Your Dwindling Privacy

Your phone records are for sale
“The Chicago Police Department is warning officers their cell phone records are available to anyone – for a price. Dozens of online services are selling lists of cell phone calls, raising security concerns among law enforcement and privacy experts.”

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists
Although this raises some serious privacy concerns, what I found more interesting about this article was how relatively easy it is now to take data from all kinds of publicly available sources and use them to produce something like a map showing the locations of all the readers (or in this case, desire-ers) of a particular book.

(Both of these links via Bruce Schneier’s Blog.)

Business Blogging

Chris Anderson of Wired / The Long Tail has started a wiki page to track public blogs by Fortune 500 companies. The list isn’t terribly long yet, but I’m sure it will be growing, both as more people discover existing company blogs and as more companies jump on the bandwagon.

Speaking of which, we’ve jumped on the bandwagon ourselves at Triporama. The Triporama Blog isn’t yet linked in from the main site (it will be soon), but Wendell has already posted a great piece about the origins of Triporama.

Happy New Year!

New Photos

Bunch of new photos on up on Flickr, btw.


Triporama Launches

I’ve been pretty busy lately, if the infrequency of my posts is any indicator, but it’s paid off: Triporama officially launched yesterday. We sent out some 300 emails and then immediately left to go to the bar. Fortunately, the site held up, with only one serious bug so far, which I fixed last night.

Not that I can slack off now…we’ve got a mile-long list of features we’d like to implement. It’s great to finally get it out there, though.

Interesting Links

This:

Top 10 Innovative Web 2.0 Applications of 2005

led me to this:

TagCloud

which let me to this:

Term Extraction Documentation for Yahoo! Search Web Services

Now to just figure out some cool things to do with it.