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A sort of cool self-diagnostic on what information third party ad networks are able to  determine about you and your browsing habits, althoughthis is just the public facing view. The real info iswhat they mine inside their data warehouses.

http://whattheyknow.cs.wpi.edu

Memo to self - must-post-more-often..

Saw this provocative Infoweek piece on slashdot about lack of Data portability in the cloud.It reminded me to note here the efforts of the Data Liberation Front,a team of Google engineers committed to making data easy to export from Google. Their stated goal is to keep the company honest by making it easy customers to leave their platform, thereby motivating themselves to compete with the best service rather than relying on the incumbents advantage.Not to sound like a Google fanboy (again), but this is a commendable effort.

Picked up this piece from Infoweek about a new feature for sharing Docs with Google groups. While this might be attractive to me if I was starting to set up Yu  Ying’s googlesphere from scratch, it will be a cumbersome implementation now. I also came across this note about sharing / security concerns with Google Docs, personal edition, and Google’s response.

As we go into our second year we face these fundamental challenges with running Yu Ying as an “all Google Apps” shop:

• Docs is not quite robust enough for a lot of (simple) things teachers need to do.
• Docs sharing across a large or dyunamic group is too tedious, and since tags are not shared, data is not organized the way users that are familiar with a “shared  folders on a file server” paradigm.
• Sites permission settings are not nearly sophisticated enough. Neither granular enough, nor inherited.
• Sites editor is great for the creation and management of a simple site by someone who is moderately tech savvy, but not sophisticated enough of a CMS for a diverse organization with users who just need to post updates, add photos and do a few simple things. As a result the teachers either (a) don’t use it enough, or (b) take way too much artistic license with layout and design, rendering the site very inconsistent in appearance.

We need to move onto the next iteration of school web tools.

So I am adding a new topic / category in my notes - the New News Business. Although my current job is not tied directly to producing or distributing news, and I am not really much of an industry watcher, I am keenly interested in where the news business is going.

My old colleague Ngai Croal posted a link to this interesting piece on the Columbia Journalism Review site about the “Pro Am Journalism Model” by Amanda Michel. Michel recounts her experiences as a principal in the “Off The Bus” project on Huffington Post. It speaks to the strengths (and the challenges) of the CJ model from actual experience.

Vivek Kundra has been named to the position of Federal CIO. As previously noted, I am a big fan of Kundra, based upon his perfomance as CTO of the District of Columbia.

This is a more or less newly created position, not the CTO position that President Obama has promised to create. The job will give Kundra more influence on how the feds execute on IT, and that’s good. Probably not as sexy a job as CTO though. I believe it’s a good move for Obama and the nation, but at the expense of the district. I hope Mayor Fenty pick an equally strong replacement here.

Washington Yu Ying PCS was covered by WTOP in this webcast as well as on the air (I guess).  Following on the heels of a suprisingly not-snarky piece in the City Paper, it feels as though the school is leading a charmed media existance, at least for now..

I got the mayor’s monthly email newsletter and there was an interesting note about the Office of the CTO’s Apps for Democracy project. The city sponsored this contest in which developers utilized the city’s Data Catalog to create mash-ups that would be useful to the residents of the city. There’s some cool stuff here (and a few dogs too). I continue to be impressed by DC CTO Vivek Kundra.

The TWPC IT management team met a few weeks back with Amazon’s Chief Evangelist for Web Services, Jeff Barr. He sketched out their strategy for growing the Amazon cloud business at a very high level. they see themselves as sticking as a pure infrastructure provider for some time, and will leave the delivery of actual application services to their partners / resellers. Because we are generally contracting for services higher in the stack there does not seem to be a lot of opportunity for us to do business directly with them, but it was interesting to see how they’re approaching the market and it just convinced me further that they have got the best grip on the concepts and opportunities. Then today I noticed a NYT posting on something he told us would be coming - Microsoft offerings in the EC2.

I think this is pretty significant turning point for SMB and Enterpise IT alike. If they execute well on this and others follow them into the marketplace there will be huge consolidation in the IT Infrastructure career field. This is potentially a real tipping point for office IT professionals, where most of what they do starts to roll up into a utility model. The big question is security and privacy concerns. Once the utility vendors overcome enterpise concerns in this area, the race will be on to move enterpise apps into the cloud.

I’ve basically been completely swamped by the perfect storm of a major project at work and the “launch” of Yu Ying.  The latter project is off to a fabulous start, the former is, er, troubled at the moment. Thus, no posting for over a month.

We opened the doors of the school the day after Labor Day with about 140 students. The kids were as nervous as one would expect 4 - 6 year olds to be at a new school (or their first school in the case of some of the Pre-kindergarteners). The parents were generally hopeful and have proved pretty supportive and enthusiastic. The faculty and staff have been downright fantastic.

The most interesting technology aspect has been our use of a school portal for families that we built with Google Sites. We had pretty big aspirations to be tech-forward and communicative school, and this is the most visible component of that strategy. So far, it is working out pretty well, but I think we can do even better. I’ll write up more thoughts on this in the coming weeks.

This is a handy tool I just found: www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com

It checks to see if a site is up from another location.  Built by Alex Payne of Twitter.

keep looking »