Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Purdue’s Brian Lamb School of Communication is joining the Google News Lab University to better prepare students for 21st century careers related to digital media. “Purdue’s faculty will utilize the latest data journalism and storytelling innovations for teaching and research as part of…
Today I launch a new teaching and research initiative which will empower Purdue students aspiring to embrace careers in big data, social media analytics, or communication. The initiative starts with a partnership with Google News Lab University. The partnership, which includes other…
Google Maps just got the right to publish its “street view” of the roads surrounding the Great Pyramids of Giza, in Egypt. This means that you can walk around seeing the sights in near 3d format… View Giza PYRAMIDS IN STREET VIEW…
The next revolution in the digital world will not be on a desktop or in your pocket. It will be in your car… Maybe… The rise of the “connected” car. This is the coming together of communications technologies, information systems and safety…
Big data is seen by many as a panacea, while many are skeptical of its ability to solve our most pressing problems. What is the real problem with big data? Blind empiricism. All…
New York Times reports that a successful YouTube broadcaster with 1,000,000 subscribers to multiple channels, who posts at least 20 new video segments a week may expect a little bit more than 100,000 dollars a year in revenue. This is about $10…
Why I will not buy another Android phone anytime soon… The opinion of this programmer is worth his weight in gold.
The great weakness of location aware mobile apps is precision and location relevance. Mobile apps that are supposed to push to you info about the place you are at rely on GPS signals to pull in information. Even when very precise, they…
? Google and NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab – YouTube. What is Quantum Computing? According to this Google Video Clip, it is computing that relies on the idea that there are multiple universes in which things can exist simultaneously, thus, we can…
In the context of the Snowden and Prism scandal, Google released a transparency report, which discloses the number of judicial requests for disclosing information about Google service users by country over a period of three years. Data has been released in the…
According to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency (NSA) leaker, the US government has recruited several major Internet corporations, especially Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, to help it harvest emails, videos, and web traffic from unsuspecting US and foreign citizens through…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Can social media increase the effect of undesirable social communication processes, such as the echo chamber or spiral of silence?…
Note: This post and the charts will be updated throughout the evening. Come back often for more recent details. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were relatively close in number of Google News searches, which is an indicator of social reach on online…
April 15 is the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on its maiden voyage in 1912. The wreck of the ship was found in two pieces, the bow and the stern, by Ballard in 1985, who released the precise coordinates of…
Following the successful social media exercise of predicting the outcomes of the nomination race in Iowa using Google Searches and Tweets, here is a preview of what could be in store for the candidates in New Hampshire. Google search trends in the…
Mashable hints that Twitter might have caught a whiff of Santorum’s possible dash in the last straight line before the finish in the Iowa caucus. There is something to say about it. Romney lost the lead not only on Twitter but also in…
Are you in front of an information booth, at the mall? Do you want to do a Google search without a keyboard? The Google voice gizmo by Breakfast, an open source hardware project, has something for you. The device uses Arduino boards…
NOTE: Soon, my places will be replaced by a new map making tool, which can be previewed here https://mapsengine.google.com/map/ A few weeks after the rebranding of Google Maps as My Places, the interface lacked an explicit tool for exporting individual maps as…
Google+ is the search giant’s response to Facebook’s recent raise as the most visited site in the world. The tools aim to make the web experience of Google account users a little bit more like that offered by Facebook. The problem is,…
Samsung Series 5 3G Chromebook (Arctic White) Google Chromebook, the minimal-OS, always on, wireless laptop is a major disappointment for David Pogue… Truth is, considering how stripped-down the Samsung is, you have to wonder why it’s as big, heavy and expensive as…
Springfield tornado is now officially rated as an EF-3 on a scale of 5. An EF-3 event can easily level strong frame homes. The Joplin, Missouri tornado was an EF-5, or “devastating”. Intensity map of the Springfield tornado path, similar to the…
Gizomodo thinks that Google’s notepad/online thin client laptop Chromebook needs to try harder All in all, it’s about exactly what you’d expect for $429 of computer in the shape of a laptop. No more, and not much less. (To be less ambiguous:…
Facebook does not seem to have a very large advertising footprint. In fact, it relies in great measure on two major partners, Zynga, the producer of Farmville, and Groupon. Gaming and group buying partners are responsible for 2/3rds of Facebook’s revenue. While…
New York Times ponders on the merging of journalism and search engine optimization Search Engine Optimization to Lure Readers – NYTimes.com The Huffington Post has hired veteran journalists to beef up its news coverage. But a significant chunk of its readers come…
Worst gripe? It feels and works like it was made on the cheap. Engineers, navel gazing, fell in love with their own cloud-based dream, leaving the users behind. In a word, released too soon. Personally, I think the idea is great and…
My bet is that the iPhone will win this fight… Back in March, I wrote about the increasingly personal fight between Steven P. Jobs, the Apple chief executive, and Eric E. Schmidt, his Google counterpart. In it, I quoted Mr. Jobs saying:…
Foreign Policy: It’s way beyond crop circles, blood-red lakes in Iraq, and half-hidden UFOs. Officials from Greece to New York to Switzerland are using the free satellite images to find tax cheats with undeclared swimming pools and illegal pot plantations. Armchair cartographers…
