Twitter turned on its API for geotagging tweets yesterday, as announce in in a post on their blog, Think Globally, Tweet Locally. Currently, geographic information will only be associated with your tweets if you use an application that adds it and will only be used to display your tweets when viewed with an application that can exploit it. Here’s the way Twitter described it.

“This release is unique in that it’s API-only which means you won’t see any changes on twitter.com, yet. Instead, Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality (go try them out now!) in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted.”

Examining Twitter’s status update API description shows how one associates a location with a Tweet. Pretty simple.

Since disclosing your location raises privacy concerns, Twitter has made geotagging an opt-in service and also allows users to delete all of the location information associated with their tweets. Moreover, their policy, as described here, says

“We require application developers to be upfront and obvious about when they are Geotagging an update. If you ever find that an application is doing it without notifying you, please let us know.”

Twitter has updated its privacy policy to cover location information.

You can read more on ReadWriteWeb and Techcrunch.

Wikipedia has an interesting RFC on approaches to achieve and maintain better coherence in its infobox templates. This is significant because Wikipedia is becoming the new CYC — a broad, practical KB filled with general purpose background knowledge. The RFC was kicked off by discussions on dbpedia template annotations. The RFC defines the problem as:

“Wikipedia uses hundreds of infobox templates for describing various entity types like NFL teams, schools in Canada, train stations etc. These infoboxes are separated and do not use a common vocabulary. Several different spellings of attributes are used for them, which all stand for the same meaning (e.g. birth_place, birthPlace, origin). This poses limitations to checking consistency within Wikipedia infoboxes, amongst different language editions, and it makes it hard for external tools to reuse the information in infoboxes.”

The goals mentioned in the RFC include (1) establishing the currently missing links between synonymous template attributes, (2) enabling authors to use template annotations to check for for factual inconsistencies (e.g., outdated population figures), and (3) providing consensus about which properties should be used in templates and what data they should contain.

This ought to be fun.

According to an article in the WSJ, Europe Approves New Cookie Law, “the Council of the European Union has approved new legislation that would require Web users to consent to Internet cookies..”

The law could have broad repercussions for online ads. “Almost every site that carries advertising should be seeking its visitors’ consent to the serving of cookies,” wrote Struan Robertson, a lawyer specializing in technology at Pinsent Masons and editor of Out-Law.com. “It also catches sites that count visitors — so if your site uses Google Analytics or WebTrends, you’re caught.”

This hit slashdot (“Breathtakingly Stupid” EU Cookie Law Passes) this morning.

By the way, our ebiquity site uses cookies. Send mail to no-more-ebiquity-cookies at cs.umbc.edu if you want to opt out.

Hmmmm. I wonder how we would implement cookie opt-out. I think setting a cookie to indicate that the user has opted out of your site’s cookies would be a good approach.

Around here we prefer range voting to approval voting or IRV.

The Journal of Web Semantics now has a facebook page and a Twitter account to augment its blog. All three will be used for news and announcements of call for papers, special issues, availability of new papers, etc. As you might expect, the tweets will be terse items, the facebook updates longer notes and the blog posts full of details. Those who are interested can follow @journalWebSem on Twitter, become a fan of the JWS on facebook, and subscribe to the blog’s feed.

Google added a great new service, Dashboard, that summarizes data stored for a Google account — see MY ACCOUNT>PERSONAL SETTINGS>DASHBOARD.

“Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard.”

This is a good move on Google’s part. But while there’s a lot of information included, it’s not everything that Google knows about you — e.g., data in cookies, click throughs data from search results and information from companies it’s acquired, like Doublclick. Still, it is a big step in a positive direction.

Yesterday was the first time a truly voter verifiable voting system was used in any binding government election, thanks in part to work being carried out at UMBC’s Cyber Defense Lab under the direction of Alan Sherman.

Takoma Park, MD used the Scantegrity system for its municipal election after testing it in a mock election last April. Technology Review has a story, First Test for Election Cryptography, that quotes Anne Sergeant, the chair of the Takoma Park board of elections

“Before trying Scantegrity in an official election, the city held a mock vote in April to work out kinks in the system. In that test, she says, about 30 percent of participants went home and used the system to verify their votes. Sergeant says that Scantegrity representatives talked extensively with voters and election officials after the April test and have improved their system accordingly. “I hope we can provide an experience where people walk away and say, ‘That was awesome,’” she says. “It’s a goal to which we aspire.”

