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Government is increasingly putting much of its public records online, creating opportunities for developers to build useful applications for citizens. From being alerted to neighborhood crime to finding the best mass transit routes, these mashups are helping solve everyday problems. Recently, the Washington DC government launched the Apps for Democracy contest to encourage developers to build applications using its data. Today, the winners were announced, and below, we take a closer look at 17 of them.

Government is increasingly putting much of its public records online, creating opportunities for developers to build useful applications for citizens. From being alerted to neighborhood crime to finding the best mass transit routes, these mashups are help

Google Calendar in a nice overlay so that your calendar can be updated without ever leaving the web page.

presentation on Personal Learning Environments from conference on Scaffolding Learning - Web 2.0 and e-Portfolios at the University of South Denmark, May 2007

presentation on Personal Learning Environments from conference on Scaffolding Learning - Web 2.0 and e-Portfolios at the University of South Denmark, May 2007

This is the PLE project at Bolton University, working towards defining the tools for personal learning. The project is being funded by JISC and carried out by CETIS

As preparation for a workshop I am giving this fall I thought it would be interesting to collect together all the diagrams of PLEs I could find, as a compare and contrast sort of exercise.

The consumer application needs to be so cool and so viral that people will be open to learning that it is powered by semantic technologies. In that case, it will be possible to further market applications as Semantic Web apps. Consumers will understand that if one Semantic Web application has potential, so might others. In math, this is called proof by induction. In marketing this is called creating a market. In any case, it needs to be done. In this post, we analyze several existing and potential applications of semantic technologies and look for the killer app.

The Semantic Web is the extension of the World Wide Web that enables people to share content beyond the boundaries of applications and websites. It has been described in rather different ways: as a utopic vision, as a web of data, or merely as a natural paradigm shift in our daily use of the Web. Most of all, the Semantic Web has inspired and engaged many people to create innovative semantic technologies and applications. semanticweb.org is the common platform for this community.

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users

The next stage is an object that does not exist yet. It needs a noun, so that we can think about it. We can call it a "Spime," which is a neologism for an imaginary object that is still speculative. A Spime also has a kind of person who makes it and uses it, and that kind of person is somebody called a "Wrangler." At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

Ordinary items are being embedded with rudimentary communications and tied to databases. The information associated with these items is becoming ever richer, more up-to-date, and more reflective of conditions on the ground. Moreover, it's increasingly available to anyone with a Net connection. Unlike the smart objects imagined by futurists for decades, things to come will be refreshingly dumb, but they'll make their users smarter.

And with INQ1 you can have Facebook© on your mobile like never before. You get Facebook© alerts direct to your mobile. Status updates straight to your contacts and loads more. Want to see who's on Skype, Facebook or Windows Live™ Messenger anytime so you can keep up with your mates? With INQ1 all the info is pulled and loaded straight into your contacts. Just like that. It's easy to move between your favourite web sites and applications. The INQ1 switcher and carousel lets you do it with one simple touch of the button by whizzing through them all as they sit at the bottom of your screen.

Tap Tap Revenge is a music game in the tradition of Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution that puts your rhythmic skills to the test in all-new ways. Tap through the beats or shake left and right as the arrows fall. Download exclusive tracks or take on your friends in Tap Tap Revenge's unique head-to-head two-player mode.

Tap Tap Revenge is a music game in the tradition of Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution that puts your rhythmic skills to the test in all-new ways. Tap through the beats or shake left and right as the arrows fall. Download exclusive tracks or take on yo

Pictures of Numbers is a book-project-in-progress, consisting of practical tips and techniques for busy researchers on improving their data presentation, and is updated in intermittent bursts of regularity (one soon to come, so check back) by Mike Dickison.

Multi-touch and general touchscreen tech is the new tech Wild West, it seems, and like the Lotto, many will enter, only a few will win. Still, competition in this area is essential for innovation; every lackluster touchscreen phone that comes out gets immediately buried because the iPhone had already taken it to the next level. Same with the Surface, but that doesn’t mean either of those products are guaranteed against usurpation.

Multi-touch and general touchscreen tech is the new tech Wild West, it seems, and like the Lotto, many will enter, only a few will win. Still, competition in this area is essential for innovation; every lackluster touchscreen phone that comes out gets imm

This paper discusses in an informal and non-rigorous way some of the reasons why tertiary teachers may not share their resources. It starts with a provocative statement that the author hopes will cause conference participants to react. Participants are invited to vote to register their position and through the use of a web page annotation system, participants will be able to add their comments and opinions to an interactive version of the paper.

We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems

We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional systems

As opposition grows against the Government's controversial plan to censor the internet, the head of one of Australia's largest ISPs has labelled the Communications Minister the worst we've had in the past 15 years. Despite significant opposition from internet providers, consumers, engineers, network administrators and online rights activists, the Government is pressing ahead with its election promise of protecting people from unwanted material, this week calling for expressions of interests from ISPs keen to participate in live trials of the proposed internet filtering system.

It's all about getting users signed into your website as quickly and efficiently as possible. It achieves this by providing a simple, consistent, provider neutral interface, and by educating the user about OpenID during the sign in process. In short, it makes OpenID easier for the end user and benefits both the relying parties and OpenID providers. It's a widget that you add to the existing OpenID login form on your website. You embed a snippet of javascript code into your page, and it writes in an HTML button tag styled to match your CSS.

In a typical year, Louis Armstrong spent more than three hundred days on the road, bringing his music to audiences around the world. He always traveled with a steamer trunk designed to house two reel-to-reel tape decks and a turntable, and he carried a stash of music for his own listening pleasure, to while away the hours he spent in hotels and dressing rooms before and after each gig. Tapes being less fragile than LPs, and possessing longer recording capacity, he ultimately transferred much of his collection to seven-inch reels. He also made mix tapes of his favorite tunes. When not pressing the valves on his trumpet or the record button on his tape recorder, Armstrong’s fingers found other arts with which to occupy themselves. One of them was collage, which became a visual outlet for his improvisational genius.

Art that has been produced as a result of using the Nintendo Wii.

Art that has been produced as a result of using the Nintendo Wii.

A new low cost cellphone that puts Facebook and other social applications at its center will debut next week on Hutchinson-owned 3 in the UK and Australia, according to Unstrung. The new handset has been designed by another Hutchinson subsidiary, INQ Mobile, and is the first of a number of “low cost social mobile” offerings in the pipeline. Apart from a dedicated Facebook client the device will also include applications for Skype, email and IM.

A new low cost cellphone that puts Facebook and other social applications at its center will debut next week on Hutchinson-owned 3 in the UK and Australia, according to Unstrung. The new handset has been designed by another Hutchinson subsidiary, INQ Mobi

it should be no surprise that mobile versions of Facebook are proving popular. Not when you take into account that Facebook offers two browser-based mobile versions of the site — one for low-end feature phones and another for ’smart phones’ — as well as native Facebook clients for Blackberry, Palm and iPhone. Notably, the Palm version runs on the smartphone maker’s entry level consumer offering, the popular and affordable Centro.