I’ll be offline until about May 10.  In the meantime, um, keep it generative!  …JZ

Government transparency through technology. U.S. federal government agencies published their open government plans online this week.  The plans detail long-term strategies for addressing one of the three identified principles of open government—transparency, civic participation, and government collaboration with public and private sectors.  They can be accessed by appending “/open” to the department website address.  The […]

On April 3, an Adobe technical project manager demonstrated that Adobe’s new Air software could be used to develop across platforms—he created a Reversi game app that runs on Android, iPhone, iPad, Windows 7, Ubuntu, and OS X (see potential caveats in comments here). Cool! As JZ said, via email, “if this is really possible, […]

A coalition of prominent netizens and watchdogs released its wishlist this week for Digital Due Process.  Google, Microsoft, AT&T, the ACLU, and EFF, among others, are advocating for an update of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act.  The statute, which includes the current regulations government agencies follow to access an individual’s electronic data and communications, […]

Internet Telephony Comes to the iPhone. Apple has approved an app intended to provide a virtual second line for business that allows consumers to make calls using Wi-Fi when available instead of AT&T’s cellular network.  The Line2 app may allow iPhone users to downgrade their AT&T cell plans, though contracts and lack of universal Wi-Fi […]

The NY Times recently published two stories on opposite sides of the ubicomp — distributed human computing — spectrum. On the one hand, there’s the tale of the “human-flesh search engines” in China. The term was apparently meant to refer to the fact that humans are the searchers, but it increasingly means that humans are […]