Three things really stand out about the current Iranian conflict. 1. User generated content is easily able to slip through any blocks that the government puts in place over traditional media. Journalists were locked in hotels in the dark, while a protester sitting on a balcony can snap pictures and post on Flickr/YouTube/Twitter/Blogs. 2. Instead of new media sources being used to highlight...
Background: The DC government is exposing an API for their 311 call center, to allow application developers to build open source tools to make it easier for citizens to submit issues. As part of it, they and iStrategyLabs have launched a second Apps for Democracy contest. The creative juices are flowing, and I have a few ideas I plan on implementing. But first things first… in order to make...
Last weekend, a few dozen developers gathered together at Viget’s beautiful offices in Reston to… talk nerdy. Out of all the conferences I’ve been to, it was one of the best. It was directly honed on developers, and all talks were targeted as such. That meant no talks about marketing, gov 2.0, branding, public relations, blogging, twitter, or anything else social media/PR, etc...
Wait — what? Every PHP Web Developer, or any other kind of web developer, has, at one point, butted heads with ImageMagick, or its inferior nemesis, GD. We’ve tussled with setup and installation, debugged scripts, and stolen code, but rarely do we look to it for anything beyond generating a thumbnail or resizing an image. Armed with nothing more than the native manual, I started...