| Weekly Wrap-up: The Year the Check-in Died, Twitter Drops Ruby for Java, The Future of the Camera and More... One of our top posts this week was Richard MacManus' look at the future of the camera. We all know how smartphones integrated cameras. "Could we be about to see the inverse - cameras integrating smartphone technology?" he asked. The story is part of our ongoing series looking at what it means to consume and produce media in post-PC-centric world. After the jump you'll find more of this week's top news stories on some of the key trends that are shaping the Web - mobile, location, Internet of Things - plus highlights from our six channels. Read on for more.
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Saving the Documents of the Tunisian Revolution When Tunisian strongman Ben Ali was chased out of power last January, after a month's escalating protests, his documents begun to disappear. It was not all nefarious goings-on. In many of the situations, the simple fact that old government and personal sites weren't being kept up meant the documents they held disappeared in the blink of an eye. Brian Whitaker is taking steps to preserve them. Whitaker's site Al-Bab (the door or gate in Arabic), was an important source of information during the revolution and during further expressions of the widespread Jasmine Revolutions. He discovered that he couldn't access some important documents and began gathering them together via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
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Help the National Institute of Standards & Tech ID Mystery Machines The National Institute of Standards and Technology is asking the public to help them identify a bunch of gear in their digital collection that their experts cannot figure out. As io9 put it, the NIST "doesn't just produce technical specifications for everything from wifi to voting machines - they also have a digital archive devoted to the study of early technology." The mystery machines, which come from the NIST's collection of scientific instruments in Gaithersburg, Maryland, are mostly from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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56% of Peoples' 1st Wikipedia Edits Are Good If you thought Wikipedia had seen its heyday, you'd have thought wrong. A small study performed by Wikipedia staff and published today found that new Editors are signing up and making edits to the site at a far greater rate than they were years ago. A slight majority of their first edits are acceptable or better. The number of new editors registering on the site has grown from 60 on an typical day in 2004 (when the site was 3 years old) to now 1800 people joining English Wikipedia and making at least 1 edit in a given day today. Vandalism is way up but still makes up less than 25% of edits from new editors. 55% of first edits by new editors today meet the site's (increasingly) stringent quality controls and require no clean-up by other editors. While that's down from 72% in 2004, it's still pretty good.
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Calling All Fascinating People: Now You Can Audition for TED on YouTube If you're one of the many people inspired, educated, informed and entertained by TED Talks videos online, you should know that the organization's web video efforts are no longer read-only. Disruptive creative geniuses and others are now invited to upload to YouTube or Vimeo one minute audition videos for consideration by TED. Selected uploaders will be invited to travel to New York for an in-person audition to present to the world on stage in California. TED says it is looking for "the rich use of technologies, formats and styles to make an impact on an audience." The deadline for submission is in 10 days.
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YouTube: Fair Use is Why Conan Can Make Fun of Rebecca Black Yesterday, YouTube redesigned its copyright help center to help educate its users about the ins and outs of copyright law. Copyright law can be complicated and, in light of that, the site now sends offenders to the YouTube Copyright School where they can watch explanatory cartoons in an experience that our own Audrey Watters isn't too sure arrives at education. If you agree, then you might want to get in on YouTube's next effort - a Q&A with legal experts it will be holding on the video site at the beginning of May.
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3 Awesome Twitter Apps Built in 3 Days Using Infochimps API Calls Last month at SXSW, Infochimps, the self-described "Amazon of data," unveiled thousands of new API calls. The API calls, or plug-and-play bits of code that developers can insert into their applications, were released in hopes of soothing the headaches inherent in making data-dependent applications. This weekend, a few developers took three headache-free days to make three awesome Twitter apps built on the Infochimps API calls. Check 'em out.
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How to Think Like a Geek & Make Tax Season Less Painful It's fast approaching tax day and if you haven't already filed, you may be feeling a lot of pain around the whole process. Fortunately, the Internet is here to help. Especially with next year. New innovations online, both literally and as metaphors, can substantially reduce the headaches associated with paying taxes. Determining what you can write off as a business expense can be particularly time-intensive if you haven't kept good track throughout the year. My wife and I have developed some helpful practices after several years of filing together to mitigate the terrible tax-time pain. And when I say we, I mean she's come up with these ideas and then either done them or told me to do them. Here's what we've found to be most helpful.
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Let's Remember Twitter's Best Assets Twitter is facing a lot of scrutiny by the business press this week, its founding myth has been called deeply into question (news: not founded by angels) and its management characterized as dysfunctional and ineffective. Yet the Tweets keep flowing, the lists listing, the replies replying. No one has Direct Messaged me yet this morning but I'm sure that still works too. All this business scrutiny makes me want to pause and be thankful for Twitter's best assets - simple technologies too often unappreciated by a media world too accustomed to its own power to feel moved by the growing communication power users derive from Twitter. Do users care about drama in the executive suite at Twitter? Not as long as the tech fundamentals remain functional, they don't. What are Twitter's most important assets? As a dedicated user of the service, I see three.
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Color Wants to Prove its Point: Partners with Fox for Film Premiere When location-based photo sharing app Color launched last month, it arrived to a chorus of complaints - all justified, mind you - about a confusing, puzzle-like design and a terrible user experience. Still, users seem to be confused about what the app is for, as you can often hear people ask "Why do I want to share photos with strangers?" whenever the topic of Color is brought up. This weekend, Color will partner up with 20th Century Fox to show users one example of how Color, the power of the crowd and proximity can all come together to create a new and interesting experience.
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