Four short links: 26 October 2009

Data Exploration, Evidence-Based Coding, API to the English Language, Dual Licensing

1. Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material, and I wanted to explain the knock-on effects of that: not just in terms of what I do, and the kind of code that's appropriate for that, but also in terms of how I feel as I work on these explorations. Even if the section on the code itself feels foreign, I hope that the explanation of what it feels like is understandable.
2. Bits of Evidence -- Slides for a talk, "What we actually know about software development and why we believe it is true". (via Simon Willison)
3. Wordnik API -- definitions, frequencies, examples APIs. See the announcement from the Web 2.0 Summit.
4. The Peculiar Institution of Dual Licensing -- Brian Aker eloquently describes why he feels that dual licensing is anti-open source. Brian obviously has considerable experience informing this opinion--his years as Director of Technology for MySQL.

Four short links: 2 October 2009

Social Media Parasites, Open Government Data, Prime Numbers, Amazon Image Abuse

1. I'm Tired of Your Analogue Attitude -- hilarious animated clip about social media gurus, made using xtranormal. (via trib on twitter)
2. Three Laws of Open Government Data -- 1. If it can’t be spidered or indexed, it doesn’t exist; 2. If it isn’t available in open and machine readable format, it can’t engage; 3. If a legal framework doesn’t allow it to be repurposed, it doesn’t empower. (also see slide deck)
3. Structure and Randomness in the Prime Numbers -- paper about some of the fun mathematics around prime numbers. (via Hacker News)
4. Abusing Amazon Images -- decoding and doing fun things with the Amazon images API. The cool thing (if you want to generate unlikely Amazon images) is that you're not limited to one use of any of these commands. You can have multiple discounts, multiple shadows, multiple bullets, generating images that Amazon would never have on its site. However, every additional command you add generates another 10% to the image dimensions, adding white space around the image. And that 10% compounds; add a lot of bullets, and you'll find that you have a small image in a large blank space. (You can use the CR command to cut away the excess, however.) Note also that the commands are interpreted in order, which can have an impact on what overlaps what.

Four short links: 8 September 2009

Mobile jQuery, API to Google Book Search, Open Learning, Popularity Algorithms

1. jQTouch -- jQuery library for mobile web app development. (via brian on Delicious)
2. GData API to Google Book Search -- search full text, get back metadata, modify "my library" collections, etc.
3. Open and Free Courses at the CMU Open Learning Initiative -- rather than just a lecture and handout dump, it has interactive exercises and questions to help you practice and figure out whether you've learned the subject. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. How to Build a Popularity Algorithm You Can Be Proud Of -- description and brief analysis for the popularity algorithms in Hacker News, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Linkibol. A basic collective intelligence technique that's not obvious. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 2 September 2009

Happy Programmers, Usability Tool, Geo API, Zombie Math

1. The Programming Language With The Happiest Users (Dolores Labs) -- you'll be surprised. Age before beauty!
2. Judge It Now -- fast market opinions on design decisions. Compare to Optimal Sort. Usability tools hitting the mainstream web, so the time to learn what works shrinks and progress is faster.
3. BlockChalk API -- These new interfaces enable developers to do nearly everything that you can do at http://blockchalk.com. It’s now possible to build client applications, mash-ups, and other tools based on BlockChalk geolocation data and services. Also see the explanatory blog post. (via joshua on Delicious)
4. The Mathematics of Zombie Attacks (PDF) -- Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all. (via Doug McKenna)

Four short links: 13 August 2009

1. Under the Hood of App Inventor for Android -- regular readers know I'm a big fan of visual programming language Scratch, and apparently Google are too. They've got twelve university classes testing App Inventor for Android, a visual connect-the-bits programming environment for Android. University classes probably because one of the co-creators is Hal Abelson, coauthor of the definitive programming textbook. Also found online: the PR-type announcement, a Professor using it, and @AppInv (nothing juicy on Twitter--it looks like might be a channel for tech support for the students). (via Hacker News)
2. Google Web Optimizer Case Study (Four Hour Work Week) -- GWO manages A/B tests for you, with a lot of statistical analysis. It's a fascinating read to see how these should be done. Every equation may halve the readership of a book, but every table of numbers and relevancy analysis doubles the value of a post like this. (via Hacker News)
3. Opening Up The BBC's Natural History Archive -- the BBC are releasing programme segments and a whole lot of metadata around their programming. Audio and video segmented, tagged with DBpedia terms, and aggregated into a URI structure based on natural history concepts: species, habitats, adaptations, etc. Gorgeous!
4. Yahoo! Term Extraction API to Close -- Internally, both services share a backend data source that is closing down, so the publicly-facing YDN services will be closing as well. I think it's the most significant casualty of Y! outsourcing search to MSFT, as this API was used by a lot of projects. (via Simon Willison)