Wikipedia, had in July 2010 over 12 million users and 3.5 million articles ( see latest Wikipedia Stats) and was the 4th most visited website on the planet (see latest data from Google’s AdPlanner). It is at the same time a prototypical…
Image via Wikipedia The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network Social networks are of interest to researchers in part because they are thought to mediate the flow of information in communities and organizations. Here we study the temporal dynamics…
I will never forget what William Dutton, now of Oxford Internet Institute Fame, one of my Annenberg School, USC professors, told me when I mentioned to him my belief that one day the set top cable box will be a computer and…
A new logo for the Italian Justice System? Image via Wikipedia An Italian court decided that anyone who does anything, anywhere in the world that an Italian court can interpret as an infringement of Italian law can be prosecuted, tried, and convicted.…
Google’s announced plans to build 1 Gigabyte broadband networks seem to play the same role as Google‘s threats of yesteryear to bid for WiMax frequencies. The FCC is planning to propose a new national broadband plan, which would make accessible to most…
The FTC Logo, Image via Wikipedia Facebook is on the hook. Privacy advocates complained to the FTC that Facebook’s decision to make most of your actions public by default is a form of deceptive practices. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a…
After being overtaken by Google in the later part of 2008, Yahoo now is passed by Facebook. During the last year Facebook doubled its traffic, while Yahoo remained largely stationary. 133 million unique visitors in Jan 2010. From Mashable: Facebook is now…
NOTE: Auletta’s Googled has been reviewed on this site, as well, by Sorin Adam Matei. Image via Wikipedia Michiko Kakutani reviews Auletta’s latest media book (author also known for “Three blind mice” and “World War 3.0). “Googled” points both to Google‘s successes…
Taking a cue from and fearing the competition of the the recent Wolfram Alpha – Bing – Yahoo alliance Google has probably paid World Bank an arm and a leg to plug their search engine in the newly released WB data API.…
Image via Wikipedia Ever wanted to geocode or georeference (or place on a map) a batch of points on Google maps but never got the nerve to do it via My Maps? Mapalist and Google forms can do the trick for you…
Image via Wikipedia Having completed its first phase of digitizing out of print and orphan books. Google is now moving toward enrolling copyright protected authors and books into a new publishing venture. The only question that remains to be asked is what…
Series 6: Getting Noticed on Google (The following is part of a series of reviews on web 2.0, web design, and social media books. It will be a 9 part series. Each review is structured to provide a brief summary of the…
The Daily Telegraph put the world on fire with the announcement that a square grid-like pattern of structures was found in the middle of the Atlantic. Google reacted promptly, claiming that the pattern is a digital artifact, being the product of the…
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to login to any computer and be able to access all your music, pictures, documents, and passwords to all your social networking services? Well, soon (hopefully) you’ll be able to. This is the whole idea…
Just when you thought you that Google was everywhere, it shows up again someplace unexpected…or is it? Now you can get your “content specific” news from Google on your personal website. This is great for those who run news-based sites. It’s also…
Have you ever wanted to capture a webpage in it’s entirety? More than just the link, but what you actually see on the page? Well you can! Services like Google notebook, Evernote, ubernote, Diigo, and Zoho (to name a few) can…
The Fedora Project: An Open-source Digital Object Repository Management System tags: fedora, repository, project, lor, library, learning, object, lol old bailey online – Google Search tags: no_tag Cirip.ro / manafu / Foloseste cineva shortText.com… tags: no_tag The Plagiarism Checker tags: plagiarism, writing,…
Charts And Graphs: Modern Solutions | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine tags: graphs, javascript, visualization, chart, css, webdesign, webdev, charts Add dynamic charts to your site | Zen-Dreams tags: zendreams ZdStatistics plugin for wordpress A very handy-dandy stats plugin for your blog…
A perfectly random rump through the meadows of hyperspace lead me from this post on In Trade about volatility as a predictor of bias to this blog full of equations, to this note and then to this Chronicle article about mobbing in…
Circularity on defining truth and verifiability on Wikipedia discussed on Technology Review: So what is Truth? According to Wikipedia’s entry on the subject, “the term has no single definition about which the majority of professional philosophers and scholars agree.” But in practice,…
Notre Dames de Reims – Google Search tags: no_tag Cathédrale Notre Dame de Reims by kevin51340 – Google 3D Warehouse tags: no_tag World Heritage Centre – World Heritage Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what…
A sophisticated browser, which straddles the desktop/server divide has been launched by Google. It aims to create a better platform for its webapplications, which need to be faster and more secure to compete with the local desktop, currently dominated by Microsoft. The…
Zembly is he masu editor of mashups… Developing Web applications to be used within social networks and numerous other cloud-based structures is becoming more and more de rigueur for the entrepreneurial set. Both on the desktop and on the go, Web users…
Disney Goes All The Way Online If the thought of planning a trip to the happiest place on Earth on a flat map online (let alone on paper) seems too dull—Disney World now offers visitors a 3-D interactive map on Google Earth.…
Following a story on the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog I’ve run into YouNoodle.com a social networking site for entrepreneurs and educators. Lots of mashups and some interesting applications. The site still needs some improvement and the communication tools improved,…
What is Googles cloud? Its a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies…