Posts tagged Street
Czech Republic Gives Google Green Light To Resume Street View
Feb 3rd
After more than two years, and a few important concessions from Google, the Czech Republic is letting the company resume its Street View service. As Czech Position reports, Google has agreed to several conditions put forth by the Czech Office for Personal Data Protection: Google will take photos…
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Did International Markets Cause Google’s Loss Of Love On Wall Street?
Jan 24th
Wall Street wasn’t terribly impressed with Google’s figures for the last quarter of 2011 announced after the bell last thursday. To a normal person, you would think that generating $2.71 billion profit and significantly beating your own previous quarters would be a cause for…
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As Australian Main Street Retail Figures Fall Online Stores Continue to Grow – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Jan 22nd
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As Australian Main Street Retail Figures Fall Online Stores Continue to Grow
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Australian SEO Company Oracle Digital announces that savvy businesses are reaping the rewards in the online space. Australian SEO Company Oracle Digital are no strangers to the online world, and have now explained how savvy businesses have been … |
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As Australian Main Street Retail Figures Fall Online Stores Continue to Grow – PR Web (press release)
Jan 22nd
 PR Web (press release) |
As Australian Main Street Retail Figures Fall Online Stores Continue to Grow
PR Web (press release) Australian SEO Company Oracle Digital announces that savvy businesses are reaping the rewards in the online space. Australian SEO Company Oracle Digital are no strangers to the online world, and have now explained how savvy businesses have been … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
Wall Street Journal Unveils Online China Econtracker
Jan 19th
China Real Time, the Wall Street Journal’s blog devoted to the world’s second-largest country, has developed and launched China Econtracker, a valuable tool to access and understand economic data on the country.
Dealing with the statistical bureaus of the world’s second-largest economy is even less pleasant than it sounds. So the Journal has created this well-organized, graphically effective and easy-to-use site. It organizes data by month-to-month and year-over-year presentations and users can switch from one to the other.
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China Econtracker offers outlays of data based on gross domestic product, industrial value added, fixed asset investment, exports, imports, trade balance, foreign exchange reserves, consumer price index and bank credit.
It provides a source for each set of data and allows users to post the results to their Twitter account or Facebook page.
Whether your are among those likely to wind up “fighting it out with journalists at the State Council Information Office or getting lost for hours in the maze of Beijing’s Internet” as Tom Orlik writes on China Real Time’s post on the Econtracker, or just someone who wishes to be more informed about one of the most important economies on earth, the site looks to provide a real utility.
One commenter on the post, however, said:
“Chinese export statistics originate in individual customs declarations. These declarations include an ever expanding and now very likely statistically material amount of trade ’roundtripped’ through Bonded Logistics Parks in China in order to realize export VAT refunds. One of the many reasons that this statistic, like any other in China, is simply not reliable.”
Now, if you understand that enough to agree or disagree, you may not need this tool. For the rest of us, though, I still think it will prove useful, however reductive and unreliable statistical collections may be.
Government office photo by Daniel Gao | other sources: China Digital Times
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Troubling Google Contractor Allegedly Caught Vandalizing Open Street Map
Jan 16th
The official blog of Open Street Map reports tonight that someone at a range of Google IP addresses in India has been editing the collaboratively made map of the world in some very unhelpful ways, like moving and deleting information and reversing the direction of one-way streets on the map.
The IP addresses match the same ones that were caught last week running a long-term scam wherein telephone directory listings were scraped from a crowd-sourced phone directory in Kenya called Mocality. A Google contractor then systematically called those phone numbers claiming to have a paid placement deal jointly offered by the Kenyan company and Google! A Google spokesperson told BoingBoing on Friday that the company was “mortified” by the discovery – but now it appears the same Google contractor may be behind mayhem rippling throughout one of the world’s biggest maps. Google says it’s investigating these latest allegations.
