J-kanban IT资讯 » O'Reilly Radar

Permalink for 'Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined?'

15:49

Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined?

I have to confess that one of the social networking tools I find most valuable is Goodreads. (It's a close second to Twitter, and way ahead of Facebook, Friendfeed, or Dopplr.) Unlike twitter, where I follow hundreds of people (possible because of twitter's minimalism) and am followed by thousands, on Goodreads, I follow and am followed by a small circle of friends and people whose taste in books I trust. As someone who loves books, it is the pinnacle of private social networking for me.

So it was with some interest that I read about Amazon's acquisition of Shelfari. Much of the resulting commentary has focused on the problems this poses for LibraryThing, in which Amazon also has an invesment (via their recent purchase of Abebooks.) I'm a bit surprised that the articles have seemingly ignored the fact that Goodreads appears to be the market leader, at least based on data from compete.com:

Of course, that could change quickly if Amazon throws their muscle behind Shelfari and integrates it into their overall service. And there's the rub: we're entering a period of Web 2.0 consolidation. After all, web 2.0 is all about network effects in applications that get better the more people use them. And that means that companies with dominant share tend to get more dominant over time; that dominance need not be organic to start with (though it helps.) Over time, I expect to see companies who've achieved dominant market share in one market segment to use it to dominate a related segment.

But here's the counter: open and interoperable applications, including open social networks. When are companies with "point applications" of social networks going to realize that their best option, in the face of inevitable competition from big companies looking to dominate their market, is to join forces via shared social networks?

Some of my friends prefer LibraryThing. Others may prefer Shelfari. But I only network with those on Goodreads because that's the service I ended up using first. What a shame that I can't see what my friends on LibraryThing and Shelfari might be reading! I'd love to see a firm commitment to cross-application connectivity, with the social network as infrastructure rather than application.

This applies to other specialized social networks as well. Sorry, even though I'm an investor in Tripit, I'm not going to try to rebuild the social network I've already got on dopplr, just because Tripit thinks they'd better add this hot functionality to what was already a unique and interesting product.

I've argued for years that one of the critical architectural decisions we can make about Web 2.0 applications is whether they are built on the "one ring to rule them all" model that we saw with Microsoft Windows and Office, a game where network effects drive a winner-takes-all marketplace, or the Unix/Internet model of "small pieces loosely joined," in which cooperating applications come together to build value greater than any of the pieces do alone.

We're entering the critical phase of that decision. Application developers need to embrace the "small pieces loosely joined" model, or they will be picked off one by one by dominant companies who've already reached scale, and who are practicing the "one ring" model. As Benjamin Franklin said during the American Revolution, "Gentlemen, we must all hang together, or we shall assuredly all hang separately." Now is a good time for LibraryThing and Goodreads to start talking about interoperability.

Permalink for 'The Google Alphabet, 2008 edition'

14:08

The Google Alphabet, 2008 edition

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

Google has added Google Suggest to their homepage. When Google suggest first-launched Buster McLeod (AKA Erik Benson) checked the suggested term for each letter to create the Google Alphabet, 2004 edition. When Google News Suggest launched in 2006 I did the same. Now in honor of Google Suggest graduating from labs here is the annotated Google Alphabet, 2008 edition:

A = amazon
B = bebo
C = craigslist (in 2004 this was cnn)
D = dictionary
E = ebay
F = facebook (in 2004 this was firefox's turf)
G = gmail
H = hotmail
I = ikea
J = john lewis (the first result is for John Lewis, a UK retailer that I had never heard of till now)
K = kelly blue book
L = limewire
M = myspace
N = nbc olympics
O = olympics
P = photobucket (over Paypal and beating out 2004's Paris HIlton)
Q = quotes (the first result is for The Quotations Page; I hadn't realized how popular quotes were)
R = runescape
S = sears (I am impressed that Sears is able to beat second-place Skype; 2004 winner Spybot is gone)
T = target
U = utube (you know your site is popular when a misspelling is a top searched term; Google's spell corrector doesn't even try to stop this misspelling)
V = verizon wireless
W = wikipedia (www.youtube.com was ninth on this list)
X = xbox (the only Microsoft product to make the list this year; hotmail was a part of the alphabet in 2004 and gmail was not oops, hotmail is clearly still on the list)
Y = youtube (not a surprise with all the foreshadowing, but this does mean that Yahoo! is no longer on the list)
Z = zip codes

