Benlog

Category: data

  • managing photos and videos

    This holiday, I finally spent time digging into how I manage photos and videos. With 2 young kids and some remote family and friends, this requires a good bit of thinking and planning. I know I’m not the only one, so I figured documenting where I landed might be useful to others. I started with…

  • (your) information wants to be free

    A couple of weeks ago, Epsilon, an email marketing firm, was breached. If you are a customer of Tivo, Best Buy, Target, The College Board, Walgreens, etc., that means your name and email address were accessed by some attacker. You probably received a warning to watch out for phishing attacks (assuming it wasn’t caught in…

  • grab the pitchforks!… again

    I’m fascinated with how quickly people have reached for the pitchforks recently when the slightest whiff of a privacy/security violation occurs. Last week, a few interesting security tidbits came to light regarding Dropbox, the increasingly popular cloud-based file storage and synchronization service. There’s some interesting discussion of de-duplication techniques which might lead to Oracle attacks,…

  • The Health IT report is very good; some opinionated suggestions

    “Oy,” I thought, when I received a copy of “REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT REALIZING THE FULL POTENTIAL OF HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY TO IMPROVE HEALTHCARE FOR AMERICANS: THE PATH FORWARD” [PDF]. I worried this would be a lot of vague, easy-to-agree-with advice with little actionable material. I was wrong. Hats off to the team that wrote…

  • devices, payload data, and why Kim is (in part) right.

    A few days ago, I wrote about privacy advocacy theater and lamented how some folks, including EPIC and Kim Cameron, are attacking Google in a needlessly harsh way for what was an accidental collection of data. Kim Cameron responded, and he is right to point out that my argument, in the Google case, missed an…

  • distributed innovation

    A few years ago, a small group of folks (Mark Birbeck, Steven Pemberton, Ralph Swick, Shane McCarron, me, and more recently Ivan Herman, Manu Sporny, and a lot of great new folks) started with the simple idea that, if web pages contained a bit of structured data in addition to their haphazard content, we could…

  • Taxing Human Transactions – Part 1

    The worst part of my job is dealing with the mess of document formats and coding systems in healthcare. The acronym soup is insane: HL7, CCD, CCR, CDA, Green CDA (which I just heard about from John Halamka’s blog but… no link!), and that’s just the document formats. Then there are coding systems like LOINC,…

  • Apple fanboy delusions, the Palm Pre is looking mighty tasty

    On many issues, I’m an Apple fanboy. On the issue of the iPhone, less and less. Here’s the short version of the story: Apple produces iTunes, which manages all of your music and videos, and syncs them to your iPod/iPhone. Very cool software, magnificently built, great experience overall. I’ve been using this setup for 6+…

  • Stefano thinks I’m a purist…

    Stefano Mazzocchi is awesome and his thinking on Web-based data is incredibly nuanced and pragmatic, so it’s not often that I want to publicly disagree with him. But in his latest post, I think he’s off the mark. Stefano argues: The difference between RDFa and Microdata (syntactic differences aside) is basically the fact that the…

  • Pot, Kettle, meet Zuckerberg

    Facebook is an impressive company, they’ve done and continue to do some very amazing things. And I admit I certainly didn’t see them coming 4 years ago. But okay, come on: “No one wants to live in a surveillance society,” Zuckerberg adds, “which, if you take that to its extreme, could be where Google is…

  • Open Licensing in Health IT

    John Halamka, renowned CIO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), is a blogger, and he just added a Creative Commons license after making the following remarks: I want my blog to be used for education, training, and research. I hope that its contents appear in derivative works such as other blogs, websites, and…

  • Distributed Data Stores: the birth of a new layer in the stack

    I learned web programming in 1995, when a SQL database for storing your data was the obvious choice, but the options were still few, expensive, and slow. Since then, the SQL database has become ubiquitous, and the options are many, including at least two very solid free/open-source solutions. But when it comes to large datasets,…

  • CC Tech Summit – December 2008

    I just finished my presentation on “RDFa: Life after W3C Recommendation” at the Creative Commons Tech Summit held at MIT (photographic evidence). Fun to chat about RDFa, as always, and a good crowd with some good questions.

  • Putting the “End” in EndNote.

    EndNote is a tool used commonly by a number of academics for adding endnote references to their papers. You keep an EndNote library of references, and you can easily add them to your Word document as you type your paper. So, this is a classic example of a file format that becomes vastly more useful…

  • Bridging the Clickable and Data Webs

    Over the last few years, I’ve been the Creative Commons representative to the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c). This means that I work with a bunch of great folks on web standards, specifically trying to define solutions that will help Creative Commons. Since 2005, I’ve led a w3c task force on RDFa, which is a…

  • Why I’m switching to Yahoo Search

    [Disclaimer: Yahoo supports RDFa, which is a specification I’ve worked on. So, obviously, I’m excited. But hey, that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.] Yahoo recently announced SearchMonkey, and for the first time in 10 years, I have a reason to switch search engines, from Google to Yahoo (In fact, I just did that in Firefox.) Most…