Lawsuit against Facebook

I wonder how many more lawsuits are out there pending against facebook? And to answer my question, this is actually a followup to earlier legal action.

This one accuses Facebook of "conspir[ing] with Blockbuster to violate a federal law protecting customer video-rental and sale records."

According to the article the previous law suit (which resulted in a settlement on Facebook's part), "some 44 companies agreed under the Beacon program to supply Facebook with information about the online transactions of Facebook users, so the data could be broadcast to “friends” on a user’s Facebook page. Users were not asked if they wanted to opt in to the program and, according to the suit, could only opt out by visiting each of the individual partner sites to prevent their data from going to Facebook."

Yet another reason not to link accounts like amazon, YOUR BANK, or another account with personal info that you might NOT want to let the world know about, with Facebook.

Facebook is a company - just like google, microsoft, etc.

Read the wired article here
or my writings about facebook and about privacy.

NYT project / Mapping name subject headings (semantic web)

I am so excited about this NYT project -- just the kind of thing needed to start moving the semantic web forward ... By the way, DBPedia is an attempt to take Wikipedia data and semanticize it... I am kind of in love with linked in data at the moment.

Article at
http://tinyurl.com/yhdayvr

"Over the last several months we have manually mapped more than 5,000 person name subject headings onto Freebase and DBPedia. And today we are pleased to announce the launch of http://data.nytimes.com and the release of these 5,000 person name subject headings as Linked Open Data. "

... we plan to expand http://data.nytimes.com to include each of the nearly 30,000 subject headings we use to power Times Topics pages, a collection that includes locations, organizations and descriptors in addition to person names.

When we first announced this initiative, we asked for participation from the global semantic technology community. We have heard from a diverse community of experts, and their advice, guidance and feedback have proved invaluable. To further encourage community participation, we have created The New York Times Linked Open Data group and urge all interested folks to sign up.

Institutional Repository News

... the group will offer repository-related services, including personnel to scan physical media to digital formats, to check on rights for publishing materials, assist in content submission and offer the opportunity to store research materials in the MetaArchive Cooperative, a collaborative repository effort between Emory University, Georgia Tech and 13 other research institutions. The Cooperative is a member-driven organization that has been funded by the Library of Congress and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.

http://www.whistle.gatech.edu/archives/09/nov/2/archive.shtml

Cloud computing -- where is our stuff?

so, where does all of that stuff you upload go? Interesting...
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/04/cloud.computing.hunt/index.html

Cloud Computing jumps 320%

I can see both some advantages (pooled resources, not on your server, lower costs, etc.) and disadvantages (trusting your online resources to who? hidden costs, etc.) to cloud computing, but it does continue to rise, 320% in the previous year according to this article at Chanel Insider.