- Page Speed (Google Code) — an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source browser extension, and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools.
- What Commons Do We Wish For? (John Battelle) — trying to understand what the Internet would look like if we don’t pay attention to our core shared values. Excellent piece from jbat, who is thinking and writing in preparation for another book.
- The Trouble with Popularity — this blog post on StackOverflow does a great job of explaining why moderators are necessary, and why it’s not in everyone’s interest to give them what they want. Sad to see this come out just as Yahoo! continues to gut and fillet Flickr, which used to be the benchmark for all things community.
- The Ongoing Fight Against GPL Enforcement — interesting! Software Freedom Conservancy, who have pursued several cases against manufacturers who ship GPLed code but do not release their source and modifications to it, have used busybox as a fulcrum for their GPL code release lever. Manufacturers may be attempting to replace busybox with non-GPLed code to take away the fulcrum. In other news, engineering metaphors are like a massless body at light speed before the bigbang: unknowable.
"community" entries
Documentation strategy for a small software project: launching VoIP Drupal introductions
VoIP Drupal is a window onto the promises and challenges faced by a new open source project, including its documentation. A meeting at at MIT this week worked out some long-term plans for firming up VoIP Drupal's documentation and other training materials.
Four short links: 3 February 2012
Investigating Page Speed, The Web Commons, Community and Popularity, and GPL Enforcement
Four short links: 31 January 2012
Entertainment Industry Booming, Exposing Data, Login Data, and QR Codes
- The Sky is Rising — TechDirt’s Mike Masnick has written (and made available for free download) an excellent report on the entertainment industry’s numbers and business models. Must read if you have an opinion on SOPA et al.
- Tennis Australia Exposes Match Analytics — Served from IBM’s US-based private cloud, the updated SlamTracker web application pulls together 39 million points of data collated from all four Grand Slam tournaments over the past seven years to provide insights into a player’s style of play and progress. The analytics application also provides a player’s likelihood of beating their opponent through each round of the two-week tournament and the ‘key to the match’ required for them to win. “We gave our data to IBM, said, ‘Here we go, that’s 10 years of scores and stats, matches and players’,” said Samir Mahir, CIO at Tennis Australia. Data as way to engage fans. (via Steve O’Grady)
- Data Monday: Logins and Passwords (Luke Wroblewski) — Password recovery is the number one request to help desks for intranets that don’t have single sign-on portal capabilities.
- QR Codes: Bad Idea or Terrible Idea? (Kevin Marks) — People have a problem finding your URL. You post a QR Code. Now they have 2 problems. I prefer to think of QR codes as a prototype of what Matt Jones calls “the robot-readable world”–not so much the technology we really imagine we will be deploying when we build our science fictiony future.
Radar is now on Google+ (officially this time)
O'Reilly Radar is extending coverage through Google+.
We've got big ideas for Radar's new Google+ page. For starters, we see it as a two-way channel, an experimentation hub, and a place to surface intriguing content.
Wrap-up from FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google
Mixtures of grassroots content generation and unique expertise have existed, and more models will be found. Understanding the points of commonality between the systems will help us develop such models.
FLOSS Manuals books published after three-day sprint
Joining the pilgrimage that all institutions are making toward wider data use, FLOSS Manuals is exposing more and more of the writing process.
Day two of FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google Summer of Code summit
As a relatively conventional book, the KDE manual was probably a little easier to write (but also probably less fun) than the more high-level approaches taken by some other teams that were trying to demonstrate to potential customers that their projects were worth adopting.
Day one of FLOSS Manuals book sprint at Google Summer of Code summit
Four teams at Google launched into endeavors that will lead, less than 72 hours from now, to complete books on four open source projects.
FLOSS Manuals sprint starts at Google Summer of Code summit
Four free software projects have each sent three to five volunteers to write books about the projects this week. Along the way we'll all learn about the group writing process and the particular use of book sprints to make documentation for free software.
Top Stories: September 19-23, 2011
True data over big data, community building through data, and the choreography of digital design.
This week on O'Reilly: Alistair Croll explained why true data is more important than big data, we looked at how BuzzData is building community around datasets, and Liza Daly explained the connection between digital content and choreography.