Four short links: 30 July 2009

Brooklyn Museum, Early Release, Toy Chest, Open Science

1. iPhone App v1.3 Released -- revealing glimpse into how third-party apps (such as this iPhone app, built on the Brooklyn Museum's API) reflect on the institution providing the API. Brooklyn Museum has dealt with this sensitively and intelligently, a model to all. As always, I want to marry the Brooklyn Museum and raise a posse of online apps.
2. Embrace the Chaos -- I can never be told "release early, release often" enough. When to release? As soon as you've got something that'll be useful to other people.
3. Toy Chest -- "Toy Chest" collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects. (via Simon Willison)
4. What, Exactly, is Open Science? - In general, we’re moving towards an era of greater transparency in all of these topics (methodology, data, communication, and collaboration). The problems we face in gaining widespread support for Open Science are really about incentives and sustainability. How can we design or modify the scientific reward systems to make these four activities the natural state of affairs for scientists? Right now, there are some clear disincentives to participating in these activities. (via Glyn Moody)

Four short links: 16 June 2009

1. Dealing with Election Results Data -- taking the raw UK European election data into Google's Fusion Tables to try and make sense of it. More cloud-based tools for the data scientist within. (via Simon Willison)
2. Time for an Open 311 API -- "311" is the US number to call for non-emergency municipal services. There have been a lot of individual projects to hack together web sites that provide the single coherent view of government services that the government itself is unable to offer, but the individual projects have all built their own APIs. SeeClickFix suggest these be unified so tools can be written (e.g., iPhone apps) that run across multiple municipalities. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Shoppers Cars Soon Able to Power Supermarkets (Daily Mail) -- At the Sainsbury's store in Gloucester, kinetic plates, which were embedded in the road yesterday, are pushed down every time a vehicle passes over them. A pumping action is then initiated through a series of hydraulic pipes that drive a generator. The plates are able to produce 30kw of green energy an hour - more than enough to power the store's checkouts. (via Freaklabs)
4. Humans Prefer Cockiness to Expertise (New Scientist) -- the blogosphere explained in one paper. (via Mind Hacks)

Four short links: 9 June 2009

Biological Radio, Laggy Smart Grids, API Moneys, and Pubsub Server

1. Drawing Inspiration From Nature To Build A Better Radio -- based on the design of the cochlear, this MIT-built RF chip is faster than others out there, and consumes 1/100th the power. Biomimicry and UWB radio are on our radar.
2. Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon -- While it’s significant that utilities are starting to build out smart grid infrastructure, utilities are largely opting for networks that provide connections that are far from real time, and this could stifle the desired innovation. [...] smart meter data that is pushed to Google’s PowerMeter energy tool has to make its way back to the utility before it can be sent to Google. That means that even for Google’s energy tool, there can be both a significant delay before information reaches consumers, and significant gaps in energy data details. These delays and gaps can undercut the premise of how smart meter technologies will empower consumers to make decisions about their energy use based on real-time costs. Smart grids (houses and devices able to take use of instantaneous pricing changes) have the potential to help us with our energy obesity problem, but the architecture must be right.
3. API Value Creation, Not Monetization -- On the side of the unexpected but interesting outcomes, Kevin said they have seen a flurry of internally developed business applications. In the past many valuable, internal-facing projects were turned down because the programs had to meet strict top line to bottom line ratios. With the availability to data and services, many teams within the company now have access to things they didn’t in the past, and project costs have been minimized. Throughout the company, consumers of the API have been able to launch successful projects that have created additional revenue and have reduced the overall development costs for new projects. Some solid numbers and names to help convince businesses to offer APIs, though the battle is still much harder than it should be.
4. Watercoolr -- a pubsub server for your apps. A channel is a list of URLs to be notified whenever a message is posted to that channel. Clever little piece of infrastructure for web apps, embodying the Unix philosophy of small tools that each do one thing very well. (via straup on Delicious)

Four short links: 5 Mar 2009

Google Books, conference books, a museum API, and some number silliness that makes me happy.

1. Jon Orwant on Google Book Search at TOC -- Jon drops info on conversion rates, future plans, mobile, etc. See this post for a roundup of blog-world commentary on the talk.
2. Brooklyn Museum Collection API -- I've linked to this amazing museum work before. Now they have an API. Search collections, fetch items, embed in your sites. (via the announcement)
3. Not So Empty Book -- a magazine, built from conference content, four editions of of which were published during the brief course of the LIFT conference this year. Brilliant!
4. March 5 is the Square Root of Christmas (Ned Batchedler) -- maths geekery like this is why I found it difficult to date when I was younger. (I solved the problem by marrying someone who, when I read this post to her, said "oh COOL!")