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Open Street Map said tonight that two user accounts have been found vandalizing streets in New York, London and elsewhere since at least last Thursday. Full investigation of the actions may take time, OSM said, because at least 17 user accounts have accessed OSM from those Google IP adresses more than 100,000 times over the past year.
Is this a Google contractor with something against crowdsourced projects? That’s one thing both targets have in common. Neither offense seems short-lived or trivial though, either.
Open Street Map is like Wikipedia for world maps. It’s a fabulous and inspiring project, I think, but not everyone agrees.
In August 2010, Open Street Map co-founder Steve Coast wrote a long blog post titled Enough is Enough: Disinfecting OSM from Poisonous People. That post has been read by almost 175,000 people.
Coast said that divisive conversations “have spilled over now from poisonous people merely making life difficult on the mailing list, to paralyzing the project and even systematically corrupting the data we serve out using bots…Many (if not most or all) of the key people in OSM are feeling drained, distracted and upset. Some are talking of hiatus or resign. These are the key people who write code, build things, maintain things and run our working groups.”
Three months after writing that post, Coast left the company that supports Open Street Map and became the Principal Architect at Bing Maps.
Coast was one of three signers of tonight’s blog post that concludes as follows:
“These actions are somewhat baffling given our past good relationship with Google which has included donations and Summer of Code work. As a community we take the quality of our data extremely seriously and look forward to an explanation from Google and an undertaking to not allow this kind of thing to happen in the future.”
In response to our request for comment, a Google spokesperson said tonight, “We’re aware of OpenStreetMap’s claims that vandalism of OSM is occurring from accounts originating at a Google IP address. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible.”
It will be interesting to see how the company responds to this, the second serious allegation of wrongdoing by one of its contracting companies inside of a week.
It would be nice if Open Street Map could continue to flourish and grow. Bad actors may be an inevitable issue for an open site building collective knowledge at scale, but it would be good if people sitting in Google offices around the world were all helping instead of hurting such efforts. Reversing the direction on one-way streets is a particularly nasty thing to do.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Brings Japan’s Tsunami Damage to Street View
Dec 17th
Google has released a compilation of StreetView images that cover 44,000 kilometers of the region devastated by Japan’s March 11th tsunami and earthquake. Users can view before and after footage as if they were right there, standing on the streets…
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
How Storifying Occupy Wall Street Saved The News
Nov 17th
In the dead of night on Monday, November 14, Zuccotti Park in New York City was raided by police. In the preceding days, there were crackdowns at several of the major Occupy protests around the country. The effort had apparently been coordinated between cities. Monday night’s actions against the original Occupy Wall Street encampment were stern, heavy enough to bring a decisive end to the protest. But the raid only served to turn up the heat in New York and around the country.
As they have since the Occupation began, people on the ground fired up their smartphones to report the events as they happened, and curators around the Web gathered and retweeted the salient messages. But early on in the raid, mainstream media outlets began reporting that the police were barring their reporters from entering the park. The NYPD even grounded a CBS News helicopter. The night had chilling implications for freedom of the press. But the news got out anyway. The raw power of citizen media – and the future of news envisioned by a site called Storify – thwarted the media blackout.
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Saving The News
This is a new media age. The news of the Occupation has countless reporters, and some of the Web’s best curators have taken on the task of weaving the Occupy stories together. In particular, Xeni Jardin has been a machine on Twitter, providing a one-woman breaking news channel of so many successive Occupy confrontations.
But for the Monday night raid at Zuccotti Park, and indeed for much of the Occupation, Storify has come into its own as the social news curation tool par excellence. In fact, thanks to the media blackout Monday night, some of the most important news outlets in the country would not have had a story if not for Storify.
Storify’s New Role: The Backbone of News
“Most of the content comes from the people on the ground, from the 99%.”
Storify is one of those companies that arrives at its point in history just in the nick of time. Its co-founders pitched the idea during the Green Revolution in Iran, one of the first popular uprisings driven by social media. “Now it’s actually happening here, on the soil of America, with the Occupy movement,” says co-founder Xavier Damman.
