- Lamar Smith Trying to Revive SOPA (BoingBoing) — don’t hate Smith, pity him. He’s a prostitute, and it shouldn’t surprise that when released from prison he immediately returns to the street corner to hawk his pearly again. He’s a victim of a political system that requires politicians to sell their integrity to be elected.
- What Powers Instagram — I love seeing inside other companies’ technology. (via Hacker News)
- Recline.js — simple but powerful library for building data applications in pure Javascript and HTML. (via Open Knowledge Foundation)
- How to Recruit Open Source Contributors (Daniel Berkholz) — with actual data from Gentoo’s GSoC projects this year. Good stuff!
"SOPA" entries
Four short links: 11 July 2012
Reviving SOPA, Inside Instagram, Data Apps, and Recruiting Open Source Contributors
The emerging political force of the network of networks
12 talks from the 2012 Personal Democracy Forum worth watching and sharing.
The ninth Personal Democracy Forum explored the nexus of technology, politics and campaigns. What's happening online matters offline. Indeed, the barrier between the virtual and physical worlds has fallen.
Publishing News: Let's remember why we got into this business
Lavar Burton on the power of storytelling and other highlights from TOC 2012.
LeVar Burton's TOC keynote takes publishing back to its fundamentals; Joe Karaganis says opposition to SOPA isn't enough, we also need we good alternatives; and bookseller Praveen Madan says the future of bookstores hinges on experiences … and perhaps partnering with Amazon.
Four short links: 10 February 2012
Monki Gras Roundup, Flow Programming, Curvy Javascript Text, and Political Purchases
- Monki Gras 2012 (Stephen Walli) — nice roundup of highlights of the Redmonk conference in London. Sample talk: Why Most UX is Shite.
- Frozen — flow-based programming, intent is to build the toolbox of small pieces loosely joined by ZeroMQ for big data programming.
- Arctext.js — jQuery plugin for curving text on web pages. (via Javascript Weekly)
- Hi, My Name is Diane Feinstein (BuyTheVote) — presents the SOPA position and the entertainment industry’s campaign contributions together with a little narrative. Clever and powerful. (via BoingBoing)
The week the web changed Washington
Collective action halted SOPA and PIPA. Now we're in unexplored territory.
Collective action channeled through the Internet halted the progress of SOPA and PIPA this week. The promise of these communication tools has come of age, and they'll be sorely needed to face the challenges of the 21st century.
Publishing News: Apple's textbook foray may not be as disruptive as it hoped
Apple takes on textbooks, an insider dishes on publishing denial, and how SOPA would affect publishing.
Apple’s big event this week marked the first step in its disruption of education — or did it? Elsewhere, a publishing insider calls it like it is, and (finally) the SOPA/PIPA discussion includes the publishing industry.
Visualization of the Week: Visualizing SOPA tweets
A huge visualization captures tweets from the SOPA protest.
This week's visualization comes from Fred Benenson, who ranked and mapped tweets related to the SOPA protest.
Top stories: January 16-20, 2012
The perils of SOPA and PIPA, a survey of Hadoop products, and common mobile UI mistakes.
This week on O'Reilly: Tim O'Reilly explained why SOPA and PIPA are bad for the Internet and bad for business, Edd Dumbill offered an extensive survey of Hadoop solutions, and we looked at the most common mobile interface mistakes.
Four short links: 20 January 2012
SOPA Politics, Google+ Scraping, Information Overload, Coding Education Game
- On the Problem of Money, Politics, and SOPA (John Battelle) — My first step will be to read this new book from Larry Lessig, an intellectual warrior who many (including myself) lament as bailing on our core issue of IP law to tilt at the supposed windmill of political corruption. But I think, upon deeper reflection, that Larry is simply playing chess a few moves ahead of us all. It’s time to catch up, and move forward together. THIS.
- Google+ Scraper (GitHub) — Instead of scraping the HTML code itself, this script fights its way through OZ_initData, a big, mean and ugly inline JavaScript array containing the profile information. (via Pete Warden)
- Student Study Techniques — How to focus in the age of distraction. cf Clay Johnson’s Information Diet.
- Code Racer — interesting addition to the “teach me to program” world: a competitive game to drill your HTML/CSS recall. You race to add HTML and CSS in response to prompts like “add a level 1 heading with the words: Racing Car”. Requires Facebook login. It’s how kids learn to type these days, so it just might work for web design too. (In my day it was with a typewriter and a bib)
From SOPA to speech: Seven tech trends to monitor
Data, voice recognition, and the "social backbone" will shape the months ahead.
Mike Loukides weighs in on the tech trends — good and bad — that will exert considerable influence in 2012.