipients of spam to band together to target known websites behind the messages. The idea is to bombard the sites with messages, slowing them down and making them more expensive to run.
535368
Location-based services are trying to revamp the Web experience to be less cumbersome on mobile devices.
507912
NXP Software has brought out a tool that can geo-tag images photographed with digital cameras so that users can more easily search, share and view photo collections.
251122
Blog: Hackers offer their take on Google's Street View feature.
447801
New TagmaStore plays well with rivals' arrays to keep watch over 32 petabytes of data.
420346
When prominent blogger Robert Scoble tried to collect contact data about his friends stored in Facebook, the social networking site reprimanded him. But Plaxo, the creators of the new address book importer Scoble was beta testing, have no plans to discontinue development of the tool. Let the data portability standoff begin.
716985
Site will alert users to roadwork and accidents in their local area.
716439
The Web 2.0 application Doppir lets users track their travel and buddies at once.
363205
Manually tagging things is a pain and, if one doesn't have obvious geographical features in the photo, it may be hard to locate them exactly on a map. So--how about marrying GPS data to the photos? It's a sound idea, it's doable, but it requires a slightl
828
The next big use for iRobot's bots: patrolling international borders.
523613
Netizens often like to compare the settlement of the Internet with that of the American West. The explorers charted new territory, observes product developer Chad Harrington of Zone Labs, a San Francisco-based
577972
Location-based services appeared here, there, and everywhere at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, as service providers maneuvered to take advantage of the increasing number of mobile phones shipping with integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) modules. Many of the services put the emphasis on finding your friends, not finding your way, as GPS evolves into more of a social tool.Yahoo announced a service called oneConnect&#160;that will to alert you when contacts arrive in town, warn you what mood they are in and show you a list of their recent e-mail messages that you have left unanswered. Yahoo intends to collect this information by combining status updates from sites like MySpace with GPS data from mobile phones and other information from Web mail and instant messaging services, a kind of aggregation for social networks. The service will go live by June, and will work with services including Google&#39;s Gmail and GoogleTalk, AOL Instant Messenger, and Microsoft&#39;s Outlook Web mail, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo&#39;s Connected Life division.Communology, of Cologne, Germany, promoted a similar notion of social-network aggregation. Its&#160;Mobile Mash-Up&#160;can help sites like Facebook or Xing offer mobile users the ability to locate friends or tag photos with information about where they were taken. Communology sells &quot;white label&quot; services, using its Live Media software platform to build social-networking services for other brands.Linking up with Facebook is a strategy that also occurred to Wayfinder: it now offers a GPS widget for Facebook users called LocateMate. The company also introduced a forum for users of its software to share favorite routes and locations at&#160;MyWayfinder.com, with links to digital mapping tools such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth.GyPSii showed a BlackBerry client for its mobile social-networking service. It already offers versions for handsets running Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. The service allows users to share photos, videos and other information, tagging it with location data. Last year, GyPSii, based in Amsterdam, acquired Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Benefon, one of the first to build GPS modules into mobile phones.One of the strangest location-based mobile social networks revealed at the show allows users to share information about ... public toilets. MizPee.eu offers reviews of toilets in Barcelona, London, Paris and Rome posted by community members, with ratings for cleanliness and cost. Showgoers hoping to use the site to beat the long lines for toilets on site were disappointed, though: the nearest one listed is 1.45 kilometers from the showground.
72019
Google's real-time viewer allows users to watch as other users around the world make changes to locations on maps.