The world needed a shareable, embeddable way to gather the tweetstorm of breaking news and turn it into a lasting document. Storify has made that possible. After a closed beta period with professional journalists, Storify opened to the public in April.
In October, it rolled out a brand new editing interface making the tool vastly easier to use. And one week ago, just before the police raided Zuccotti Park, Storify made its move, redesigning its homepage as a destination featuring the most important stories on the social Web. Storify’s vision is no less than a leveling of the media playing field. On the Storify homepage, lifelong and first-time journalists stand side by side.
“All news is social now,” says Storify CEO and co-founder Burt Herman. Whoever’s on the ground is the reporter, and whoever’s curating on the Web is the editor. It doesn’t matter who is whom. “We always talk about quoting from the original sources, from politicians, companies and everybody else, but now the journalists who are normally reporting are the sources.”
From a Dorm Room to the Front Page
While career journalists were being removed from Zuccotti Park, Ben Doernberg was watching the Web from his dorm room at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Ben is a college junior, and journalism is not his major. But his Storify of the Occupy Wall Street raid reached tens of thousands of people and was embedded by the Washington Post.
“This is not actually my first Storify,” he says, despite fun rumors to the contrary. “I was at Zuccotti Park about a month ago and happened to take a video that ended up getting on CNN, so this is kind of the second bizarre media day I’ve had in the last month.”
Doernberg used Storify to track the reports of the media blackout. “I looked at Twitter around 1 o’clock, and everything was going insane,” Doernberg says.
“By the time I decided to make a Storify, I had already read probably 100 tweets on this issue, so I tried to figure out what the overarching themes or the story seemed to be to me, and I went back through my memory of who tweeted what at what time.” What resulted was a comprehensive document of tweets, links, photos and videos of instances of the NYPD suppressing the media presence in Zuccotti Park. The Washington Post ran it, and the post has been viewed more than 20,000 times.
The 99% Media
The founders of Storify couldn’t be more delighted that students are making headlines using their platform. The day after the raid on Zuccotti Park, Storify shared two student stories from the raid on their blog. Doernberg’s was one. The other was by Columbia journalism grad student XinHui Lim, whose Storify post captured the grizzly details from the ground and included embedded live-streamed video. At one point in the night, that amateur video stream had 23,000 viewers.
Damman says this is the perfect demonstration of the Storify redesign. These social media documents are the real story, and the NYPD’s obstruction of credentialed journalists only shows how out of touch the police are. “The police in New York don’t realize that it doesn’t matter to not have journalists on the scene,” Damman says, “because everybody is a reporter. What happens last night shows that they don’t get that.”
“Most of the content comes from the people on the ground, from the 99%.”
Herman agrees that Monday’s events prove that the distinction between legacy media and new media is no longer important. During the raid, journalists became sources, regular people became journalists, and they traded places with each other throughout the night. It’s all one medium now. “Let’s not spite the Internet,” Herman says. “Let’s let the Internet be what it is.”
The Gatekeepers
The NYPD’s censorship efforts were thwarted by smartphones, Web technology and good, old-fashioned gumption. But authorities are working hard around the country to block journalists from covering the Occupation. Twenty six reporters have been arrested so far, ten of them in Zuccotti Park on Monday night.
Fortunately, those incidents are being captured on Storify, too, and the curator wants to make sure the free press is protected.
Next page: Josh Stearns of FreePress.net on new media, arrested journalists and the implications of the OWS blackout.
The Dark Knight Rises Occupies Wall Street And YouTube – ReelSEO Online Video News
Nov 13th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
The Dark Knight Rises Occupies Wall Street And YouTube
ReelSEO Online Video News The following is an index of our more popular video search engine optimization (Video SEO, VSEO,… Many of us here at ReelSEO are still settling back into our routines following the awesome SMX West… We had the privilege of speaking with Bruce Clay … |
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