57298
submission
ErikTheRed writes:
According to this Washington Post story (found via this Penny Arcade newspost and mocked in comic), the FTC has issued a staff opinon stating that so-called "word-of-mouth marketers" — people who participate in community forums, etc. — who are being compensated to promote a product or service must disclose this fact. Violaters could face anything from cease-and-desist orders to multi-million dollar fines. Oh yeah, the Washington post is compensating me with a free PSP for pimping their story (just kidding).
56802
story
inputsprocket asks:
"Having gotten into a project that involves doing some geo-statistic data mining analysis on Apache log files, I couldn't believe how there seems to be such a large chasm, in open source's vast library, for such a powerful analytical tool. Unless I'm wrong, then there is no such open source project available for *nix variants. There appears to be a great deal of brand software (heh — only for Windows off-site analysis though), yet there is are great open source tools for generic mapping tools (GMTs). The available GMTs seem to be overkill for mapping of weblogs and require a lot of in-house programming to map IP addresses to cartographic data using free geo-location databases. The closest I found was Palentir. Does one really have to rely on the powerful needs of Map Server, MapTools, Carto Web, or Map Builder to draw simple maps with statistics on web usage, given the extra programming needs required to do this?