The Scantegrity system was created by a group of universities, including UMBC. A voter uses a paper ballot marked with invisible ink, which is exposed with a special marker. That marker reveals a code, which the voter can then use to check online whether their vote was tabulated correctly.

Ben Adida has been auditing the election and documenting the process on his blog.

See also the ComputerWorld story, E-voting system lets voters verify their ballots are counted, and audio report on WAMU.

DARPA will hold the DARPA Network Challenge to explore how “broad-scope problems can be solved using Internet-based technologies.

“To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.”

According to the rules, the balloons will be on display from 10:00AM to 4:00PM on Saturday, 5 December 2009. A prize of $40,000 will be awarded to the first participant to submit the latitude and longitude of all ten weather balloons within the contest period, which ends on 14 December 2009.

Golden Balls is a UK game show with a final round, Split or Steal, that is similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. The two contestants have to simultaneously choose to split the prize or try to steal it. If both choose split, they each get half. If one chooses split and the other steal, than the stealer gets it all. If they both choose steal, neither gets anything. While the payoff matrix is not exactly that for the PD, it has a similar effect on the strategy. Check out this video of a Split or Steal round for £100,000. (Spotted on Hacker News)

In the Fall of 2007, two MIT students carried out a class project exploring how presumably private data could be inferred from an online social networking system. Their experiment was to predict the sexual orientation of Facebook users who make their basic information public by analyzing friendship associations. As reported in the Boston Globe last month, the students’ had not yet published their results.

Well, now they have — in the October issue of the First Monday, “one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet”.

Carter Jernigan and Behram F.T. Mistree, Gaydar: Facebook friendships expose sexual orientation, First Monday, v14, n10, October 2009.

The paper has a lot of detail on the methodology for collecting the data and how it was analyzed. Here’s the abstract.

“Public information about one’s coworkers, friends, family, and acquaintances, as well as one’s associations with them, implicitly reveals private information. Social networking Web sites, e–mail, instant messaging, telephone, and VoIP are all technologies steeped in network data — data relating one person to another. Network data shifts the locus of information control away from individuals, as the individual’s traditional and absolute discretion is replaced by that of his social network. Our research demonstrates a method for accurately predicting the sexual orientation of Facebook users by analyzing friendship associations. After analyzing 4,080 Facebook profiles from the MIT network, we determined that the percentage of a given user’s friends who self–identify as gay male is strongly correlated with the sexual orientation of that user, and we developed a logistic regression classifier with strong predictive power. Although we studied Facebook friendship ties, network data is pervasive in the broader context of computer–mediated communication, raising significant privacy issues for communication technologies to which there are no neat solutions.”

As we had previously noted, this datamining exercise only accesses information that Facebook users explicitly choose to make public. The authors note that their analysis “relies on public self–identification of same–gender interest in Facebook profiles as a sentinel value for LGB identity”. The privacy vulnerability is that the default setting for a Facebook account is that friendship relations are public and you can not control the privacy settings of your friends. So if your leave your friend list public and many of your Facebook friends open up their profiles, it may be possible to draw reasonable inferences about your age, gender, political leanings, sexual preferences and other attributes.

In next week’s ebiquity meeting (10:15 EDT Tue 10/6), Lance Byrd and Set Cruz will talk about Blackbook, a graph analytic processing platform for semantic web data.

Blackbook3 is an RDF middleware framework for integrating data and executing algorithms that relies on open standards and “best-of-breed” open source technologies, including Jena, Lucene, JAAS, D2RQ, Hadoop, HBase and Solr. Blackbook3 has a plug-and-play, loosely–coupled architecture, supports SOAP and REST interfaces, offers SPARQL and linked data endpoints and can run in environments where high confidentiality is required.

The talk will discuss the current and future use cases for Blackbook3 as well as broader knowledge discovery and dissemination issues for RDF applications. You can participate remotely via dimdim starting at 10:15 EDT October 6.

David Easley and Jon Kleinberg have made available a free pre-publication draft of a new book, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. The book is based on an inter-disciplinary undergraduate course, Networks, that they teach at Cornell.

They say about their book

“Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex “connectedness” of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.
    Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.”

Download the 828-page (!) draft of Networks, Crowds, and Markets in pdf here.