in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
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Paraphrased for a new century and an old industry:
“To seek the timeless way we first must know the quality without a number. There is a central quality which is the rooted criterion of life and the spirit of man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be numbered.”
Snippet from a course announcement for a winter 2007 class to be taught by Don Blumenthal at the U-M School of Information:
This course will examine: 1) privacy issues related to the safeguarding of sensitive information against inadvertent disclosure; 2) policy and societal questions concerning the value of security and privacy regulations, the real world effects of data breaches on individuals and businesses, and the balancing of interests among individuals, government, and enterprises; 3) current and proposed laws and regulations that govern data security and privacy; 4) self-help and private sector regulatory efforts; 5) emerging technologies that may affect security and privacy concerns; and 6) issues related to the development of enterprise data security processes and programs that take into account the requirements of all relevant constituencies: e.g., technical, business, and legal.
Here’s the course catalog page for Data Security and Privacy: Legal, Policy and Enterprise Issues. I met Don at a2b3 lunch some time ago. This looks like a great topic and a relevant offering, since — when I was on an outbound trajectory from the department, at least — so much of the dork curriculum actually resulted in half-baked SQL-injectable junk and so forth.
I finally gave up on Plazes — after two years, after they totally broke it (by, in one majestic batshit swoop, redesigning the site and discontinuing the API and junking up the desktop client), and after everybody else in the local nova mob stopped using it.
But: there’s some slightly unknown collective action that Plazes didn’t enable — and neither yet has anything else. All those little timeslices of Plazes-attention over all those months got me: a sense of space, weird trivia about University buildings, and a few happy excuses to meet a new person in an airport ✈ or cafe ♨.
Here are my notes about Plazes from 26 months ago.
At this writing, there are 11 Placeshout microneogeographers in Ann Arbor who’ve written 5 or more shoutouts. The top 5 cities on the site are (1) Ann Arbor, (2) San Francisco, (3) Detroit, (4) Ypsilanti, and (5) Atlanta. 35 cities in Michigan have at least one place mentioned.
There’s a Placeshout Facebook group.
New feature: RSS feeds per location, e.g. Ann Arbor geoRSS.
Late last week, Catherine twitterinvited folks to bulk up Ann Arbor on Placeshout. Three days later, Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti are the first and third most “shouted” cities, with San Francisco coming in second. This reminds me of the early, happy days of upcoming.org, when Ann Arbor was one of the locations with the most user and event churn.
So what the hell is Placeshout? Take a look. For context, see Ed’s notes on the KARB/KYIP Placeshout event. Here’s all of my activity on the site.
It’s too bad there’s no API, and no feeds. You can search and Google Maps browse and so forth right on the site, so there’s no pressing need, beyond the standard desire to pipe Placeshout white noise into various filters. Or grab a KML. Or update Placeshout from Twitter (I can only assume that’s what the additional 40 characters in twitterspace are for).
I do like how you aren’t expected to make friends with everybody. It’s enough, at least for now, to see a username you know and think O HAI and just move on with the pressing business of downrating inappropriately positive reviews of Ann Arbor’s crappier brewpubs.
Back from a presentation for SEM Group at SPARK; here’s the linkdump.
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
Important to remember in this Facebook Moment. del.icio.us/tag/freedom0.
