The Drizzle project is building a database optimized for Cloud and Net applications. It is being designed for massive concurrency on modern multi-cpu/core architecture. The code is originally derived from MySQL.

A Lightweight SQL Database for Cloud and Web in Launchpad

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.

Google Insights

Inside the shadowy underworld where rogue employees sell holes in their companies' software. The buyers: security firms, mobsters, and -- surprise -- the U.S. government.

Fear of a Black Hat

Remember that great application that used to come with all Macs called HyperCard? Ever wished it would return, only better? Well say hello to TileStack! Here's a video that explains everything:

TileStack - Your Creative Playground

New work by Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg:

This is an exciting moment for visualization. It’s a time when the mainstream media are embracing sophisticated techniques born in university research labs - a time when you can open the New York Times and see complex treemaps and network diagrams. But just as exciting is the fact that some new visualizations, ones that get people talking and thinking about data in a new way, are being invented outside the academy as well.

This is starting to happen often enough that it’s worth having a term for techniques that originate outside the research community. Borrowing terminology from the design world, we’ll call them “vernacular” visualizations-in a nod to Tibor Kalman’s admiration of “low” art. This article focuses on one ubiquitous type of streetwise visualization: tag clouds. Born outside the world of computers, they were raised to maturity by web 2.0 sites coping with an unwieldy world of collective activity. Tag clouds are an eclectic bunch spanning a variety of data inputs and usage patterns that defy much of the orthodox wisdom about how visualizations ought to work ...

(Unfortunately, ACM subscription required for full text)

From the archive:

My research focuses on the visualization of the traces people leave as they interact online. Some of my projects explore email archives, newsgroup conversations, and the editing history of wiki pages. I am particularly fascinated by the stories that these social archives tell us and the patterns they contain.

Martin is a mathematician whose research interests include information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, bioinformatics, and art.

Wattenberg’s investigation into the shape of song is part of his overall mission to make the invisible visible.

Tag Clouds and the Case for Vernacular Visualization

It's 1975 And This Man Is About To Show You The Future

(Scenes From An IBM Slide Presentation)

A selection from Square America, a gallery of vintage snapshots & vernacular photography.

It's The Future ...

Not sure how to explain the internet to your young ones? Presenting a series of nursery rhymes to teach children how to comport themselves on the online.

Baby’s First Internet

CRUSH (Custom Reporting Utilities for SHell) is a collection of tools for processing delimited-text data from the command line or in shell scripts.

crush-tools

Using the latest technologies and innovations in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Corkboard lets you manage your data and works-in-progress in a new and intuitive way. Corkboard works alongside your clipboard—the place things go when you copy or paste them—to hold more data and show you exactly what's going on.

You can drag-and-drop data to Corkboard, where it will be kept for safekeeping between reboots, crashes, quits, and saves. When you need to use the data again, just drag it back out to the program that needs it. It's fast, simple, and easy.

Corkboard. ⌘C and ⌘V are so 1984.

Vizuality is visual literacy. In theory, we should be able to annotate, reference and hyperlink moving images as easily as we do text. But all that is hard to do that now. Just try hyperlinking to a specific frame in a movie. You are lucky to be able to link to a small clip. What you'd really like to do is link to an object within a frame as it persists over a scene. Let's say you want to link to a fez in a scene from Casablanca. No one can't do that now.

But we should be able to do that. If we had the tools of vizuality to the same degree we have tools of literacy - like cut and paste, footnotes, summaries, dictionaries and the like -- creating a link to a fez or bow tie in a film or video would be no problem.

Motion pictures are on their way to become equally ubiquitous. With the arrival of cheap organic LEDs, moving images will soon cover every flat surface. As they do we will march from literacy to vizuality. In order to complete that great transition, we'll need a whole suite of tools, like these first primitive ones above, which permit us to manipulate, manage, store, cite and create moving images as easily as text.

Tools for Vizuality