Robert Scoble just posed this question, “Someone just asked me if there’s a good way to get a holistic look at Twitter or friendfeed followers. I don’t know of any. Do you?”
He was talking about their geographical locations. Among the answers, one person pointed at a Yahoo Pipes application that puts pins (each corresponding to one follower) onto a world map. I‘ve written about Yahoo Pipes before — it’s a web service that lets you “visually” create an algorithm that reads RSS feeds and manipulates them. Pipes can filter, put together, count, limit and obviously do a lot more. I have created a Pipes application that filters several RSS feeds and then makes them available for insertion on a blog.
I am increasingly concerned about the fragility of the Internet. With our data living more and more in the cloud, we are vulnerable when networks fail. Without email, without the documents I’m writing or editing, I have to sit out any network blackout that takes place. This happens to me more often than I’d like – probably a couple of times a month in my home office. I’m on Comcast cable for my connectivity, and though I frequently get 10 megabits/second of bandwidth, and almost always have at least 1.5 mbs, there are times when it gets so unreliable it might as well not be there, and then there are times when it just stops working for a couple of hours. 