How does Google's algorithms choose the alphabet, err top term? According to the FAQ it's primarily popularity. There must be some other unnamed factors because some of the Google Trends matchups don't support that.

Here's Yahoo! vs. YouTube. Based on the chart it's not surprising that YouTube has come out on top.

y trends chart

Its no surprise that Spybot is gone, but I would have guessed that Skype would come out above Sears.

s trends chart

The Olympics beat out second-place Orkut right now, but I wonder how long it will retain the top spot before coming back again in 2010.

People are more likely to look for free stuff than the news, not surprising that Craigslist is ahead of CNN:

It's been a long, close battle, but Photobucket has definitely beaten out Paypal and Paris Hilton. Paris will probably be apart of the alphabet every so often when she gets a spike in notoriety.

Permalink for 'Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map'

9:27

Flickr's Burning Man Map Uses Open Street Map

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

Permalink for 'Improving Highschool Science Education'

19:00

Improving Highschool Science Education

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

As I read this fascinating NYTimes piece on a Florida teacher covering evolution, I was reminded of an interesting email exchange I had recently with Kevin Padian, a UC Berkeley professor in the Dept of Integrative Biology, and curator of the UC Museum of Paleontology. He was at Science Foo Camp, and afterward wrote in email:

My area is evolution, the most misunderstood concept in all of science. Two websites that help the public with this are at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology (evolution.berkeley.edu) and the National Center for Science Education (www.ncseweb.org) (our ExecDir Genie Scott was one of the other participants at camp). I'm in the process of constructing a website on major transitions in evolution to which scientists can contribute, and which will be available to all teachers, students, and textbook writers. We really want to get this stuff into textbooks so that the creationist assertions that we have no evidence for microevolution can be countered. I've outlined a strategy for this in an article (PDF).

Kevin was kind enough to send me a copy of his paper. His thesis is that highschools react to college demands, so providing great free resources for college textbook authors will raise the bar for highschool textbooks. He points to a new type of illustration, the evogram (caution: long, see also this PDF of the relevant slide), which clearly shows evolutionary continuity over both organisms and time. He suggests evograms as a useful addition to the educational toolbox.

My reaction was that I didn't think targeting colleges would work:

I enjoyed your paper. I disagree with your pivotal assumption, though, that if colleges up their game then the high-schools will have to follow. That's just not the case--you only have to look to computer science to see how CS has been gutted at the high-school level. It's as though math were taught in high-schools as "how to use a calculator". Despite our jests, math isn't that bad in high schools--there's still serious math education happening even if it could be done better, but there's precious little serious computing education at all.

Kevin stuck to his guns, though:

Interesting observation, but I think you're making a slightly different (and highly valid) point: that "simplification" for lower grade levels can mean "dumbing down" or even "subvert crucial skills" (like using calculators for everything because they're not making kids learn multiplication tables, estimates, and so on). As a result, the whole structure of CS -- what kids need to know to be literate about CS at the HS level -- is lost. That's exactly what happens when the whole science of macroevolution becomes reduced to making "molds and casts" of fossils instead of teaching concepts about biodiversity through time.
But I will stick to my thesis: K-12 curricula won't include this stuff unless it's taught at the college level. Everything is downward-driven. High schools structure their course offerings based on what will get their kids into colleges. Even at the university level we structure our major requirements for many science departments based on what medical and professional schools want as preparation. It doesn't necessarily mean that if something is in a college text it will be taught in high school, but I'm making a different point: if it's not an important part of the college curriculum, it definitely won't be taught in K-12.

