Google’s Open Spot Android app lets people leaving parking spots share the information with others searching for parking nearby. Running the app shows you parking spots within a 1.5km. New parking spots are assumed to be gone after 20 minutes and removed from the system.

People who announce open spots gain karma points, while those who report false spots, known as griefers, are on notice:

“We’re watching for behavior that looks like a griefer spoofing parking spots. We have a couple of mechanisms available to make sure someone can’t leave a bunch of fake parking spots. If we see this happening we will take steps to fix it.

This is a simple example of a context-aware mobile app that can further benefit from also knowing that you are driving, as opposed to riding, in your car and likely to want to find a parking spot, as opposed to doing 70mph on I-95 as it goes through Baltimore. Moreover, context would also inform that app that you are probably leaving a public parking spot and mark it automatically. However, such a feature should be smart enough to avoid being tagged by Google as a griefer and finding out what punishment Google has in store for you.

Wikipedia was offline for nearly twelve hours today, starting about 11:00am EDT. According to Wikipedia’s Twitter feed:

“Thanks for being patient, everyone. We’ve figured out the problem: power outage in our Florida data center. Slowly coming back online!”

This is not the first time that Wikimedia has experienced problems cause by power outages. In March 2010, Wikipedia was also knocked offline globally:

“Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries. However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects.”

According to a story in itnews

“The cluster is hosted in a co-location facility in Tampa, Florida, which has approximately 300 servers, a 350 Mbps connection, and supports up to 3,000 hits per second, or 150 million hits per day. Two other server clusters – knams in Amsterdam, Netherlands and yaseo, provided by Yahoo! in Seoul, South Korea – also provide hosting and bandwidth to serve users in various regions.

It looks like there are still failover problems. We can watch the WIkimedia Technical blog for more information.

Semantic Overflow is great largely because it benefits from the good design and implementation of the StackExchange framework. Could our site be be improved with Semantic Web technology, i.e., by eating our own dog food?

It’s not just an academic question. Recently the community QA site Training Examples got quite a bit of visibility as a site

“Where data geeks ask and answer questions on machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, text analysis, information retrieval, search, data mining, statistical modeling, and data visualization!”

If you visit the site you will see that it closely follows the Stack Overflow design, complete with tags, reputation, badges, etc. It uses QSQA, which is free software licensed under GPL and implemented in Python using Django. Site creator Joseph Turian has mentioned a a desire to improve the site by applying machine learning and language processing techniques to its content.

So, how could Semantic Web technology be used to improve our own Q&A site? Add your suggestions here.

Training Examples QA is a site created by Joseph Turian where “data geeks ask and answer questions on machine learning, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, text analysis, information retrieval, search, data mining, statistical modeling, and data visualization!”

It’s a close knock off of the popular stack overflow site and appears to be very well done.

If it catches on in the relevant research communities, it could be a very useful resource. (via LingPipe blog)

Semantic Overflow is a great way for the Semantic Web community to help one another with questions, problems and education. It was started in November 2009 using the Stack Overflow framework hosted by Stackexchange.

It’s still building, with 261 questions submitted and just over 450 registered users, about a third of which have enough reputation to vote. Here’s an example: Ian Davis of Talis asked What is a good elevator pitch for Linked Data? and got 17 answers.

Like the parent stack overflow system, semantic overflow is a blend of a forum, wiki and recommendation site. It lets user ask, tag and answer questions, but also allows those with a sufficient reputation score to vote on and even edit both the questions and community submitted answers.

The tradition way of asking technical questions of a community is the mailing list or a Web based forum. The stack overflow model offers many advantages, so I hope this site continues gain traction.

If you want to monitor the site for new questions, you’ll find the feed of the 30 most recently submitted questions useful.

Infochips now offers a query API for two interesting datasets: a Twitter collection and US Census data.

The Twitter data covers 500M tweets from 35M users collected between March 2006 and November 2009. The API currently included the following services.

• Trstrank – a trust metric for Twitter users based on network centrality (see trst.me:
  

  http://api.infochimps.com/soc/net/tw/trstrank.json?screen_name=SarahPalinUSA

• Wordbag – returns the 100 tokens (i.e., words) that a particular Twitter user tweets more often than the average Twitter user.
  

  http://api.infochimps.com/soc/net/tw/wordbag.json?screen_name=ladygaga

• Influencer metrics – replies in/out and retweets in/out for a given user
  

  http://api.infochimps.com/soc/net/tw/influence.json?screen_name=algore

• Conversations – find interactions between two users. Currently this just yields direct messages but will include retweets and mentions later. For example, check out conversations between Lady Gaga and Sarah Palin:
  

  http://api.infochimps.com/soc/net/tw/conversation.json?user_a_id=14230524&user_b_id=65493023

Pricing varies with use and ranges from Baboon” (free for 100K calls/month) to “Golden Ape” ($4000/month for 15M call/month).

