Understanding Buzz for Your Business

Google’s Tuesday release of Buzz, a new social networking component to its ever-growing suite of web tools, has kept the internet busy with debate over how Buzz will compete with major social network players Twitter and Facebook for users’ correspondence with friends and contacts.

While central discussion surrounds speculation over whether Buzz’s privacy flaws will scare away users or the new product ...

The Who Rocks Facebook with Name That Riff

I’m not a big fan of the majority of available widgets, apps, and games that bombard Facebook.  Most are garbage in my opinion, and do nothing other than clutter your profile or page.

The problem is many of these widgets were built with the old school marketing mentality of “if we build it,...

Crisis Commons: Crowdsourcing Information Solutions for the Crisis in Haiti

In response to the devastating aftermath of the twin earthquakes (on January 12 and then on January 20) in Haiti, Crisis Commons has come to serve as a key forum for the coordination of professional volunteers in the development of rapid solutions to the diverse array of information-based challenges facing the aid effort....

Why Wikipedia has Accurate Health Information

Back in January 2009 I started the Master of Information Management program at the University of Maryland, and last semester I took a class on Consumer Health Informatics and another one on Social Computing.  With the permission of both professors, I wrote different versions of a paper for each class about how Wikipedia has maintained accurate health information,...

The New York Times Maps Metropolitan Culture via Netflix

Through a very elegant blend of rental data from Netflix and Google Maps, the New York Times continues to improve on the infographic with a very interesting interactive feature called "A Peek Into Netflix Queues", which it published on January 10.

The Netflix maps drew me in for about 30 minutes,...