Jon Udell

A conversation with Adrian Holovaty about EveryBlock.com

For this week’s ITConversations show, Adrian Holovaty joins me to chat about EveryBlock, a new website that gathers and publishes “address-specific” information such as crime reports, building-code violations, and restaurant inspections. Acquiring this information isn’t frictionless and raises questions about how this kind of data can be published usefully, as opposed to merely published. EveryBlock also [...]

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04.03.2008 15:25:19 - Jon Udell

Hard link

A conversation with Stefano Mazzocchi about Cocoon and SIMILE

I’ve written a lot about MIT’s Project SIMILE since I visited the team back in December. In this week’s Interviews with Innovators I talk with Stefano Mazzocchi, the creator of Apache Cocoon, about his work on the SIMILE project. Early in the interview I asked whether he thought he was more well-known for Cocoon [...]

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02.03.2008 19:50:46 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Undisclosed location

For the next 8 or so days I will be at an undisclosed location. The following items will be absent from the scene: ice snow the internet The following items will be present: sun sea books music rum

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02.03.2008 19:50:42 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Where can I subscribe to a running-shoe-replacement service?

A few years back I realized that my knees and ankles were hurting because I’d put too many miles on my running shoes. No permanent injuries resulted, but a friend who outran his shoes wasn’t so lucky, and he’s got back problems for life. This is a business opportunity. If you’re a runner, spending $100 [...]

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28.02.2008 11:55:46 - Jon Udell

Hard link

A conversation with Valdis Krebs about social network analysis

For this week’s ITConversations show, introduced by special guest introducer Lynne Windley, I got together with Valdis Krebs, who’s been mapping and analyzing social networks since Mark Zuckerberg was in diapers. I can’t remember how I first got to know Valdis, but this snippet from a 2004 interview — for an InfoWorld cover story on enterprise [...]

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26.02.2008 21:15:24 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Code4Lib 2008

I’ve interviewed a couple of people who attended and/or spoke at last year’s Code4Lib conference: Art Rhyno, and Beth Jefferson. Code4Lib brings together IT-oriented librarians, and library-oriented IT folk, to create what seems like a truly unique event. I’m really looking forward to attending Code4Lib 2008 next week in Portland, where, as an adopted [...]

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25.02.2008 05:55:19 - Jon Udell

Hard link

HealthVault protocols will be released under the Open Specification Promise

Back in October I interviewed Sean Nolan, chief architect for HealthVault. Now he’s launched a blog, and in his latest post he writes: Microsoft will make the complete HealthVault XML interface protocol specification public. With this information, developers will be able to reimplement the HealthVault service and run their own versions of the system. Microsoft will irrevocably [...]

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25.02.2008 05:55:19 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Want to bootstrap the data web? Make batch data entry easier for civilians.

People are trying, once again, to kickstart the music scene here in my town. The other day I received two emails, each containing a schedule for a newly-activated local venue. In the past, I’ve advised folks to add this information to Eventful, which in turn feeds my my local aggregator. That hasn’t happened much, and [...]

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22.02.2008 00:13:26 - Jon Udell

Hard link

Overcoming data friction

This headline from Adrian Holovaty’s blog speaks volumes about the state of online data in 2008: EveryBlock hiring a Python screens-scraping expert. The recently-launched EveryBlock, a generalization of ChicagoCrime.org, extends that model to other cities and to a broader range of data types. I interviewed Adrian this week for an upcoming ITConversations show, and he [...]

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20.02.2008 15:55:29 - Jon Udell

Hard link

A conversation with Joel Selanikio about cellphones and SMS in developing countries

For this week’s ITConversations show I interviewed Joel Selanikio — a pediatrician, former CDC epidemiologist, and co-founder of DataDyne, a non-profit consultancy dedicated to improving the quantity and quality of public health data. DataDyne’s EpiSurveyor is: …a free, open source tool enabling anyone to very easily create a handheld data entry form, collect data on a [...]

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19.02.2008 08:01:06 - Jon Udell

A conversation with Adrian Holovaty about EveryBlock.com

A conversation with Stefano Mazzocchi about Cocoon and SIMILE

Undisclosed location

Where can I subscribe to a running-shoe-replacement service?

A conversation with Valdis Krebs about social network analysis

Code4Lib 2008

HealthVault protocols will be released under the Open Specification Promise

Want to bootstrap the data web? Make batch data entry easier for civilians.

Overcoming data friction

A conversation with Joel Selanikio about cellphones and SMS in developing countries

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