Digital Capital Week (DCWEEK) is a 10 day festival running from June 11 to 20 in Washington DC focused on technology, innovation and all things digital — social media, games, policy, multi-media, activism, new media, mobile computing, animation, etc.

DCWEEK is expected to involve more than 4,000 people — artists, technologists, entrepreneurs, communicators, govies, and citizens. They will come together to participate in over 100 distributed events produced and hosted by individuals, organizations and community groups. Most of the events are free or charge a nominal cost, but pre-registration may be required.

At DCWEEK you can:

• learn from others through sessions, keynotes, workshops and panels
• meet new friends, clients, partners, investors and collaborators
• focus on the issues in DC that can be addressed in new ways
• come together to support innovative businesses, people and ideas
• work on projects that benefit the city and the world
• experiment with what’s possible
• have fun at some great parties

See the DCWEEK site for registration, schedule and details.

Baltimoreans are lucky to have access to the new droid-based HTC EVO and Sprint’s 4G service. 3-6 Mbps to your phone! Hiawatha Bray writes avout it in a story in yesterday’s Boston Globe, 4G phone will quickly change things:

“It’s called the EVO 4G, and it’s our first glimpse at the next big thing in smartphones. When cellular carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. begins selling the EVO on June 4, it will be America’s first 4G cellphone, capable of far greater speed than the 3G iPhones and BlackBerries we have come to love.

But why fly 360 miles to check it out? Because Boston doesn’t have a working 4G network yet. Baltimore is one of about two dozen US cities where you can find one. Sprint says it’s building more 4G coverage as fast as it can; Boston is on the list for sometime this year.”

Google publishes a list of the 1000 most popular Web sites based on unique visitors to the top-level domain. The list is compiled by their (DoubleClick) Ad Planner group and shows estimates for the monthly number of unique visitors and pageviews. Not surprisingly, Facebook tops the list with 540M visitors and 570B page views per month.

Each site is categorized (e.g., as social network, web portal, search engine, etc) though some of these are surely wrong — e.g., #985, dropbox.com, is listed as “Myth & Folklore”. They say that the list excludes “adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites.”

If you want to play with the data, a Karl Seguin has downloaded the data, added some additional attributes, and made it available in json. That would make it easy to run your own analysis on them — category distribution, country distribution, average load time, etc.

Google’s Crisis Response team has a landing page for the Gulf oil spill featuring overlays for Google Maps/Earth. This joins their pages for other recent natural disasters, such as the earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China. Some support ‘crowsourcing’ by allowing people to upload information, data and queries.

Google Crisis Response page for the 2010 Gulf oil spill

“Working with the input of subject matter experts and in conjunction with like-minded organizations and the development community at large, Google Crisis Response facilitates the development and refinement of crisis response technology—with the ultimate goal of helping victims help themselves and helping first responders/relief agencies/governments/citizens help victims.

When a major disaster strikes, the Google Crisis Response team collects fresh high-resolution imagery plus other event-specific data, then publishes this information on a dedicated landing page.

Google Crisis Response Mission

To develop, maintain, and optimize a worldwide, rapid-deployment protocol to speed the dissemination of situational information and increase the efficacy of rescue and humanitarian aid activities in response to quick-onset disasters.

Google Crisis Response will:

• Coordinate with other platforms, organizations and teams
• Build tools to surface near-real-time data
• Support response/relief organizations
• Respond in times of crisis

There doesn’t seem to be a list of these pages online, but here are a few:

• Typhoon Ondoy
• Chile earthquake
• Haiti earthquake
• Qinghai, China
• Gulf oil spill

Kaggle is a site for data-related competitions in machine learning, statistics and econometrics. Companies, researchers, government and other organizations will be able to post their modeling problems and invite researchers to compete to produce the best solutions. The Kaggle demo site currently has three example competitions to illustrate how it will work and expects to host the first real one in March. Kaggle’s competition hosting service will be free, but the site says that it plans to “offer paid-for services in addition to its free competition hosting.”

Via Marc Olano: The Global Game Jam is into its second day at UMBC with 41 registered participants working on seven games. Keep up from home with our live video feed and games list.