Clearing the Cache: In Near Real Time
BY Nancy Scola | Thursday, June 18 2009
- In short order, photos from today's big rally in Tehran's Tup Khane Square are popping up around the web. The one above makes its way to us from a blog called Carpe Diem via The New York Times' The Lede blog, the latter of which is doing reporting work to confirm photos they're finding are from where and when they appear to be -- one of the many fascinating aspects to how the media ecosystem is functioning when it comes to reporting Iran this week.
- Andrew Sullivan wants Google to go green, and he relays to his readers a Twitter'd suggestion that Mousavi does too.
- (A completely random but slightly interesting discovery from this morning: in some software programs sold here in the U.S., Arabic fonts delete "backwards," for lack of a better word. That is, hitting the delete button on the right side of say, میر حسین موسوی, drops characters from the left side of the word -- obviously because Arabic reads left to right. Try it. It's kinda neat to see.)
- Nate Silver tries to make sense of the "rural support" explanation of Ahmadinejad's supposed victory.
- A meme is born: There's now 60-plus pages worth of Twitter Search results at Rep. Pete Hoekstra's expense, prompted by a Hoekstra tweet yesterday comparing Twitter and Iran with congressional Republicans use of Twitter during their refusal to leave the House floor a few months back. (Background here.)
- One guy getting in on the joke action is Rep. Jack Kimble. His message to Hoekstra: "We were probably their inspiration" Funny guy. What district is he from again?
- In light of Facebook's new custom name URLs, a look at claiming your online identity.
- Never hunt for an open electrical socket again...
- ProPublica and the New York Times win a bunch of money to build a "DocumentCloud" -- of particular interest to us because of what it might mean for extending the usefulness of freed government files.
- Howard Dean tries out online whipping tools (vote counting tools, that is) to measure congressonial support for a public health insurance option.
- Videos goes up of the New York State Senate's intriguing "Capitol Camp" on state-level open government held in Albany a few weeks back.
- And OSTP's Thomas Kalil floats the idea of a government-sponsored X Prize-style open government competition.
(With Brian Solomon)

