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When you have split up with anybody after a long relationship and the tears have subdued, you will find that your house is full of items that you don’t want any longer, and that you don’t have a use for either. Rather than throwing them off the window or building a big bonfire, you should consider visiting this website. You see, it acts as both a community where people can cry on each other’s shoulder over the break up, and then proceed to sell these items that bring back unwanted memories. Read more Learn more about BreakUpGoods.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much BreakUpGoods.com is worth with Stimator.com

Go to the website where a portable iPhone charger called the 3GPower2 is for sale, and you will find tips on extending an iPhone’s battery life. What you won’t see is any hint that Bill McNeely, the man behind the product and the website, is working from a dorm-style room on a police-training base in one of the world’s most dangerous corners: Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan mired in battle with the Taliban. For now, McNeely earns his living managing the logistical operations at the camp, run by an American company that the U.S. government has hired to help train the fledgling Afghan National Police. (McNeely requested that the name of his employer not be printed.) When night falls, though, McNeely gets busy running his Web business. The inspiration to market an iPhone battery booster came to McNeely last summer. Immersed in his usual routine of nighttime online reading (despite what he calls a 1999-level connection to the Internet), McNeely came across articles citing the iPhone’s short battery life. “I saw a big market,” he says, “and not that many players.” Though he has no technical knowledge, McNeely had a simple idea: Create a sleek-looking external battery that snaps on to the bottom of an iPhone, giving it hours of new life. He went to Alibaba.com, and within a few weeks, he was able to land a Chinese manufacturer. He turned to the freelancer site Elance to find a graphic designer; his packaging was created by a Bulgarian. McNeely also used the Web to find and hire a Harvard Business School — educated consultant to help craft his business plan. And a New York Times article led McNeely to a Web designer, who helped him set up his site. After an investment of about $6,000, McNeely got 3GPower2.com up and running in less than three months, and his site opened for business last September. McNeely’s personal war-zone exit strategy is to build his iPhone battery charging business to the point where he can give up the overseas life and get back home to his family. And the sooner the better. His days are filled with reminders of the war around him: There are the crowds of Afghan men who have come to receive police training — and the crackle of gunfire from the base’s shooting range. Recently, a rocket launched by the Taliban landed a few hundred feet from the base. It’s hardly an ideal environment in which to start an entrepreneurial venture, but McNeely had few options. His stint in Afghanistan began in 2008, after he had been out of work in Texas for three months. A former Army logistics officer who served in Iraq, McNeely found a job with a defense contractor managing a crew of local mechanics responsible for maintaining trucks and tractors used in a poppy-eradication mission in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. The work was dangerous. McNeely survived an attack on his convoy, but several drivers were killed, and his SUV was destroyed. “I’ve been through some pretty rough stuff,” he says, “but I was really scared that day.” McNeely needed the work, though, so when that job ended, he signed up for his current job with the same company. So far, business is slow for 3GPower2. McNeely, who earlier tried and failed to start a defense contracting business, has sold just over 250 chargers, at $29.95 each. He’s spending his evenings and weekends on the business and making Skype calls to his wife, who handles shipping from their house in Temple, Texas. To get sales moving, McNeely is applying search-engine-optimization techniques to his company website. He’s also counting on boosting sales with a discount promotion offered through the coupon site Groupon.com . (See ” Four Tips for Using Groupon Coupons “). If the strategy works, McNeely figures he will be able to head home well before the end of the year with a full-time job waiting for him — running his own business. “He promised that this will be the last year,” says his wife, Suzy. That means a lot more iPhone battery booster sales, but McNeely intends to keep his promise.

