“The current crop of Web social media tools is focused on people you already know — friends, family, professional colleagues. But how many people become Facebook friends with their neighbors? How many people in American cities can even name more than a handful of their neighbors? Some neighborhoods here and there have their own Yahoo Groups, or old-school ad hoc email lists, but there’s no solid online tool for neighborhoods that takes advantage of modern technology and people actually use. This is a huge opportunity, and because we’ve already got an audience of people who have registered their interest in given neighborhoods and blocks, we’re in a great position to do it.”
“During those heady days of early December, at least 50,000 people signed on to be part of the Anonymous army, joining in the grand disruption of the global wheels of commerce (er, kind of … these sites may have gone down in the DDoS attacks, but it’s not as though actual MasterCards didn’t keep working perfectly at the checkout). “I guess you could call it an army, but I wouldn’t,” says Housh, unfurling another telephone monologue. “Anonymous isn’t an army, or a group, per se. There aren’t members. Anyone who uses the loic is Anonymous, which means that anybody at any time in their lives can become Anonymous. Anonymous is nobody and nothing and nowhere.” He laughs a little, somewhat ghoulishly. “For all I know, you downloaded the loic, too—you’ve never proved to me you didn’t—so you might be Anonymous, too.”
If you’ve spent any time in Internet chat rooms, you’ve probably come across the saying “Don’t feed the trolls.” That means that you’re not supposed to shower any sort of attention, neither praise nor wrath, and definitely not CNN coverage, on the Internet’s top troublemakers, those flame-throwing, drama-producing, forum-obsessed kids with an excess of both computer savvy and time on their hands. Right now, though, the trolls are getting really well fed, though whether they’re also involved in a reputable practice of civil disobedience is a worthy subject of debate.
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Gondor is the production infrastructure that we at Eldarion have built for our own sites and those of our clients. We’re making it available to other Django developers like you so you can focus on your site, not your infrastructure.
It supports:
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“I remember my first customer. One day my parents gave me an envelope. It came from Germany and had those airmail stripes at the top. I opened it up, found a screenshot of Audiofile printed on a piece of paper—and a crisp $20 bill. More envelopes rolled in. Over the next few years, Audiofile probably generated $50,000—not bad for a kid in college in the early ’90s.
The lesson: People are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.
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Pattern is a web mining module for the Python programming language. It bundles tools for data retrieval (Google + Twitter + Wikipedia API, web spider, HTML DOM parser), text analysis (rule-based shallow parser, WordNet interface, syntactical + semantical n-gram search algorithm, tf-idf + cosine similarity + LSA metrics) and data visualization (graph networks).
