- Mobile Overtaking Web — provocatively packaged extrapolations of ComScore and similar numbers to conclude that Americans spend more time interacting with mobile apps than with web sites. I’m sure you could beat an iPhone developer to death with the error bars.
- Best Privacy Policy Ever — satiric privacy policy from a Firefox plugin.
- The Time for Libraries is Now — forceful presentation on the need for librarians (aka “information professionals”) in an age of excess information.
- Google 2011 vs Microsoft 1995 (Nelson Minar) — interesting analysis which prompted Andy Baio‘s comment Google will be in trouble if their strategy succeeds, or if it doesn’t.
"libraries" entries
Four short links: 25 January 2012
Mobile v Web, Great Privacy Policy, Libraries Now, and Google's Social Strategy
Tools of Change for Publishing Newsletter: January 11, 2012
Five things that shaped publishing in 2011, Louis CK's download experiment, DRM-free as a competitive advantage.
We take a look at the five things that shaped publishing in 2011 (many of which will shape the industry in 2012 as well). Plus, how service and ease of use can trump piracy.
Four short links: 29 November 2011
Reconstructing People, Digital Preservation Costs, Open Source Everything, and Coding Education
- Reconstructing My Grandfather (JP Rangaswami) — this is how libraries will be used in the future, by ordinary people (i.e., not professional researchers) reconstructing their families. See my library essay for more thoughts on this.
- Physical Conservation vs Digitisation for Preservation (Leeds) — they chose deliberately compromised paper materials (acid-riddled paper) and found that it still would take 50 years for digitisation to pay off. Digitisation, even destructive, is bloody expensive compared to just keeping the paper ticking along.
- Open Source Everything (Tom Preston-Werner) — reprises a lot of the discussion we had around the boardroom as we figured out how to articulate why we keep Silverstripe open source. It was interesting to see this the same day Doom3 was open-sourced. (via Hacker News)
- Coding is the New Latin (BBC) — in elite England, “Latin” means that it’s part of a classical education which leads to new career opportunities and social mobility.
Four short links: 24 November 2011
Libraries and the Internet, Cheap Multicore, Online Exceeds Print, Perpetuating Ignorance
- Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong — I was asked to provocatively help focus librarians on the opportunities offered to libraries in the Internet age. If I ask you to talk about your collections, I know that you will glow as you describe the amazing treasures you have. When you go for money for digitization projects, you talk up the incredible cultural value. ANZAC! Constitution! Treaties! Development of a nation! But then if I look at the results of those digitization projects, I find the shittiest websites on the planet. It’s like a gallery spent all its money buying art and then just stuck the paintings in supermarket bags and leaned them against the wall. CC-BY-SA licensed, available in nicely-formatted A4 and Letter versions.
- Green Array Chips — 144 cores on a single chip, $20 per chip in batches of 10. From the creator of Forth, Chuck Moore. (via Hacker News)
- The Atlantic’s Online Revenue Exceeds Print — doesn’t say how, other than “growth” (instead of the decline of print). (via Andy Baio)
- On the Perpetuation of Ignorance (PDF) — ignorance about an issue leads to dependence leads to government trust leads to avoidance of information about that issue. Again I say to Gov 2.0 advocates that simply making data available doesn’t generate a motivated, engaged, change-making citizenry. (via Roger Dennis)
Four short links: 23 November 2011
Inside-Out Libraries, Cleaner YouTube, Kid Tablet, Facetracking Toy
- Massive Wikimedia Donation — I missed it when it happened, but the State Library of Queensland made the 4th largest ever donation of high-resolution out-of-copyright images to the Wikimedia Foundation. The image metadata are available through Wikimedia under liberal licensing terms, too. This is what your national and state libraries should be doing!
- Clea.nr — strip all the crap from around YouTube pages. (via Ed Tech Ideas)
- Nabi Tablet (Toys R Us) — ruggedized Android tablet for kids, $199 price point. (via Mark Osborne)
- Face-Tracking KiddyZoom Video Cam (YouTube) — I’m always startled most when the future turns up in kids’ toys. Tablets and face-tracking? Soon it’ll be face recognition (“hello mommy!” says the doll), brainwave-triggered activity, and 3D printers. (via BERG London)
Four short links: 11 November 2011
Technocracy's Blind Spot, Progressive Enhancement, Libraries and ebooks, and Library Fablab
- Nudge Policies Are Another Name for Coercion (New Scientist) — This points to the key problem with “nudge” style paternalism: presuming that technocrats understand what ordinary people want better than the people themselves. There is no reason to think technocrats know better, especially since Thaler and Sunstein offer no means for ordinary people to comment on, let alone correct, the technocrats’ prescriptions. This leaves the technocrats with no systematic way of detecting their own errors, correcting them, or learning from them. And technocracy is bound to blunder, especially when it is not democratically accountable. Take heed, all you Gov 2.0 wouldbe-hackers. (via BoingBoing)
- Country Selector — turns a dropdown into an autocomplete field where available. Very nice! (via Chris Shiflett)
- Ebook Users Wanted — Pew Internet & American Life project looking at ebooks, looking for people who use ebooks and tablet readers in libraries.