PS: take a look at our UCMP website, evolution.berkeley.edu to see what can be done informally to circumvent the usual textbook-curriculum-standards bottleneck.

I now agree with Kevin—if something's critical at college level, high schools will want to teach it and teach it well. I also love the idea of providing free educational materials that make it easy for textbooks and teachers to cover a topic well. It reminds me of csunplugged.org (created by Kiwis!) that Google funded to be publicly available at no cost. I'd love to see more organized efforts to improve the high-school and college education of science (and computer science) through small reusable teaching resources. Anyone know of some?

Permalink for 'Panamaps: A Multi-Layered Map'

7:54

Panamaps: A Multi-Layered Map

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

A map is valuable for its ability to convey information. Too much and its illeligible; too little and the map isn't very useful. Layers are used by cartographers to make maps more usable. Layers are easy to turn on and off on digital maps, but it's difficult to have multiple ones on a physical map. The recently-released Panamaps are able to have three layers on a single map. You can get Panamaps for Chicago and New York City. The layers include neighborhoods, transit and streets.

The maps are very cool and are very solid feeling. As you tilt the map you see a different layer. At certain angles you can see two layers at once. The technology behind the layers is fairly advanced as they explain:

1. Artwork for three views of Manhattan is created and optimized for visual performance. This requires a detailed understanding of typeface, line orientation, color contrast and a host of additional subtle but significant design concerns.

2. The three Images are interlaced by alternating horizontal strips from each. The resulting compound image is calibrated to a specially designed polymer lens substrate. Lenses contain between 60 to 200 micro-lenses per inch, depending on the desired outcome. This is mounted to a backing, die cut and packaged.

3. The underlying technology essentially fools the human eye. By rotating the map, the angle of viewing is changed and one of the resulting three layers can be viewed.

Panamaps are produced by Urban Mapping, a geo-data company known for its neighborhood and transit data (Radar post). The company sent me a map of each city. I will definitely be taking my Panamap with me around Manhattan when I am there for Web 2.0 Expo. Neighborhoods, streets, and transit are the most sensible layers for a city map, but what would really get me excited would be the ability to create Panamaps for any set of layers - perhaps your favorite Platial or Google MyMap of a city. Ian White, the CEO, didn't think the economics of this idea would work, but I think that there could be a real market for this.

Permalink for 'A Graphic Designer Puts Print on Demand Through Its Paces'

2:23

A Graphic Designer Puts Print on Demand Through Its Paces

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

A report on the UnderConsideration blog outlines a fascinating experiment called Dear Lulu. From the blog coverage:

This past July, fourteen students attended a two-day workshop at Germany's Hochschule Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences with Prof. Frank Philippin and London-based designer James Goggin. The brief, as explained by Goggin:
"My plan for the workshop is to investigate the visible and tangible parameters of graphic design — type specimens, halftone screens and, in particular, colour tests and calibration charts — and make a book of our own self-produced tests which we will send to print on Friday afternoon using the online print-on-demand system Lulu. The book project will therefore act as a colour/type/pattern test of the very system with which it is produced. "Print-on-demand" is an increasingly important production system which can serve to make us designers rethink the impact our profession has on the environment and to question the often wasteful print volumes and production methods requested of us by our clients. Graphic designers, and especially students, have a chance to use and subvert these relatively new (and fairly cheap) technological systems to our advantage."

The result of the workshop is Dear Lulu, a fantastic and imaginative resource that puts digital printing to the test through a Do-It-Yourself presentation that fits right in with philosophy of print on demand that makes it such an alluring proposition for designers looking to publish with little financial risk and with pretty decent results in return.

The report is not only a fascinating analysis of how far Print on Demand has come, but also a great tool for evaluating printers in general, as the output of the process is a book designed to stress the capabilities of any printer. As Amrita Chandra wrote on twitter in response to my post there, "what is great is you can send the book to other printers for comparison."

