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AFP - After weeks of tumultuous protests inspired largely by South Korea's netizens, the country which claims to be the world's most wired society is considering new ways to monitor the Internet.

Filed under: Robots

Continue reading Crabfu strikes again with Tortoise RC bot

Filed under: Robots

Continue reading Crabfu strikes again with Tortoise RC bot

Have you ever posted a message on Twitter for responses for a blog post you'd written? Frustrated that you can't get those replies on you blog without doing multiple screenshots? Chirrup, a Twitter comment system, may be just what you were looking for.

Twitter Comments for Your Website

Chirrup is a really simple Twitter comments solution. If you're familiar with the FriendFeed plugin for WordPress, Chirrup won't be a problem at all. It's essentially a separate component to add to your blog, similar to a widget. The system "Chirrup fetches all of the replies from Twitter, and sorts them by URL so you can have a comment feed for each page in your site." You can place the comment box anywhere you'd like and style it to your tastes. Users can even send a Twitter comment through system.

How It Works

To run Chirrup you will need the following:

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• A little space with a hosting provider who support PHP (i.e. nearly any hosting provider).
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• N.B. Your host must support curl, which means completely vanilla PHP installations may not work. Any hosting provider worth it's salt will have this enabled by default, however.
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• The ability to add a piece of Javascript to your site's HTML templates.
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It seems it doesn't need anything that hosting doesn't already come with. Though Chirrup store comments as they arrive from Twitter, it also uses a small XML file on your server to prevent relying on the database.

"1. Follow your web host's instructions for uploading files, and put Chirrup wherever you want it to go. Chirrup will run either from a dedicated subdomain or from a sub-folder within an existing site. Note down the URL where Chirrup's folder will be accessible - we'll use http://chirrup.example.com/ in this example.

2. If you are using Apache, Chirrup already contains a .htaccess file which will forbid visitors from peeking at Chirrup's XML cache. If you're using a web server other than Apache, you'll need to configure this yourself."

With some small lines of javascript placed where ever you'd prefer, you're all set to use Chirrup. To use Chirrup on a WordPress blog simply download the contents of Chirrup and upload them to your WordPress plugins directory in their own folder. Piece of cake.

A Solution to Conversation Fragmentation

The system is very simple and easy and also a great solution to the conversation fragmentation nature of services like Twitter. So if you've been pretty heated about not getting those comments back on your blog, Chirrup is the best solution out there to bring Twitter replies back to the originating source.

We've learned that the Swiss version of Technorati has put itself up for sale this week. The site is called SLUG and indexes about 2,200 Swiss blogs. Currently SLUG shows 460,000 posts in the index which are categorized by topic.

The current "seller expectation" on the auction is 25,000 Euros or $40,000 USD. If you are interested in the auction, it's being held on Sedo.

The site features a very interesting geo-location map which shows bloggers by location. Click a blogger and see his or her latest posts.

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A New York-based company called Sense Networks is using public and private location-based data to figure out where consumers are going and what they're doing--patterns that have obvious potential value to, say, retailers trying to figure out where to locate stores and hedge funds trying to figure out how the economy (or a retailer or restaurant chain) is doing. Not surprisingly, the company is funded by...hedge funds. NYT:

Sense Networks earlier this month released Macrosense, a tool that...applies complex statistical algorithms to sift through the growing heaps of data about location and to make predictions or recommendations on various questions - where a company should put its next store, for example. Gregory Skibiski, 34, the chief executive and a co-founder of Sense, says the company has been testing its software with a major retailer, a major financial services firm and a large hedge fund.

Tony Jebara, also 34, the chief scientist and another co-founder of Sense, said, 'We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who's coming in from particular neighborhoods...'

Sense's models were developed initially from sources like taxicab companies that let it look at location data over such a period. Sense also uses publicly available data, like weather information, and other nonpublic sources that it would not disclose. 'We had three-quarters of a billion data points from just one city,' Mr. Skibiski says.

Mr. Jebara's statistical models interpret those patterns and look at whether they correlate with things in the real world, like tourism levels or retail sales... The Macrosense tool lets companies engage in 'reality mining,' a phrase coined by Sandy Pentland, an M.I.T. researcher who was also a co-founder of Sense and now advises it on privacy issues....

There's little doubt that products we use everyday, like our cellphones or cars, will increasingly allow for us to be tracked. And after years of hype, there also seems to be demand for services built around location. Gartner, a technology researcher and consulting firm, says that the market - which includes various navigation and search devices and subscriptions and services - will nearly triple in revenue this year, to $1.3 billion from $485 million in 2007, and will reach $8 billion in 2011.

Full article at NYT

newVideoPlayer("/kennedysc_gizmodo.flv", 520, 410,""); Forget about the Lego Airbus A380 and the Lego Death Star, because this video will show you the mother of all Lego models: the 750,000-brick Kennedy Space Center. Using 1,506 square feet, it took 2,500 hours to build. It includes a 6.13ft-tall Space Shuttle on the launch pad, the space center with a 9ft-long Saturn 1B rocket, and the Vehicle Assembly Building—8ft long x 6ft high x 5ft wide—made out of 50,000 Lego bricks. I know. Mindblowing. This thing is so massive that it can probably affect Earth's orbit. [Giz's Lego Trip]