Our CaT crowd is an influential lot--their innovations and influence make news left and right. Here are some recent hits, as well as a few just-for-fun items.
Mashable takes a walk through the latest Twitter mutation, Stweet!, which discerns a tweet's location and marries it to Google's Street View. Be very afraid.
In another intriguing Twitter project, Vancouver's Jer Thorp married microblogging and arrivals to create Just Landed. The tool parses the syntax to find people who've just stepped off planes, and then uses CaT presenter Ben Fry's Processing to create an animated map of the results. Thorp says the project came about after a discussion on disease transmission, making Just Landed officially the coolest byproduct of the H1N1 outbreak. Like the project below, Thorp's effort owes a bit of a visual hat tip to Google's Aaron Koblin--who, believe it or not, will be at CaT. With the MIT Senseable City Lab, Koblin used outbound transmissions in Processing in New York Talk Exchange and mapped air travel in Flight Patterns.
Get an in-depth look at the various technologies of interest to the kooky scientists in the Times R&D group, courtesy Niemen Journalism Lab and CaT speaker Nick Bilton.
Some say future journalists will be able to do everything from sifting through databases to developing applications and harnessing APIs, which is a far cry from many of today's newsrooms. Read about one of the first prominent "hacker-journalists" at PBS' MediaShift Idea Lab and watch our video interview with the Times' Bilton and Derek Gottfrid to hear their take on the rise of a new class of reporter.
The smartphone as field guide? The National Science Foundation thinks that's how the future will look, with a program already in place to identify leaves and help researchers. The matching software may be paired with catalogs of bird calls or other flora and fauna, according to the article.
In other 'hey that looks like Processing' news, some smarty-pants stuck a light on their Roomba robot vacuum and did a long-exposure photo as it cleaned the house. The resulting image on Wired's Gadget Lab blog is great.