Food for thought for research firms: what if the output of a research firm were not just a report but a tool for putting a company's own systems through its paces, evaluating against the standards outlined in the report?

Permalink for 'Annals of the Patently Absurd'

2:06

Annals of the Patently Absurd

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

Microsoft has received a patent on a "new and improved" Page-Up and Page-Down system. Timothy D. Sellers et al. was awarded the patent on August 19, 2008 for a "Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments."

Abstract for United States Patent 7,415,666

A method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed. In one implementation, pressing a Page Down or Page Up keyboard key/button allows a user to begin at any starting vertical location within a page, and navigate to that same location on the next or previous page. For example, if a user is viewing a page starting in a viewing area from the middle of that page and ending at the bottom, a Page Down command will cause the next page to be shown in the viewing area starting at the middle of the next page and ending at the bottom of the next page. Similar behavior occurs when there is more than one column of pages being displayed in a row.

Full text of 7,415,666

Perhaps patent examiners are unable to tell what's obvious or not because the very language in which patents are written is so obscure. Try parsing this sentence:

A document viewing component, such as in the form of a control hosted in a program, controls the scrolling operation, such as by containing a scroll control.

Most likely this twisted language is the work product of Workman Nydeggar, the patent attorneys on this one. No doubt they are responsible for this closing flourish:

While the invention is susceptible to various modifications and alternative constructions, certain illustrated embodiments thereof are shown in the drawings and have been described above in detail. It should be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the invention to the specific forms disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, alternative constructions, and equivalents falling within the spirit and scope of the invention.

Patent 7,415,666 was submitted in March 2005 so it took three years for the patent office to take in all this mumbo-jumbo and decide to give its approval. So if the USPTO is going to approve nearly every patent -- and I'd love to see a list of rejected ones -- why does it take three years to do so?

Also, 7,415,666 was not the only good news for Timothy D. Sellers of Bellevue WA. This week, he had three patents approved, upping his own total to nine. He re-invented the toolbar, among other things.

Thanks to Richard Forno's of InfoWarrior for his posting to Dave Farber's IP list.

Permalink for 'Photosynth is Released and Moves to Virtual Earth'

13:00

Photosynth is Released and Moves to Virtual Earth

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

smith tower synth

Live Labs has released Photosynth, the 3D-esque photo collection viewer that it first tech-previewed in 2006 (Radar post). With this release any Vista or XP user running FireFox or IE can create, view, and share Synths (Mac support is planned). I suggest exploring the Synths. There are some amazing ones available like Smith Tower in Seattle (home to the Photosynth team), Macchu Picchu and even scenes from World of Warcraft.

There are several controls and views associated with Synths. The 3D leaf brings you to a view where you zoom through the Synth either by clicking them or with arrows at the edges (shown above). In this view you will occasionally see a ring appear you can use that to rotate that view. From here you can also see the point cloud of images, which on quality Synths will reconstruct the original structure (to get this view use the Crtl button). The +/- controls will advance you though the pics. The play button will move through the photos in chronological order in a timed fashion (you can also use "." to advance one at a time, use ";" to go backwards). The dotted leaf takes you to the photview which let's you zoom in on any individual photo and really take advantage of the Seadragon image streaming technology (show above).

pic view

You'll have to download some code from Photosynth to view and create Synths. The install includes an ActiveX control for viewing in IE, a Firefox extension and the Synth creation software. After getting an account on their site you are ready to make a Synth! Making a Synth is fairly painless. Simply click "Make a New Synth" on the site and your new desktop software will open. Point it at your photos, name it and the software will do the rest. There are two things happening right now. One, all of your photos are being uploaded to their community site (all Synths are public). In parallel your Synth is being created on your machine. It generally takes longer to upload your photos than to make the Synth (this seemed to be true for me). Both of my Synths were done in under an hour (on an older laptop running XP); it used to take days on a cluster to get it done. Microsoft is using your machine to do the heavy lifting -- very smart!

