Alex Reid

Last week, Jesper Andersen was talking at the Strata Data Conference about how to build a “data narrative” using social media and online information to tell a story about a neighbourhood.

He focused on San Francisco’s Haight Street and with the public information from government open data, mapping data, real estate, rental listings data with data from social services like Foursquare, Yelp and Instagram.

He looked at the safety element by finding the crime statistics from DataSF.org, and looked at an analysis of Tweets and found that, by distribution, people were more negative on the lower half of Haight. He was also able to see what people found interesting on Haight by mapping pictures from Instagram to the street as well to offer a creative Google Street View.

Story of Haight

It’s not the next Google Street View but it does offer hope inspiration to mobile application developers to use open data and social media data to tell a story.

I was looking at Trend Micro’s web site following yesterday’s post and I found this interesting online guide titled How Social Engineering Works concerning how not to be tricked online.

This should be sent to everyone’s parents.

I will warn you though that this guide is written by a computer security company for the novice, so it can be a scary read for those new to the Internet.

There’s one part of the guide that suggests that cybercriminals are like “bad guys holding a gun to your back to take your money” but “don’t inflict that much harm unless you give in”. What?.. This is terrible advice. Bad guys holding a gun to your back are not harmless, but that’s beside the point. Cybercrooks are more like snake oil salespeople trying to steal your banking and identity information; they are data terrorists.

It’s a good starter guide. More people should educate themselves about how scams can work, and in general, question what they see and hear.

Beware of Starbucks gift cards on Pinterest. Trend Micro found that scammers are already using Pinterest to lure clicks to a phishing site.

It’s Dr. Seuss’ birthday.

An interesting fact: Seuss coined the word “nerd”.

The word was used Dr. Seuss book from his 1950 book If I Ran the Zoo.

“And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Ka-Troo/And Bring Back an It-Kutch a Preep and a Proo/A Nerkle a Nerd and a Seersucker, too!”