What would you do if you heard a giant boom and you didn’t know where it came from? If you’re like thousands of people in Portland, Oregon, you might hit Twitter and Google Maps to participate in the city-wide exploration of a slightly frightening mystery. Last night at about 8 p.m., people in a big part of the city felt their windows shake and no one could tell them what caused it. Was it a sonic boom? An angry deity? Even the mayor himself tweeted this morning that he was looking into the sound. In the meantime, thousands of people were using the hashtag #pdxboom and adding themselves to a hastily configured Google Map showing where they lived and how loud the boom had been there. In just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park. This morning the police found a detonated pipe bomb there and cited the Google Map in their announcement. Sponsor Pausing the Stream Reid Beels is a designer, geo-developer and one of the community organizers of Portland’s forthcoming conference Open Source Bridge (“The conference for open source citizens”). Beels says he was sitting in a restaurant in southeast Portland when he heard the boom, and saw tweets streaming in about it within minutes. He searched Twitter for “boom” and “explosion,” limiting the results by location. Within five minutes, he says, a hashtag had emerged: #pdxboom. What was the #pdxboom, people wanted to know? Some people said it sounded like thunder. Lots of people said it sounded like an empty trash Dumpster crashing on the ground. They mentioned their locations in their Tweets and Beels quickly grew frustrated that all this data was just streaming into the ether, lost from analysis. So he threw up a Google Map with instructions to put a pin in your location and describe how the boom sounded to you. Within an hour 100 people had placed pins on the map. Beels and developer Audrey Eschright came up with a color coded system to describe the intensity of the sound, and began retroactively coloring in pins based on any comments people left. Then they found out that Google Maps will only display the 200 most recent pins placed in a public map. Beels’ friend Aaron Parecki wrote a script to download the map’s data every fifteen minutes. That came in handy when a few hours later someone vandalized the map by dragging a large number of markers outside the town. It was trivial to roll back to the last valid data. The local TV news and the newspaper ran stories about the boom, and pointed their audiences to the Google Map. Thousands of people visited it, and just under 1,000 added a pin marking where they where and how loud the boom had sounded to them. It became clear that the boom originated near the Sellwood Bridge; a big cluster of red markers surrounded the area, especially to the east. Thousands of people are still streaming in to look at the map; at the end of the day it’s now approaching 70,000 views, even if the mystery, if not the crime, is solved. Some people thought it was a precursor Earthquake Boom . (I woke up convinced my house was in an earthquake.) But the Portland police went to a park in the area most filled with red flags on the map and found a large detonated pipe bomb. A Portland police spokesperson said the maps and tweets were very helpful. A topographic view of the map made some inclined to believe that cliffs across the river and low-hanging clouds combined to make the sound travel as far across the city and in the direction that it did. That Was a Practice Run Beels says two big lessons came out of the experience for him. First, the tools they used were easy and fast, but they were also quite limited. Google Maps in particular was capable of multi-user collaboration but did poorly when it came to displaying a large amount of data. As Eschright wrote after the action, “It’s not the best platform for a couple hundred people, many without prior experience editing maps, to be using all at once.” Inspired by campaigns like CrisisCampPDX and the CrisisWiki , Beels says the community is interested in setting up an installation of open-source, crisis support software Ushahidi on standby in case a real crisis has to be dealt with. Beels says he’s inspired not just by what was done in this situation, but by what it revealed about the future. “The community of people who will search for things online and go out of their way to try to figure out what’s going on,” he says, “is larger than you might think.” Marshall Kirkpatrick is leading a webinar for Poynter’s News University on Thursday about how location services are changing the news . Discuss

A fight just broke out down the street from my house. Yesterday, a dog in my neighborhood had one of its legs amputated. That’s the kind of news I like to know and so I’m very excited that MSNBC’s hyper-local news aggregator EveryBlock has expanded this week to include services in Portland, Oregon. EveryBlock is one of scores of competing services that serve up public records, social media content and local announcements on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, or in this case block-by-block, basis. What does it mean when the most successful of these services rolls into your town? 12 hours into the experience, here’s what some people in the local (human) media geeks have to say about it. This conversation offers a unique view into the front-line battle to offer news consumers more and faster information about our own neighborhoods than we’ve probably ever had before. Sponsor Does existing local media consider EveryBlock a threat? Local TV news personality and new media experimenter Stephanie Stricklen doesn’t. “I can’t think of any reason why it’s not awesome,” she told us. “Any time you bring another source of information into a city, especially one where you can access