There's an art to making a Synth, one that I apparently have no talent for as none of mine have turned out very well. You'll notice that all Synths have a "Synthy" percentage attached to them. The higher the number (up to 100%) the more pictures were used to create the core Synth. I tried making two (one of my house and one of an object) neither had a high Synthy value. Photosynth depends on the texture of the objects to construct a Synth. I do not know if the problem was the lack of texture, my camera, or the photographer (there's a guide which can help you).

Choosing the license for your Synth can be done via a dropdown box. It can be licensed under Creative Commons. The team hopes that the CC licenses get used. after you create your Synth you can geolocate it on a map. It's a long way from integrated with Live Maps, but it's a start. You can also embed Synths.

Photosynth's release is bringing on a number of personnel moves. Blaise Agüera y Arcas was the architect of the Live Labs and Photosynth. He founded Seadragon and it was their technology that made Photosynth possible. Blaise will be moving to work for Erik Jorgensen (who used to run the Virtual Earth team and now runs all of MSN) as the MSN Architect. Blaise was also just awarded a TR35 award this week -- congrats! We can expect Synths to show up throughout the MSN network (this could be a big boon to MSNBC).

David Gedye, the Principal Group Manager, and the other members of the Photosynth team are moving to the Virtual Earth team. They will be working in the 3D Imagery group (Radar post) so we can expect some Synthing of the Birds Eye view images (I hope).

Live Labs' release of Photosynth as a product is very significant for Microsoft. Google has long been praised for its integrated research and product development approach while Microsoft has acknowledged that it could use MSR, its research arm, more efficiently. Live Labs, led by Gary Flake, filled with researchers and championed by Ray Ozzie, is one of the ways that Microsoft is trying to bring MSR over to the product. It marks the first successful transition of one of their projects over to product.

Photosynth has two immediate futures. One lies as a standalone product where users will be able to construct 3D models of their homes and objects . The other lies as a backend technology that will be used to supplement Virtual Earth's 3D efforts. Photosynth will have achieved its promise when these two paths are merged and our Synths are being used to populate their 3D world.

Permalink for 'Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web?'

4:26

Is Linking to Yourself the Future of the Web?

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

Last year, Bill Janeway really got my attention (pdf) when he noted that "over time, Wall Street 'firms began to trade against their clients for their own account, such that now, the direct investment activities of a firm like Goldman Sachs dwarf their activities on behalf of outside customers.'" As I wrote in my blog post at the time, Trading for Their Own Account, "I thought, whither Google, Yahoo! and Amazon?"

At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

This thought re-surfaced when Techcrunch launched Crunchbase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results).

Journalism professor Jay Rosen noticed this too, and wrote the tweet that sparked this post:

@NYTimesComm Could you try to find out for me why Week in Review pieces do not link out even when vital to the story? [is.gd]

Follow Jay's link and you come to a story that indeed doesn't have any outbound links, except to other Times stories. Now, I understand the value of linking to other articles on your own site -- everyone does it -- but to do so exclusively is a small tear in the fabric of the web, a small tear that will grow much larger if it remains unchecked.

Business Week is also getting into the act, per a New York Times article entitled Topic Pages to Be Hub of New BusinessWeek Site:

The core of Business Exchange is hundreds of topic pages, on subjects as broad as the housing market and as narrow as the Boeing 787. Plans call for the number of topic pages to grow quickly into the thousands. (The first one created, which may or may not be in the public version of Business Exchange, was “BlackBerry vs iPhone.”)

Want to place a bet whether articles in the magazine will link exclusively to these "topic pages?" At least Business Week plans to have outbound links from the topic pages (Crunchbase does this too, just siphoning off the first step in the link stream, unlike the NYT roach-motel links.)

Each Business Exchange topic page links to articles and blog posts from myriad other sources, including BusinessWeek’s competitors, with the contents updated automatically by a Web crawler. Nearly all traditional news organizations offer only their own material, spurning the role of aggregator as an invitation to readers to leave their sites.

