Four short links: 12 June 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. New Media Challenges: Legal and Policy Considerations for Federal Use of Web 2.0 Technology (Center for American Progress) -- report on the issues around Web 2.0 use in Government, which include privacy, security, Public Records Act, advertising, etc. See also It's Not the Campaign Anymore: How the White House Is Using Web 2.0 Technology So Far from the same group.
2. Government Data and the Invisible Hand -- Ed Felten has written a fantastic piece on the relationship between data, presentations of the data, and the government departments that produce the data. It is full of powerful recommendations: The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Fast Modularity Community Structure Inference Algorithm -- This algorithm is being widely used in the community of complex network researchers, and was originally designed for the express purpose of analyzing the community structure of extremely large networks (i.e., hundreds of thousand or millions of vertices). The original version worked only with unweighted, undirected networks. I've recently posted a version that works on weighted, undirected networks. (via mattb on Delicious)
4. First Driver for USB 3.0 -- After a year-and-a-half's worth of work, Intel hacker Sarah Sharp announced that Linux will be the first operating system supporting USB 3.0. (via deusx on Delicious)

Graphing Social Patterns West: Monday Highlights & AppNite Demo Contest

by Dave McClure | comments: 3

Alright folks, we're less than 48 hours away from the beginning of Graphing Social Patterns West 2008... w00t! I'm flying down to San Diego tomorrow, and looking forward to seeing everyone :)

If you're a developer, make sure you enter our AppNite Live Demo Contest -- submissions are due by *midnight Saturday 3/1* (that's tonight!). Two lucky winners will receive MacBook Air notebooks for the best app demos.

Here's the lineup for Monday:

• The Future of Social Networks - Charlene Li, Forrester Research


• MySpace Platform Overview - Amit Kapur, MySpace


• Facebook Platform Overview - Ben Ling, Facebook


• Ten Million in Ten Weeks - BJ Fogg, Stanford University


• Facebook Business Marketing 101 - Rodney Rumford, FaceReviews.com


• Giving Good Poke - Beth Kanter, Beth's Blog


• Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog API - Ian Kennedy, Yahoo / MyBlogLog


• Social Networks & the NEED for FEEDS - panel


• Bring Your Own Platform (BYOP) - panel


• Widget Strategies & Social Platforms - panel


• Privacy Management & Data Portability - panel


• DiSo: Distributed Social Networking - Chris Messina, Citizen Agency

In addition to the conference sessions above, in the evening we'll have the AppNite contest, the O'Reilly Radar keynote from Tim, and then Ignite ETech organized by Brady Forrest, the program chair for ETech, being held concurrently with GSP.

See you in San Diego!