Brokekid.net

Earlier this week, the GeoCommons, a tool for visualizing geographic data, launched a tool that enables users to create maps from their own data sets. Their goal, “is to push the boundaries of web mapping to provide easy to use and powerful cartographic design tools along with access to a huge amount of complex geospatial data.”

Current services like Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are quite limited in what they’re capable of creating. GeoCommons has differentiated themselves by designing an “understandable and accurate cartographic design interface,” giving users more options for referencing existing data.

GeoCommons has also included the ability to export map data in a KML file, the accepted standard in online map creation. This enables the user to create a map in GeoCommons and then export the KML file into applications like Google Earth or NASAs WorldWind.

This service struck me as an incredibly powerful advocacy and organizing tool, a new approach to empowering communities, organizations and individuals to affect change at a grassroots level. Combining publicly available data from sources like the Federal Government, the UN, the World Bank and other outlets, will allow nonprofits, businesses, individuals and even social networks, to efficiently target and coordinate a better plan of action for addressing various issues. Referencing campaigns and activities to varying data sets will allow for better decision making, allocation of resources and course of action.

TacticalTech.org’s Mapping for Advocacy is an approach for “[enabling] advocacy groups [to] explore and exploit the potential of maps to effectively send out their message.” Tactical Tech recognizes the potential in using maps to visually represent data for affecting change, an example -

The Darfur project undertaken by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) where mapping was used to expose a humanitarian crisis in Sudan is a prime example. Combining mapping and rich content, witness testimonies, satellite imagery, data and other information placed on a Google Earth map, the USHMM raised awareness of the reality of incidents in the Sudanese region.

This is an interesting approach to solving a very serious issue, but only one example using mapping. What other examples can you think of? How can Idealist utilize maps? How would nonprofits be bettered served by integrating mapping into their own services? What opportunities would be presented using this technology? Any ideas?

Data Portability

The basic concept behind data portability is to allow users to have “[the] capability to control, share, and move data from one system to another. Data Portability is the idea that users should be able to move, share, and control their identity, photos, videos and all other forms of personal data.”

Simply put, you should be able to keep your data and use it however you choose.

Lovely. So how exactly would this work?

Instead of maintaining multiple contact lists across Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo and so on, you would have one contact list with your relationships to those people defined, like who’s your co-worker, friend and family member. You would then have access to that list on the different web sites you use.

You would have one identity to log into every website and your profile will automatically update your bio, education and background, books and movies you love, your music preferences, etc.

A great example of this is the MySpace Data Portability project from last week’s post, where MySpace allows you to share your icon, bio, blog posts and other information with Twitter.

What else what data portability allow you to do?

Say that you decide to leave one web service for a similar service, you won’t have to worry about what’s going to happen with your data, you can take that information with you.

For example, if you left Shelfari for Goodreads, both popular book listing and sharing web apps, you won’t need to re-enter all your book data from Shelfari into Goodreads.

These are only a few examples of how data portability would work, and I could go on, but I won’t. There are a number of standards being developed to port your data around, some of them you are familiar with, like RSS and hCal/iCal, and some of them you are not, like XFN.

Check out some of these standards below -

APML – for capturing a person’s interests and dislikes
FOAF – for describing people, their activities and their relations to other people (like social network relationships) and objects
hCard – or publishing the contact details of people, companies, organizations, and places
OAuth – this is a method to publish and interact with protected data, like your Gmail contacts, with out giving up all the access to your data (like passwords)
OpenID – allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single ID, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site
OPML – format for outlines, like the sites you follow
RSS – a really simple way to syndicate (hence RSS) all sorts of stuff, like blog posts, videos, pictures, audio and so on
SIOC – used for interconnecting discussions such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other
XFN – XHTML Friends Network, a simple way to represent human relationships using links

How could we use these standards and ideas for data portability? I have a novel idea, why don’t you tell me in the comments and share these ideas with everyone. What do you think? How can we apply this and help our users? How do we already apply it? Let me know. Cheers!

Messing around with my own install of Sweetcron. What’s Sweetcron?

That said, Sweetcron is, in a nutshell, a self-hosted lifestreaming CMS that offers full control over what content gets imported, and how it looks on the live website for visitors. A server with PHP5, MySQL4.1, and htaccess control is required, and setup is a tediously manual (though fairly short) process. After the initial login, the first thing to do is (obviously) start plugging in various services with which to keep your lifestream flowin’. A trip to Sweetcron’s “Feeds” tab in the dashboard offers a simple input box for entering RSS feeds, but herein lies one of the first significant hangups of Sweetcron’s infant status.