When this trend spreads (and I say "when", not "if"), this will be a tax on the utility of the web that must be counterbalanced by the utility of the intervening pages. If they are really good, with lots of useful, curated data that you wouldn't easily find elsewhere, this may be an acceptable tax. In fact, they may even be beneficial, and a real way to increase the value of the site to its readers. If they are purely designed to capture additional clicks, they will be a degradation of the web's fundamental currency, much like the black hat search engine pages that construct link farms out of search engine results.

I'd like to put out two guidelines for anyone adopting this "link to myself" strategy:

Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.)
Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.

The web is a great example of a system that works because most sites create more value than they capture. Maybe the tragedy of the commons in its future can be averted. Maybe not. It's up to each of us.

22:16

Ignite Boston 4

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

Permalink for 'Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart'

1:09

Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

The New York Times today has a fascinating profile of Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, entitled Is This The Most Trusted Man in America? The article is a wonderful celebration of the person and the spirit of the show he's created.

But perhaps more interestingly in the internet context, this article is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of journalism. It shows how the informality and attitude that we take as characteristic of blogging can be combined with the tough-mindedness, research, and craft that is displayed by the best investigative reporters.

Let's start with passion about stuff that matters, something top bloggers and top journalists ought to have in their genes:

MR. STEWART describes his job as “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room and points out that “The Daily Show” mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — “the stuff we find most interesting,” as he said in an interview at the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most “agita,” the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his “morning cup of sadness.” And they’ve done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.
“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

Much like blogging, a key to the show's success is its authentic, personal voice, and its ability to synthesize news with viewpoint:

Ms. Corn [the show's executive co-producer] noted that while things “may be exaggerated on the show, it’s grounded in the way Jon really feels.”
“He really does care,” she added. “He’s a guy who says what he means.”
Unlike many comics today, Mr. Stewart does not trade in trendy hipsterism or high-decibel narcissism. While he possesses Johnny Carson’s talent for listening and George Carlin’s gift for observation, his comedy remains rooted in his informed reactions to what Tom Wolfe once called “the irresistibly lurid carnival of American life,” the weird happenings in “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque” country.
“Jon’s ability to consume and process information is invaluable,” said Mr. Colbert. He added that Mr. Stewart is “such a clear thinker” that he’s able to take “all these data points of spin and transparent falsehoods dished out in the form of political discourse” and “fish from that what is the true meaning, what are red herrings, false leads,” even as he performs the ambidextrous feat of “making jokes about it” at the same time.

But there's also a lesson for bloggers that the show, however personal, is finely honed, with lots of research:

“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”

And:

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”
The writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer of the show, put it, stories that “make us angry in a whole new way.” By lunchtime, Mr. Stewart (who functions as the show’s managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3 p.m. a script is in; at 4:15, Mr. Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, sound bites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites — which can be intense, newspaper-deadlinelike affairs — before a 6 o’clock taping with a live studio audience.
What the staff is always looking for, Mr. Stewart said, are “those types of stories that can, almost like the guy in ‘The Green Mile’ ” — the Stephen King story and film in which a character has the apparent ability to heal others by drawing out their ailments and pain — “suck in all the toxins and allow you to do something with it that is palatable.”

What a call to action! What a way forward for all of those trying to understand the future of news! Point of view fused with fact checking, bluntness and informality fused with ruthless editing, a humanistic vision that acts as a filter to make sure that the stories covered actually matter!

Permalink for 'Why We're Failing in Math and Science'

2:23

Why We're Failing in Math and Science

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone.

In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and science with a few simple stories.

