Today was the kick-off  meeting of NOSQL Summer here in Graz, Austria.

A NOSQL Summer is a network of local reading groups, that will decipher & discuss NOSQL-related articles, from late June to early September 2010. Each group sets its own meeting pace (usually once a week or once every two weeks) and select which papers are up for discussion.

At every cycle, members read the selected paper at home and then meet up for an hour or so to discuss, debate and answer their own questions.

The paper then gets annotated and is published again on the NOSQL Summer website.

Four of our in the meantime already 12 local swimmers decided to join the first meeting and dived into interesting topics regarding NOSQL and distributed computing with fellow geeks. We were reading and discussing the article called “On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services” (PDF) written by James Hamilton. Our discussion was first driven this article but soon also covered other topics:

• Cloud computing and setups
• Privacy issues regarding cloud storage
• Social networks and privacy concerns
• Complexity in hardware setups regarding cloud services
• Hadoop and HBASE
• Philosophical discussions on how current and past society deals with privacy specially in cloud contexts

There were a lot of different opinions and views on using internet-services and the cloud for storing and processing one’s own data. Do you prefer to keep your data in a cloud or do you prefer to host all of your data by your own? We did not find one common answer to these questions and I guess you either won’t find one. It was an interesting meeting with friends and I am already looking forward to the next one.

The next NOSQL Summer Meeting will be announced through the NOSQL Summer Website but I can already give you the date. It will take place on the 4th of August 2010, hosted at the campus of Graz University of Technology again.

If you are interested in NOSQL or distributed computing and distributed storage then just subscribe to the NOSQL Summer Group of Graz and we will keep you informed on the next paper to read and on the next interesting dates.

Articles you may find interesting too

• Paper: On Designing and Deploying Internet-Scale Services (highscalability.com)
• Cassandra: Predicting the Future of NoSQL (readwriteweb.com)
• Structure 2010: The Future of SQL in the Cloud (gigaom.com)
• Weekly Wrap-up: Old Spice Videos, TED Talks for Startups, the New Digg, And More… (readwriteweb.com)
• NoSQL, Heroku, and You (heroku.com)
• Disruptive Cloud Computing Startups At Under The Radar – NoSQL – Aspirin, Vicodin, and Vitamin (cloudave.com)
• NoSQL Database CouchDB Turns 1.0 (readwriteweb.com)

The following video visualizes some recent social media statistics interestingly. Quite impressing how social media has developed over the last year. Facebook for example has gained 200 million users in just one year. That’s incredible …

(via crowdspring and mashable)

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• Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh) (viralblog.com)
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Image via Wikipedia

Mashable has just published a post titled “Nobody Can Stop Facebook Because Nobody Understands Facebook“. There is an interesting sentence in this post:

Have the nuances of online privacy become so complex that they’re beyond the comprehension of mere mortals? I’m not saying that Facebook has any intent to cause confusion, but the complexities of the open vs closed debate and the prescriptive vs descriptive nature of the “everybody” setting effectively act to shut down public discourse.

I agree that it has not become easier to control privacy specially in the scope of Facebook. I do not really know what data which I publish on Facebook stays there, do you know? Actually when posting on Facebook I keep in mind that everything that I provide is for anybody to use. This you should also keep in mind when you act on Facebook.

Other interesting articles:

• Facebook Personalizes the Web with Open Graph (michaelfertik.com)
• How to Restore Your Privacy on Facebook (e1evation.com)
• What data does Facebook publish about you? (boingboing.net)
• Facebook privacy hole ‘lets you see where strangers plan to go’ (Charles Arthur/Guardian) (techmeme.com)
• More Facebook Privacy Concerns (lockergnome.com)

On a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg states that if he’d start facebook again all privacy settings by DEFAULT would be PUBLIC. A very interesting approach which leads to the question if people want if all of their data is available publicly? I personally do not.

Here is the interview of Zuckerberg:

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• Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over (readwriteweb.com)
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Google Grippe-Trends (Google Flu Trends) ist nun auch in Österreich verfügbar. Auf der extra dafür eingerichteten Website kann man den derzeitigen Verlauf der Grippewelle in Österreich, sowie in viele anderen Staaten verfolgen.

Google bietet auch die Möglichkeit, die zugrunde liegenden Daten für eigene Zwecke herunterzuladen. Für jeden, der sich dafür interessiert, wie das Prinzip dahinter genau funktioniert verweise ich hier auf einen Artikel von Google (Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data), der in der Zeitschrift “Nature” veröffentlicht wurde. Der Artikel steht auch als PDF Dokument zur Verfügung. Weitere Informationen zu diesem Thema können auch direkt bei Google bezogen werden.

Kaplan University has produced two interesting and inspiring videos on how e-Learning can be performed in near future.

It’s time to use technology to rewrite the rules of education …

Here is another one.

Besides I have found an interesting article written by George Siemens on How MIT is going to get large lectures off the blackboard. The whole artikle is called Media Literacy: Making Sense of New Technologies and Media by George Siemens.

(via e-Learning Blog)

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Wer hat nicht schon verschiedenste IM Messenger auf seinem Computer installiert? Bei jedem Verbindungsaufbau zum Internet versuchen diese auch einen Teil des Internets für sich zu beanspruchen. Wem das zu stressig ist, bzw. wer möchte, dass all diese IM Dienste irgendwo zentral verwaltet werden können, der sollte sich einmal meebo genauer anschauen. Bei meebo ist es möglich jegliche IM Dienste über eine Website zu verwalten und über diese mittels seiner IM Accounts zu kommunizieren. Sehr interessante Sache!