Four short links: 4 Mar 2009

1. Wall Street on the Tundra -- Michael Lewis's long but fascinating glimpse into Iceland's rise and fall as hubris-filled banker to the world. One of the many lessons is not to believe the post-hoc explanations for success: "Icelanders—or at any rate Icelandic men—had their own explanations for why, when they leapt into global finance, they broke world records: the natural superiority of Icelanders. Because they were small and isolated it had taken 1,100 years for them—and the world—to understand and exploit their natural gifts, but now that the world was flat and money flowed freely, unfair disadvantages had vanished. Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, gave speeches abroad in which he explained why Icelanders were banking prodigies.". For more on the financial meltdown, also read The Real Cause of the Financial Crisis--it's spot on.
2. The Cult of Done Manifesto (Bre Pettis) -- magnificent call to arms for JFDI, Just Do It.
3. Twilio -- your web apps can trigger voice calls and respond to incoming calls through a simple REST and XML API. It's wildly simple. Using it, This Line Is Secure was able to launch very quickly. I'm still not able to think in terms of phones, unable to see when a voice-drop or numeric-key interface works for an app, but I'll bet that playing with Twilio will help me develop that sense without the cost of Asterisk hardware.
4. Let Startups Bail Us Out -- Reid Hoffman writes in favour of ensuring an adequate supply of startups. "Consider a few start-ups from the past century: Microsoft, MTV, CNN, FedEx, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Burger King. Each opened during a period of economic downturn. Today, these brands employ hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. We need to prepare for the next Burger King. By empowering individuals and small businesses, an innovation stimulus can help germinate stable industry players for the long term." (via Caterina)

Four short links: 10 Feb 2009

Happy Monday! Kid coding and web-powered political transparency form the artisanal wholewheat organic bread slices around a sandwich filling of meaty (or tofuy) web travel APIs and blogly angst:

1. Art and Code -- conference on programming environments for "artists, young people, and the rest of us". Alice! Hackety Hack! Scratch! Processing! And more! March 7-9 at CMU. Want! (I've written before about my ongoing experiences teaching kids to program)
2. TripIt API -- clever, they're building a single point where hotels, airlines, travel agents, mobile apps, etc. can access your integrated booking (use case: flight delayed, which hotel and mobile car rentals learn and react to by not assuming you've bailed on them) (disclaimer: OATV has invested in TripIt).
3. Organically Grown Audiences (Danny O'Brien) -- good point from Danny that I've been thinking about for a while: maintaining an audience is hard work, and the audience isn't necessarily comprised of people you'd choose to hang out with. Perhaps the answer is to grow the audience slowly, but I'm not convinced. I'd say that unreciprocated intimacy from your audience is a sign that you're doing things wrong, but it's how fame works: the things people say to people in the public eye, on and off the web, are astonishingly presumptuous and familiar. Then again perhaps I should retreat back to the British Isles from which my frosty social distance comes and tend my tweed elbow patch farm until I die from bad teeth, bad beer, or a surfeit of Benny Hill.
4. Promoting Open Government (Economist) -- state and central governments are making expenditure public, in varyingly useful ways. Links to Missouri Accountability Portal and ReadTheStimulus.org (the former as well-designed, the latter as crowd-sourcing).

Major milestone for ProgrammableWeb & "The Web as Platform"

Last week marked an important milestone for the "Web as Platform" as the 1,000 API was added to the ProgrammableWeb registry. John Musser (see: Web2.0 Report) started tracking the first few web service API's back in 2005.

How do these 1000 APIs break down by type? The following chart, derived from our database, shows the the top 15 sectors or markets with the greatest number of competing API providers. As you can see there are already 71 mapping-related APIs alone"

Open beats Closed: Best Buy’s new APIs

Welcome to Joshua-Michele Ross, who joins the Radar team with a focus on how Web 2.0 is affecting business strategy - Sara Winge

Best Buy is a pioneer when it comes to unleashing the talent of their own staff; from the Loop Marketplace that allows employees to submit ideas for Digg-style ranking AND funding across divisions (for example an HR manager can fund an idea from a customer service employee) to their use of prediction markets and their support of the employee-driven social network, Blue Shirt Nation.

Now they are hoping to tap into the developer talent pool with remix.bestbuy.com which they announced at the recent NYC Web 2.0 Expo. According to project lead, Dave Micko, Remix is “an open API to access all of the data that feeds www.bestbuy.com. So, all of the rich information featured on Best Buy’s extensive, deep and content rich web site will now be available publicly via a simple, REST-based API call. “

While other big box stores are thinking small and releasing unappetizing Facebook widgets like this:


Best Buy is thinking much more strategically about the value of the Internet by allowing anyone to reinvent their entire online store. With “access to all the data that feeds Bestbuy.com” imagine the potential of creating your own, curated site on top of Best Buy’s catalog and supply chain. Imagine top Blue Shirts running their own online stores with select merchandise that they stand behind or imagine a thousand home-theater geeks and “go-to-guys” (and girls) extending their expertise and word-of-mouth via their own online stores.