Last week, Robert Bruce Thompson, author of An Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, wrote a guest blog post on makezine.com, Home Science Under Attack, which told the sad story of how a retired chemist was arrested and his lab confiscated because he was doing experiments:

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents. Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's not accused of aiding terrorists, synthesizing explosives, nor even of making illegal fireworks. Deeb fell afoul of the Massachusetts authorities for ... doing experiments.
Authorities concede that the chemicals found in Deeb's basement lab were no more hazardous than typical household cleaning products. Despite that, authorities confiscated "all potentially hazardous chemicals" (which is to say the chemicals in Deeb's lab) from his home, and called in a hazardous waste cleanup company to test the chemicals and clean up the lab.
Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for Marlboro, stated, "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation."
Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman's words into plain English: "Mr. Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals..."

I forwarded this message to Dave Farber's IP list (which is now searchable via markmail, the amazing mailing list search engine!), and got back some great stories that I wanted to share.

Armando Stettner wrote one story that illustrates just how much our culture has changed. His story also involves the cops, but here, they understand and support science. Too bad that was 40+ years ago:

When I was about 13 or so, I also had a chemistry set in my basement. I was living on Long Island - Freeport, to be exact. I also remember the hobby shop with ALL sorts of glassware and little labeled bottles of chemicals. I had some really neat stuff: all sorts of chemicals - I seem to remember potassium ferrocyanide with which I did some chemoluminescence (I think that's one of the ingredients), sodium in liquid form, various acids, a few rolls of magnesium - not to mention all the paraphernalia: lots of pyrex stuff, triple beam balances, etc. All the chemicals were neatly arranged in this cabinet.
One day, I had mixed a concoction and was carrying it (premixed!) in a tin coffee can. Myself and a friend were carrying the stuff to the train tracks to test it out (light it) where it was relatively safe. The stuff started getting warm but I thought it was the sun heading the can up. Then it started getting REALLY warm. As it got hot, I dropped it in the middle of the street. The stuff flashed over. It was VERY cool.
But, I decided I didn't want to stay around any more and left.
Unfortunately for me, this all occurred in front of the house of someone who knew me (she was a 'friend' of my parents). She called the cops.
The Freeport police came to my house questioned me and my parents, joined in a little while by some county detectives. They were very polite. We took them down to the basement where I showed them all the stuff. The uniformed police left and the detectives continued to look at all the stuff and ask questions. They called somebody to ask some advice. It turns out they called the county labs. The guy got off the phone and asked 'you're not making any drugs down here are you?" I said no!! He smiled - he winked at my parents. Then he said the most unexpected thing: he said the gang at the labs offered to give me a tour of the labs anytime I wanted.
Then they left asking me to be careful. For me, it was actually a positive experience.
Today, I'm sure I'd face a visit from the Hazmat teams and the DHS. And, because of the triple beam balance, my house (or my parents') would be confiscated under the forfeiture rules.

At Maker Faire earlier this year, Robert Bruce Thompson gave a talk (video unfortunately truncated at both ends) that highlighted how attitudes towards chemistry have changed since he was a kid, starting with a tour of the powerful chemistry sets available in 1964 (courtesy of the Sears Catalog), and tracing the dumbing down and rising fear of liability that doomed them, until, as Kevin Kelly noted in a recent review of Robert's book, we reached "the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain 'No Chemicals!'" (Review sent out in Cool Tools email, up on the Cool Tools site soon.)

Why are we failing at math and science? Because it isn't fun any more. When you put safety on the highest altar, what do you give up? When fear of lawsuits -- not to mention fear of technology -- drives product design, marketing, and public policy, you eliminate science at its roots, in the natural experimentation of kids who want to know how the world works.

Permalink for 'The U.S. iTunes App Store'

22:12

The U.S. iTunes App Store

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

With the iTunes App store now over a month old, I decided to look closely at data from the U.S. store over the last three weeks. While sales numbers are not publicly available, Apple publishes overall as well as category-level rankings. There are currently just over 1,800 (paid and free) applications in the App store, double what it was three weeks ago. Games is the largest category with about 500 applications (roughly 27% of all apps), up 87% from three weeks ago. Puzzles, Arcade, and Board games are the three largest Gaming subcategories:

The fastest-growing category, Education, more than tripled over the last three weeks.