info about such a small geographic perspective, I like that.” “No matter what you think of online journalism, everything is changing and the more players that come to the table the better we are all. We serve different audiences. The local TV stations could never have the time to visit every single block every day, there’s not enough people, not even the newspaper could.” Might local human reporters use a service like EveryBlock to find stories they should investigate and put in context? “Absolutely,” Stricklen said, “I can see myself using something like this.” As I write this story, some kind of animal problem has been reported at an intersection near where I live and an experimental short film screening was just blogged about by a neighborhood arts organization. The films aren’t my style, to be frank, but I love that I am aware of the event. In fact, many of the updates from public records are maddeningly unclear. Many others are so trivial that lots of readers wouldn’t consider them news. The health department visited the Chinese restaurant down the street and found the ice-scooper stuck handle-side down in the ice machine! Some lady on Yelp said she didn’t like the tapas restaurant. Someone just flagged down a police car, but EveryBlock has no idea what it was about. To this EveryBlock’s Dan O’Neil says: “Are there gaps in EveryBlock’s knowledge? Yes. Are there gaps in human knowledge in real life? Yes! There’s a comment field, help us out!” Is this a newswire of completed stories? No, this is something different. (But it is a complete publishing of the public records your taxpayer funded agencies make available, O’Neil points out.) To be honest, I like reading that kind of stuff. Maybe you do too. As O’Neil says, “we do have a wider definition of what news is.” Not everyone feels satisfied with the level of detail being provided or the absence of filtering the signal from the noise. It’s hard to imagine machines replacing the human storytelling that journalists provide. The machines could augment that journalism, though, and there’s lots of room for them to do an even better job of it. Where Humans and Machine Work Together EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty told us in January that the organization had hired a full-time editor to research various government agency codes in order to articulate public records in a more human-readable way. “It’s one thing to publish public records; it’s another to make sense of them,” he said. EveryBlock’s O’Neil told us that editor’s name is Paul Wilson and said Paul put in hours interviewing Portland municipal staff in order to translate the data fields the city publishes into the format EveryBlock now publishes. O’Neil says those municipal staff members are unsung heroes, especially Rick Nixon of the Bureau of Technology Services. “It’s a very complex endeavor to publish regularly updated data,” O’Neil says. “Portland has excellent meta data and contact info, but a lot of times it’s hard to get to the expertise and for those experts to explain it to someone else. When it’s not your job to answer phone calls from web developers and tell them what spreadsheets mean, it’s tough. We’re in a weird gap time. In the future the expectations and questions we bring to data will be more common and it will be a part of peoples’ job descriptions – but the people in Portland should be commended for already really trying to figure out what these things mean.” Portland makes a lot of this data officially available as part of its brand-new CivicApps program, but EveryBlock worked with the county restaurant inspection agency to get that data in particular through other channels. “We’re cycling through 5,000 restaurants on a nightly basis,” O’Neil says, “and the restaurant inspections in Portland are the most plain language content of all the cities we look at. It’s great to see those people speaking in human and not just municipal language.” Home-Team Geeks “What will be really exciting is to see what Portland’s indigenous community of developers and web journos do with the content the city is making available,” says Steve Suo, editor and executive VP of Portland’s real-time, white-label EveryBlock competitor NozzlMedia . Nozzl is made up of long-time newspaper guys, now building something for the future. (See our write up of Nozzl: ” Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters “.) EveryBlock’s arrival in town happened just days after the city’s celebrated opening of a substantial amount of new data through CivicApps, and with help from the city. Nozzl thinks it can do a better job of putting this data into context. “The more eyes you have on the data, the more insights we’ll see brought to bear,” Suo says. “We’re currently adding all the same Portland data for our Portland metro news customers,” Nozzl co-founder and CEO Steve Woodward says. Woodward says that in addition to prioritizing context and serving white-label customers, Nozzl pulls from more sources of data, covers a broader geographic area, and focuses on real-time data. “EveryBlock will tell you what crimes occurred near your home over the last several days. Nozzl will give you information about that siren you hear at this very moment.” EveryBlock’s O’Neil basically says bring it on , pointing to Portland’s mere five minute delay on 911 call data and his site’s real-time bulletin feature. These are remarkable times. There are services like EveryBlock, Nozzl, Outside.in , Fwix and more all battling it out to best serve us users with new and innovative ways to drill down into more details about our immediate physical surroundings. EveryBlock is the biggest player in the game, though, and our awareness of hyper-local news here in tech-savvy Portland has probably been changed for good. Discuss