After six weeks of public discussions, document updates and changes, as well as incorporating input from digital rights experts, Mashable is pleased to unveil its first-ever Digital Bill of Rights, made for the Internet, by the Internet.
via Explore Mashable’s Crowdsourced Digital Bill of Rights.
4 Dazzling Stargazing Maps | Mashable.
The 4 stargazing maps discussed:
The World’s Biggest Data Breaches in One Stunning Visualization | Mashable.
See the entire data visualization at Information is Beautiful.
A young man pours his heart and soul into an add-on for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim that adds dozens of hours of new gameplay, quests, and more — for free.
via 19-year-old creates incredible Skyrim expansion | Crave – CNET.
Amazing creativity. An example of what can be produced through access to open data, in this case the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim SDK (software development kit or creation kit). The 19 year old creator of the Falskaar add-on, Alexander J. Velicky, is hoping to get a job with Bethesda Game Studios.
Related: The Elder Scrolls Online
You may also like:
With the recent reveal that the NSA has been monitoring Americans’ email “meta-data,” the term has suddenly transformed from an obscure, techy vocabulary word into something on the tip of the average cable-news watcher’s tongue. Email meta-data is, of course, information about an email (like who sent it and when it was sent) as opposed to the content of the email itself. But if it isn’t clear what that means exactly, a recent visualization project by researchers at the MIT Media Lab called Immersion provides “a people-centric view of your email life” by providing an interactive tool to dive into your own meta-data.
immersion: a people-centric view of your email life. You will need to login via a Gmail account. You can also check out the demo.
Immersion will only display interactions between your personal contacts in a visualization map. It will not actually display more specific metadata than this.
However you choose to approach content in your web work, the lowly lorem ipsum text has certainly inspired a myriad of similar versions. In this post, we cover the most unique and humorous lorem ipsum text generators available, with a preview of each included.
via 56 Unique Lorem Ipsum Generators | Mashable.
Fun just to see all the unique options. My favourites:
How about using auto-generated text that will actually make people love your project even more? With Cupcake Ipsum, you can create a sweet, sugar-coated paragraph of text:
“Cupcake ipsum dolor sit. Amet I love liquorice jujubes pudding croissant I love pudding. Apple pie macaroon toffee jujubes pie tart cookie applicake caramels. Halvah macaroon I love lollipop. Wypas I love pudding brownie cheesecake tart jelly-o. Bear claw cookie chocolate bar jujubes toffee.”
17. Yorkshire Ipsum and Sagan Ipsum.
This is the perfect lorem ipsum generator for Yorkshire folks, and you can even fork and contribute to it on GitHub:
“Ee by gum. Nobbut a lad. Tha daft apeth. Nobbut a lad nobbut a lad mardy bum any rooad by ‘eck. Tell thi summat for nowt soft southern pansy. Where’s tha bin ah’ll gi’ thi summat to rooer abaht tell thi summat for nowt aye. Soft lad t’foot o’ our stairs. Big girl’s blouse will ‘e ‘eckerslike nah then is that thine ne’ermind wacken thi sen up.”
Inspired by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, Sagan Ipsum is a space and cosmos-related dummy text generator:
“Apollonius of Perga extraplanetary. Tingling of the spine. Orion’s sword, rich in heavy atoms cosmic ocean astonishment encyclopaedia galactica tesseract two ghostly white figures in coveralls and helmets are soflty dancing, rich in heavy atoms the only home we’ve ever known how far away.”
Metadata in twitter posts lets readers in on your geographic location, the language you speak, the phone you use, and more. They’re also a mapmaker’s best friend.
Quotable: “A second visualization shows language use on Twitter. Metadata from Twitter messages also tells the language the tweet was sent in. In the United Kingdom, most tweets are in English…except in London, where a cacophony of foreign-language tweets dominate the visualization.”
ResearchGate announced that it has closed a $35 million round of series C financing from Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Tenaya Capital, with participation from Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital. This hefty third-round of financing follows its series A and B rounds raised in 2010 and 2012, respectively. Short-term returns may not be part of the equation for ResearchGate’s investors, but Bill Gates, for one, hasn’t been shy about placing big bets on potentially high-impact education, energy and health-related technologies, even if those are long-term — or long shot — investments.
ResearchGate has endeavored to give researchers a platform where they can not only upload the journals they’ve been published in, but share raw data as well — along with experiments that failed or succeeded — in an effort to make that knowledge accessible in a broader context.
For the full article see: Bill Gates, Benchmark And More Pour $35M Into ResearchGate, The Social Network For Scientists | TechCrunch.
See also: Bill Gates Backs “Open Science” Social Network ResearchGate In Push For Nobel Prize | ReadWrite
A unique pilot program to research book discovery and generate data on libraries supporting authors.
Sourcebooks and OverDrive are partnering on a pilot program that will allow library patrons worldwide the opportunity to read New York Times bestselling author Michael Malone’s acclaimed novel “The Four Corners of the Sky” in ebook format. The Big Library Read is a no cost program in which libraries worldwide promote from their lending catalog a single ebook to their patrons. In addition to creating a global “library book club,” it’s designed to generate data about the positive exposure and sales influence library ebook catalogs provide to authors and publishers. See the full article at Library eBooks: The Role of Libraries in the Book Discovery Process | Sourcebooks.com.
You may also like:
OverDrive and Sourcebooks to Launch Ambitious Ebook Data Experiment | The Digital Shift
Google Framed As Book Stealer Bent On Data Domination In New Documentary | TechCrunch
Quotable: “From the second it starts, director Ben Lewis’ opinion is clear: Google Books is as an insidious plot for data domination. See, Google didn’t just want to make a universally accessible library. It wanted to use all the knowledge to improve its search and artificial intelligence projects.”
infophile 