Data

One of the most common complaints I hear from people with large music collections is that browsing through songs as if scrolling through a spreadsheet is tedious. For these file-hoarding music fanatics, aimlessly browsing through their music library holds the same appeal as flipping through the card catalog of the Library of Congress.

The problem is: there comes a point when the iTunes paradigm of presenting your music collection as a column-sorted list of files is just absurd. Thankfully, Anita Lillie from MIT's Media Lab has based her thesis around a new way to visualize song data and she'… Read more

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Yahoo said Wednesday that it will make its user logs anonymous within 90 days as it ups the ante on data retention policies.

In a statement, Yahoo said it would also make user data on page views, page clicks, ad views, and ad clicks anonymous as well as its user logs. The only exceptions would be for "fraud, security, and legal obligations."

Clearly, Yahoo, Google, and others are racing to the bottom on data retention policies. In particular, Google and Yahoo have been playing a game of privacy … Read more

These data portability announcements keep rolling on: On Monday, Google announced that its Google Friend Connect product, which plugs social-networking features into participating sites, is now compatible with Twitter.

So what does this mean? Well, if you go to a site that uses Google Friend Connect, you can opt to use your Twitter credentials to log in to it. Then, as the official Google blog explained, you can then find which of your other Twitter friends are using the same site. Also, you can send out a "tweet" announcing that you've joined up.

Twitter was one of … Read more

Despite occasional criticism that Google doesn't commensurately contribute back to open-source software, hordes user data, and otherwise exercises too much control over the Web, it is also a refreshingly open company. Google has long declared the virtues of open data, open source, and open standards.

Writing in the International Herald Tribune, Google's Nelson Mattos, vice president of engineering for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, reiterates this message with an impassioned plea for open technology:

Open innovation is better than closed. Open technology - open in the sense that the technology or knowledge is available to the general … Read more

Does a loved one suffer from infomania? Do you have an incorrigible number-cruncher on your gift list? Whether your favorite data-tracker is a runner or a gardener, here are five devices that could be a hit at home this year.

1. Fitbit

About the size of a thumb drive, this fitness and sleep tracker discretely clips to your clothes. At home, it auto-syncs with its base station and uploads information (such as how many calories you burned that day or how many hours you actually slept) to a website where you can track data for yourself, … Read more

The marketing push for Facebook Connect, the social network's new data-portability project, goes on. Their angle: It's really easy to install on any site or blog.

A post on Facebook's developer blog contains a video that explains the most basic way to integrate Facebook Connect. The just-under-ten-minute video is the first of several instructional pieces, Facebook engineers said.

Focusing on ease of use is particularly important as Facebook attempts to win over site owners and publishers. There are other data-portability options out there, like OpenID and the just-launched MySpaceID, and Facebook's best bet is to convince … Read more

As part of the Le Web conference in Paris, News Corp.'s MySpace announced that it has taken a deeper plunge into the data portability pool.

The social network has announced its support for Google Friend Connect, which launched in full last week, and is using the standard to help power a new set of tools called the MySpace Open Platform. In conjunction, MySpace has ditched the distinctly unsexy moniker of "Data Availability" in favor of the new sobriquet "MySpaceID" for its universal log-in project. The Open Platform, in addition to MySpaceID, encompasses its OpenSocial-compatible app … Read more

While no one can predict what will happen to the economy over the next 12 to 18 months, you can bet your bottom dollar that threats to confidential data will increase substantially in that time frame. Why? Malicious code threats are growing exponentially while the cyberunderground becomes ever more sophisticated.

Fortunately, industry players are starting to team up to lower the cost, complexity, and integration effort needed for data-centric security. Last week, EMC's RSA and Microsoft got together to announce that the software giant will integrate RSA's Data Loss Prevention (DLP) into the Windows infrastructure in order to … Read more

InternetNews.com's Andy Patrizio pens an excellent analysis of why EMC, the storage giant, just might gobble up Sun, the former Unix king. While there are potential conflicts to such a match, the synergies might well outweigh them.

Patrizio walks through a range of benefits EMC could derive from Sun's hardware prowess (tape storage to complement EMC's expertise in NAS and SAN, enhanced server throughput performance. ZFS, etc.), as well as its software line-up (Java, RSA security, database replication, etc.). The list is long and the potential benefits would be huge.

But it's actually in the … Read more