links for 2009-02-05

"The discussions at GovBarCamp suggested that the problem's clear, but were less conclusive about the solution. Part of the issue is that the current system was created with the best of intentions, but has had unanticipated consequences. There are signs of change, though. We geeky types like nothing better than giggling at some of the portal-style ineptitude that has been the Direct.gov.uk site over the years, but then over the course of three days they've hacked together an "is my kids' school closed" site which would probably have taken at least a year and six figures if it had gone through "traditional channels". But for every Schoolclosure.org.uk, there's another incipient car crash of a project travelling towards us, whether it's medical records or MTAS or the National Identity Register."

"What could come next? We'd love to see some semantic parsing of all this content. As semantic web aficionado Tom Morris wrote today, "[These] Could be signs of something very good – imagine if the New York Times were to join the web of Linked Data, pointing from articles out to all sorts of distributed resources. The amount of information stored up inside an institution like the New York Times would be really interesting if it were linked together with other data on the Web. A search API isn't tremendously interesting, but it is interesting to see someone like the NYT do this, rather than just Web 2.0 sites and hosts of user-contributed material publishing this kind of data.""

"Social networking sites have been urged to do more to protect their young users after MySpace announced it had identified and removed about 90,000 registered sex offenders from its site in the last two years." 90,000!

"First things first: More than 27 percent of the Pirate Bay’s users are from China, whereas only 8.17 percent come from the U.S. Even more impressive: Hong Kong, with its 2.3 million households, is responsible for nearly two percent of the Pirate Bay’s user base. Combine that with the fact that the Bay has around 21 million concurrent active users, and it becomes clear that around 17 percent of all households in Hong Kong are using the Pirate Bay at any given moment."