- The Public Library, Complete Reimagined (KQED) — the Fayetteville public library is putting in a fab lab. [L]ibraries aren’t just about books. They are about free access to information and to technology — and not just to reading books or using computers, but actually building and making things. (via BoingBoing)
Four short links: 3 August 2011
Library Licensing, Mac Graphics, Coal Computing, and Human Augmentation
- Just Say No To Freegal — an interesting view from the inside, speaking out against a music licensing system called Freegal which is selling to libraries. Libraries typically buy one copy of something, and then lend it out to multiple users sequentially, in order to get a good return on investment. Participating in a product like Freegal means that we’re not lending anymore, we’re buying content for users to own permanently so they don’t have to pay the vendor directly themselves. This puts us in direct competition with the vendor’s sales directly to consumers, and the vendors will never make more money off of libraries than they will off of direct consumer sales. What that does is put libraries in a position of being economic victims of our own success. I would think that libraries would remember this lesson from our difficulties with the FirstSearch pay-per-use model that most of us found to be unsustainable.
- Radi — a Mac app that can produce pretty much any kind of visual content for the web. Images, animations, vector graphics, video clips, realtime visual effects, JavaScript programming…. (via Hacker News)
- Cost of Computing in Coal (Benjamin Mako Hill) — back-of-the-envelope estimation of the carbon costs of running an overnight multicore Amazon number-crunching job. Thinking about the environmental costs of your crappy coding might change the way you code, much as punched cards encouraged you to model and test the program by hand before you ran it. How many tons of coal are burnt to support laziness or a lack of optimization in my software?
- Friction in Computer Human Symbiosis (Palantir blog) — Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process. (via Tim O’Reilly)
Four short links: 4 July 2011
God Games, Digitised History, git Database, and App Framework
- Let There Be Smite (Pippin Barr) — simple diversion for the 4th of July. It won’t be easy for God to save America. (via Pippin’s blog)
- Basel Wear — to answer the question I know was burning on your lips: “what *did* the Swiss wear in 1634?” Impressively detailed pictures from a 1634 book that is now online. One of the reasons I’m in favour of digitizing cultural collections is that we’re more likely to encounter them on the net and so ask questions like “how did people dress in 1634?”, “why did everyone carry keys?”, and “what is a Sexton?”
- databranches: Using git as a Database — it’s important to approach your design for using git as a database from the perspective of automated merging. Get the merging right and the rest will follow. I’ve chosen to use the simplest possible merge, the union merge: When merging parent trees A and B, the result will have all files that are in either A or B, and files present in both will have their lines merged (and possibly reordered or uniqed).
- Joshfire — open source (dual-licensed GPLv2 and commercial) multiplatform development framework built on HTML5.
Four short links: 27 June 2011
Poor Economics, Shrinking Web, Orphans Put to Work, Realtime Log Monitoring
- Poor Economics — this is possibly the best thing I will read all year, an insightful (and research-backed) book digging into the economics of poverty. Read the lecture slides online, they’ll give you a very clear taste of what the book’s about. Love that the website is so very complementary to the book, and 100% aligned with the ambition to convince and spread the word. Kindle-purchasable, too. Sample boggle (one of many): children of children born during the Chinese famine are smaller, and children who were in utero during Ramadan earn less as adults.
- The Web Is Shrinking (All Things D) — graph that makes Facebook look massively important and the rest of the web look insignificant. It doesn’t take into account the nature of the interaction (shopping? research? chat?), and depends heavily on the comScore visits metric being a reliable proxy for “use”. I’d expect to see other neutral measures of “use” decreasing (e.g., searches for “school holidays”) if overall web use were decreasing, yet they don’t seem to be. Nonetheless, Facebook has become the new millennium’s AOL: keywords, grandparents, and a zealous devotion to advertising. At least Facebook doesn’t send me #&#^%*ing CDs.
- Orphan Works Project (University of Michigan) — library will digitize orphaned works for researchers. Lovely to see someone breaking the paralysis that orphaned works induce. (via BoingBoing)
- log.io — node.js system for real-time log monitoring in your browser. (via Vasudev Ram)
Four short links: 11 May 2011
API Explorer, Random Sampling, Open Cultural Collections, and Video Lectures
- webshell — command-line tool for debugging/exploring APIs, open sourced (Apache v2) and written in node.js. (via Sean Coates)
- sample — command-line filter for random sampling of input. Useful when you’ve got heaps of data and want to run your algorithms on a random sample of it. (via Scott Vokes)
- Yale Offers Open Access To PD Materials in Collections — The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale’s vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available. No license will be required for the transmission of the images & no limitations imposed on their use. (via Fiona Rigby)
- Resistance to Putting Lectures Online (Sydney Morning Herald) — lecturers are worried that their off-the-cuff mistakes would be mocked on YouTube (they will be), but also that students wouldn’t attend lectures. Nobody seems to have asked whether students actually learn from lectures.