Much needed breakthroughs in ecommerce usability (product and catalog navigation, visualization, design and findability) are now open to thousands of developers to work on. Best Buy will be able to bring that intelligence back into their organization. The only missing piece seems to be some form of compensation for folks who actually go to the trouble of creating their own stores; reward zone points, commission, reputation etc.

Open beats Closed:
This move reflects one of the new strategic principles at work on the Internet: Open beats Closed. There are two readings of open beats closed - both correct and on-point for Best Buy. First, it is the literal injunction to be consistent with the norms of behavior on the Social Web; authentic, transparent and candid. Second, businesses are finding new ways of sourcing content, innovation and market insight and energy outside of their organization. They are letting more people to contribute by allowing access to once tightly guarded data or business processes (via APIs and mashups). As a result they are redrawing the boundaries of the traditional organization. As we dig deeper into the network economy closed companies are going to find it more and more difficult to survive against open companies.

Has anyone in the Radar community seen a similar, open move by a big, traditional company? I have not.
(In full disclosure: I have worked with Best Buy on several initiatives but have nothing to do with the remix project.)

Portable Contacts API Starts to Get Real

This evening Joseph and John of Plaxo and I have been hosting a hackathon at Six Apart for the Portable Contacts API (video about PorC). The Portable Contacts API is designed "to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the web."

We originally expected a handful of people to show up and hack on implementing bits of the specification, but so far have been blown away at the progress made and about the twenty people that came. Tomorrow is a summit style meeting hosted by MySpace also in San Francisco to try to finalize the specification among a wide range of providers and consumers. I'm expecting a handful of interesting demos, but wanted to share two that have already come together tonight.

Joseph Smarr and Kevin Marks of Google hacked together a web transformer that integrates Microformats, vCard, and the Portable Contacts API. Given Kevin's homepage which is full of Microformats, they've built an API that extracts his profile information from hCard, uses a public API from Technorati to transform it to vCard, and then exposes it as a Portable Contacts API endpoint. Not only does this work on Kevin's own page, but his Twitter profile as well which contains basic profile information such as name, homepage, and a short bio.

Brian Ellin of JanRain has successfully combined OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, and the Portable Contacts API to start showing how each of these building blocks should come together. Upon visiting his demo site he logs in using his OpenID. From there, the site discovers that Plaxo hosts his address book and requests access to it via OAuth. Finishing the flow, his demo site uses the Portable Contacts API to access information about his contacts directly from Plaxo. End to end, login with an OpenID and finish by giving the site access to your address book without having to fork over your password.

While the individual building blocks are fairly geeky themselves, pulling them together like has been happening tonight shows that we're only at the beginning of building the next generation of social networks. When the pieces work together, people won't have to know what's going on under the hood; it will just work--and will be almost like magic. John has more photos up on his blog.

Google's Social Graph API Learns a New Trick

This past February at Social Graph Foo Camp, Google released the first version of their Social Graph API. (see past Radar coverage) This API was focused on making it easier for developers to understand who a user is and find their other accounts around the web via publicly declared data.

Today I'm driving up to Foo Camp along with Brad Fitzpatrick, the developer of the API, where he has just pushed a new API method live called "OtherMe". This new methods focuses on making it easier for developers to get a holistic view of a user, their feeds, and some basic profile information. You can see this for my profiles in a pretty form from the API. Unfortunately it hasn't been documented yet, but if you're familiar with the existing API it is pretty easy to figure out and real documentation is on its way. This is another large step forward when it comes to opening the social graph. Today it has become many times easier to welcome a new user to your service by presenting a list of people they already know versus asking them if you can scrape contacts from their email address book(s).

Part of Brad's announcement of these changes is below:

Note that this is simply a mechnical transformation on the /lookup method, not offering anything that wasn't possible before. It's just that the transformation was tedious and error-prone and silly to have to repeat in each client library. Hopefully putting it in the server makes it more convenient for everybody.

Why is this useful? A lot of websites are now letting you list your other websites/profiles on your profile, but it's just as annoying to repeat this information on every site as it is to redefine your friends everywhere. If the site incrementally hits this API in the background as you enter profile URLs, the site can then recommend you link/share your other websites. Examples of sites that let you enter your other profile URLs and could use this API include: Pownce, Digg, Vox, Typepad, Movable Type, Plaxo, Friendfeed, Mugshot. And that's just off the top of my head from sites I'm familiar with. I'm sure there's a bunch more.