Showing posts with label san francisco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label san francisco. Show all posts

30 June 2009

Squishing the Media Bugs

Belatedly, I'm writing about this very cool idea:


It’s called MediaBugs.org. And the idea is to create a web site, a web service, that people in a community, in this case the San Francisco Bay Area, can bring problems and errors that they find in media coverage and post them and try to get them fixed. [...]

The inspiration of the project is from what’s called a bug tracker in an open-source project. So if you’re developing open-source software, you have this project, and you put up a public website that anyone can bring these — file these bugs. If you’re using Firefox and something breaks, you go to their web site, and you tell them about it.

I fear the practice might be harder than the theory, but I certainly wish it well.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

05 March 2008

The Sheer Ordinariness of Craig Newmark

I've written before about the excellent writing of Mark Pesce. He's at it again with a piece entitled "That Business Conversation". Although there's nothing hugely new there, it's well worth reading. I particularly liked the following section:

At one of the first of those meetings I met a man who impressed me by his sheer ordinariness. He was an accountant, and although he was enthusiastic about the possibilities of VR, he wasn’t working in the field – he was simply interested in it. Still, Craig Newmark was pleasant enough, and we’d always engage in a few lines of conversation at every meeting, although I can’t remember any of these conversations very distinctly.

Newmark met a lot of people – he was an excellent networker – and fairly quickly built up a nice list of email addresses for his contacts, whom he kept in contact with through a mailing list. This list, known as “Craig’s List”, because a de facto bulletin board for the core web and VR communities in San Francisco. People would share information about events in town, or observations, or – more frequently – they’d offer up something for sale, like a used car or a futon or an old telly.

As more people in San Francisco were sucked into the growing set of businesses which were making money from the Web, they too started reading Craig’s List, and started contributing to it. By the middle of 1995, there was too much content to be handled neatly in a mailing list, so Newmark – who, like nearly everyone else in the San Francisco Web community, had some basic web authoring skills – created a very simple web site which allowed people to post their own listings to the Web site. Newmark offered this service freely – his way of saying “thank you” to the community, and, equally important, his way of reinforcing all of the social relationships he’d built up in the last few years.

The rest, of course, is history.

09 March 2007

Urban Forest Tracker = Open Source 2.0?

Traditionally, open source has been most successful when applied to generic, mainstream software categories - operating systems, Web servers, browser etc. Specialised, vertical applications have not generally been thought suitable, because the pool of interested people who can contribute bug reports and fixes is small.

But the appearance of this open source urban forest tracking system suggests we may be entering a new phase:

In urban San Francisco, the public works department and nonprofit organizations work together to preserve and expand tree life as part of that city's efforts to create sustainability. The city today unveiled a new Web portal and open source application that will help those agencies, and the general public, keep tabs on a growing urban forest.

This new project will probably work not so much because there is a huge untapped group of urban forest tracking system hackers just waiting to hit some code, but because there are plenty of tree-huggers who will help debug the system and input data. In other words, these new kinds of open source projects - call them open source 2.0 - only require a small core of coders to maintain, but survive and thrive thanks to the larger group of suppliers of open data.

06 March 2007

Second Life's Second Innards

Talking of guts, here's a piece about Second Life's intestines. I've written about this in various places, but there are more details here:

Second Life runs on 2,000 Intel and AMD servers in two co-location facilities in San Francisco and Dallas. The company has a commitment to open source, with servers running Debian Linux and the MySQL database. Linden Lab chose Debian Linux because the software is suited to scaling massively with a small IT staff, said Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. MySQL allows the server farms to scale horizontally, by adding large numbers of low-power servers as needed, rather than vertically, which would have required Second Life to run on a few, powerful systems, Miller said.

05 February 2007

Second Life Comes to...Brighton?

Brighton is famous for many things, but cutting edge virtual world software development is not one of them. Until now:

Title: Software Developer
Department: Engineering
Work Location: San Francisco, Mountain View, Davis, Seattle or Brighton, UK