Take a moment to go back in time with me, back to when life was simpler and the biggest threat to humanity was Y2k… It is 1999, you’re 13, and your mother just walked through the front door carrying a large, vibrantly colored blue and yellow bag. Based on the heft and the "Best Buy" […]
Over the past 24 hours I worked with an amazing team to start building a Siri for government. Well, Wolfram Alpha is more like it, but you probably have a better sense of what Siri is. The site is called CivOmega and it allows you to ask any question™ you want about civics. The system […]
I made something awesome last week: Opened Captions. At face value it just looks like a live feed of C-SPAN’s Closed Captions. This alone is actually pretty cool if you think about it, especially if you are a deaf political junkie who sits far away from the TV and can’t read the closed captions. Of […]
I may have graduated, but I still get very good advice from my mentors. The most recent came from Ethan Zuckerman: “Dan, please try not to get fired in your first month. That would be really embarrassing for everyone.” His delivery reflected a hint of genuine concern. There are many reasons why he might have […]
Last month, I ran a user study to test the effectiveness of Truth Goggles (a credibility layer/B.S. detector for the Internet). The tool attempts to remind users when it’s important to think more carefully. If you’re curious, you can check out the demo page. Now that the study has officially concluded, the numbers have been […]
Remind me to never do that again. On Friday I officially handed in my thesis, titled “Truth Goggles: Automatic Incorporation of Context and Primary Source for a Critical Media Experience.” For those who don’t know already, it was about an automated bullshit detector for the Internet / an interface to help people think carefully called […]
Three weeks ago I went to a happy hour organized by the Neiman Lab, I mentioned my thesis project, Andrew Phelps said “that sounds cool, can I write about it?” and I said “sure why not!” I assumed that the post would get about as much traction as professional blog posts usually get: a few […]
My colleague Matt Stempeck said it best: “Dan, I know that your life has been a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped up in a whole box of tsunamis this week, but you really need to start wearing pants to work.” It turns out only part of that quote is accurate, but you’ll never know […]
This post was written as part of a course called Introduction to Civic Media. I feel odd writing too many separate posts in one day. My solution is a merger: the post on Anonymous and Hacktivism is going to buy out my project update. The terms of the buyout haven’t been made public but money […]
As we all know the most important part of any successful project is completely changing your idea at the last minute. In that spirit I am about to present a progress update on a project that has nothing to do with the revamped IRC interface I outlined last time (note that the IRC project isn’t […]