The average price per paid app is around $5.50, with 94% of apps priced at $10 or less. Prices vary considerably by category with expensive apps skewing the average price in a category: a single application priced at $449 drove up the average price of Finance apps to more than $22. Excluding the top and bottom 1% priced apps, the average price of an iPhone application is about $5.20. Similarly, by removing the top and bottom priced app in each category, we get a more reasonable estimate of the average price per app within a category (click here for details).

The Book category is comprised mostly of ebooks and while there are over 150 such "apps", it was the only category not represented in the Top 100 rankings:

In contrast, more than 1 in 10 of all Music apps were among the Top 100 Paid Apps:

Looking beyond the Top 100 paid apps to all paid iPhone applications, the best-performing categories (in terms of popularity) are Music, Weather, Navigation, Lifestyle, and Entertainment (click here for details).

On average, app providers have slightly over one app each, with 25 (out of the close to 1,100) providers accounting for about 21% of all paid apps:

Most providers had 0 or 1 app listed in the Top 100 Paid Applications, with the following exceptions: Hottrix, Pangea Software, Inc., Phase2 Media, telience.com, and Electronic Arts all had 2 apps in the Top 100 list. For now, the cohort of web developers who dominate the Facebook application platform have been unable to make similar inroads in the iPhone platform. Perhaps it's time to brush up on Cocoa and Objective-C?

Permalink for 'Landmark Case Upholds Open Source Licenses'

10:14

Landmark Case Upholds Open Source Licenses

» ‎ O'Reilly Radar

The U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit has issued a wondrously clear and unambiguous opinion (pdf) that supports the enforceability of open source and public licenses. It is great news for user and contributor communities, and their lawyers. Nothing that I've seen posted so far actually quotes any of the juicy parts of the opinion, so I've included some of that.

The Back Story:

The software in the case is licensed under Artistic License 1.0, which was written by Larry Wall in the late 80s. The defendants allegedly copied the software into their own products without complying with key Artistic License requirements—they did not include the original authors’ names, copyright notices, references to the COPYING file, information about sources of the original files (e.g., SourceForge), or a description of how the original files had been modified.

The plaintiff asked the court for an injunction prohibiting distribution of the defendants’ products, arguing that by violating these license conditions, the defendants violated the copyright in the software.

In a nutshell (and omitting legal fine points), the decision under appeal denied the injunction, holding that copyright protection is not available for software distributed free-of-charge under an open source license.

This truly shocked the open source, free software, and public license community, and a coalition of groups led by Creative Commons filed a “friend of the court” brief (pdf) in support of the appeal. (In the interests of full disclosure—Allison Randal and I worked on the brief on behalf of The Perl Foundation.)

The Ruling:

The appellate court reversed the lower court’s decision in an opinion that open source lawyers have dreamed about but never thought that we would see.

The court paid tribute to the diversity and importance of the open source, free software, and public license community:

“Public licenses, often referred to as “open source” licenses, are used
by artists, authors, educators, software developers, and scientists who
wish to create collaborative projects and to dedicate certain works to
the public…Open source licensing has become a widely used method
of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in
a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades
ago.”

And after noting that “lack of money changing hands” does not equate to lack of economic value, it wholeheartedly endorsed enforcement of the Artistic 1.0 license:

“The clear language of the Artistic License creates conditions to protect
the economic rights at issue in the granting of a public license. These
conditions govern the rights to modify and distribute the computer
programs and files included in the downloadable software package. The
attribution and modification transparency requirements directly serve to
drive traffic to the open source incubation page and to inform downstream
users of the project, which is a significant economic goal of the copyright
holder that the law will enforce.”

Perhaps the happiest aspect of the opinion is the assured and sophisticated discussion of open source processes, projects, and economic value. Although the briefs filed by the plaintiff and by Creative Commons undoubtedly assisted the court’s analysis, it seems safe to conclude that the court was already aware of the significance of open source—yet another sign that the “movement” actually has come of age.