On Data Lock

Since I've had a few nitpicks over my description of Facebook as a closed service, let's talk a bit about open data. This is hugely important in the social media realm and in politics, and I'm passionate about it in both fields. Fortunately, enough other people are at least as passionate about this as I am and have already put in the time to put some clear information on the matter "out there" on "teh intarwebs".

While I would have preferred a more complete checklist of "social media" services, the article Wired posted a few months back entitled What Do We Want? Our Data. When Do We Want It? Now! does a pretty good job of summing up one of the biggest issues with social media sites - some of them let you take your data off the site, while others try to trap you in. The issue is actually a bit more complex in some cases - Flickr's policy, for example, is that only Pro users can use the bulk export tool to download all of their photos at once. For an initial overview, though, Wired's got the bases covered.

The world of open data in government has hit similar snags. Although this was one of the big things in Obama's favor last election (and the other side expressed interest in the topic as well), the current administration is still having trouble getting this right. Sunlight Labs has been tracking the progress on this front, criticizing fairly but lightly in the way that a group lobbying for openness must (Although a volunteer effort and something of a watchdog group, they are still essentially lobbying at some level). One of the biggest issues has been Adobe's lobbying efforts holding sway with many government offices even though Adobe formats aren't truly open. In most cases, a PDF file is more like a picture of a document instead of an actual useful document.

There are, of course, many other issues related to all of these - for government data, we want to be able to write programs that can parse and re-use the data, and with social network data, the ideal would be to make it possible to share between networks and directly download (and/or remove) all data and directly upload large amounts of data on any given site. I have a laundry list of issues with Facebook (expect me to post that here sooner or later - I actually logged on to that site once last week and saw it's as bad as it was two years ago when I previously logged on. Since I do not put any content on there, I will not be adding it to my "Stalk Me!" list on the sidebar here), but data lock seems to be one of the bigger problems and one of the few that most of us can agree on.

(In case you couldn't tell, this is one of a number of older "drafts" I've recently decided to clean up and post. Data lock is an important topic and while this is clearly just a start, I can always revisit this - so here's this much to get things started.)

Interesting Links

Time for a new link dump. Are you enjoying these?

The Internet Archive recently announced a new project called OpenLibrary. It's essentially Wikipedia for books. That's still needed, since LibraryThing lacks a good way of summarizing things for people interested in discovering books in a non-social manner (not that there's anything wrong with using social networking to discover interesting books - if you ask me, LibraryThing is an example of social networking done right because it actually uses the social model to purposefully manage meaningful data).

For April Fool's Day, XKCD decided to change the site's format to a command line interface. In addition to commands that were functional (and a few that just appeared to be), there were also jokes and games. That interface is still available for those of you who missed the joke or want to relive it (more than I can say for YouTube's TEXTp feature by the time I blogged about it at LMOTD). Most of the source code (some last minute changes were made during the day) is available on github. Naturally, the next step would be to build a version of this that can be used with YubNub - then you will have a true command line for the web (I'm not up for coding this myself due to lack of time, but I'm definitely excited about the idea).

YubNub is worth trying out anyway, if you're not familiar with it. The description of it on it's website probably isn't appealing to most, but trust me, it's worth it (I intend to revisit the topic in a future post and describe why I think all LEGO fans should use it - type "ls lego" into it if you want a taste of that).

(Recently Used) Programming Resources

I've been stashing bunches of URLs at work that I've found useful. Some of these I might want to refer to in a non-work context, but they're all based on stuff I've been working with lately (perl, Git, Bash, Cacti, Linux, etc). Nothing too earth-shattering, but very handy. Here's the current list:

Git
Git - SVN Crash Course
Git Cheat Sheet

Perl
Pointers in Perl
Perl Regular Expressions
Perl Tutorial - Arrays
Perl File IO
Yubnub commands: perldoc, cpandoc

Vi (Don't use this often but frequently find myself in there and needto escape):
Vi Cheat Sheet
Simple Guide To VI / VIM

Linux:
The .ssh/known_hosts file
Linux / Unix grep command help
Regular Expressions in grep
Show all running processes

Bash:
How to Write a Shell Script
Bash Self-Extracting Script

Cacti:
Cacti Manual - CLI Scripts
Cacti Documentation