Four short links: 16 November 2009

Visualizing Adventures, Droid Deployments, Fly Vision, and Mass Meat For You

1. Choose Your Own Adventure -- numerical and visual analysis of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels. The distinguishing characteristic of My Kind Of People is that they appreciate the quantitative study of the commonplace. (via Bryan O'Sullivan)
2. Tracking Droid Numbers -- uLocate, the makers of the Where app for Android, have been tracking the growth of the Droid phone using the data they get from the Android app store. (via BoyGenius Report)
3. Fly Eyes Makes Better Robot Vision -- to make smaller flying robots, researchers would like to find a simpler way of processing motion. Inspiration has come from the lowly fly, which uses just a relative handful of neurons to maneuver with extraordinary dexterity. And for more than a decade, O’Carroll and other researchers researchers have painstakingly studied the optical flight circuits of flies, measuring their cell-by-cell activity and turning evolution’s solutions into a set of computational principles. [...] Intriguingly, the algorithm doesn’t work nearly as well if any one operation is omitted. The sum is greater than the whole, and O’Carroll and Brinkworth don’t know why. Because the parameters are in constant feedback-driven flux, it produces a cascade of non-linear equations that are difficult to untangle in retrospect, and almost impossible to predict. (via Slashdot)
4. Meat Band Aids and Mass Production of Living Tissue -- Apligraf is a matrix of cow collagen, human fibroblasts and keratinocyte stem cells (from discarded circumcisions), that, when applied to chronic wounds (particularly nasty problems like diabetic sores), can seed healing and regeneration. This Gizmodo Q&A is informative.

Four short links: 6 November 2009

Barcode Scanning, Downloadable Community Book, Gov Hack Day, Android Kludges

1. Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store ... (via Ed Corkery on Twitter)
2. The Art of Community For Free Download -- Jono Bacon's O'Reilly book on community management now available for free download (still available for purchase!).
3. Gov Hack -- Australian government ran a hack day with their open data, this is their writeup.
4. Android Mythbusters -- slides for talk by Matt Porter at Embedded Linux Conference Europe. A (long) catalogue of the kludges in Android.

Four short links: 15 October 2009

Open Access, Right to Broadband, Machine Learning Textbook, Javascript Performance Art

1. Open Access Week -- world-wide, dedicated to raising awareness of open access to research. (via Creative Commons Aotearoa).
2. 1Mb Broadband Access Becomes Legal Right -- Starting next July, every person in Finland will have the right to a one-megabit broadband connection.
3. The Elements of Statistical Learning 2ed -- classic book (I have the 1st edition) that is now available as a free PDF download. (via Hacker News)
4. vi in Javascript -- yup, someone's written a vi clone in Javascript. (via monkchips on Twitter)

More on how web performance impacts revenue...

At Velocity this year Microsoft, Google and Shopzilla each presented data on how web performance directly impacts revenue.

Their data showed that slow sites get fewer search queries per user, less revenue per visitor, fewer clicks, fewer searches, and lower search engine rankings. They found that in some cases even after site performance was improved users continued to interact as if it was slow. Bad experiences have a lasting influence on customer behavior.

What about smaller websites that aren't yet at this scale?

Alistair Croll and Sean Power, the authors of the new book Complete Web Monitoring, have continued this research for sites at smaller scale.

They used a Strangeloop Networks web acceleration appliance to optimize half the sessions to a smaller production website, tagging optimized and unoptimized visitors so they could be analyzed in Google Analytics. The Strangeloop device applies many of Steve Souders' performance rules to an existing site automatically (a kind of "Steve-in-a-Box" ;-).

The results of their analysis show how significant a reduction in page latency can be. In addition to reducing bounce rates, and increasing pages per visit & time on site, they found a 16.07% increase in conversion rates and a 5.50% increase in average order value.

Check out the full post on the Watching Websites blog.

Four short links: 21 September 2009

Bad Writing, Tech Immigration, Long Tail Fail?, and The Real McKoi

1. Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences -- awful awful writing, and glorious glorious mockery of it.

   Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.

   It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here.

2. From Australia to the World: The Story of Google Maps and Google Wave (PDF, HTML Cached here) -- history of Google Maps and Wave, from the creator. This particularly struck me: I know few matters more frustrating than finding funding for a start-up. Immigration tops the list.
3. Rethinking The Long Tail: How to Define 'Hits' and 'Niches' -- the argument comes down to absolute vs relative measurements of popularity. Anderson says that relative hides too much, because percentages are meaningless in a world of infinite inventory. Researchers respond that hits and niches are defined in absolute numbers (top 10, bottom 100). The real takeaway is that infinite inventory requires excellent discovery tools drawing upon collective intelligence systems (hence the Netflix recommendation contest). (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. The Mckoi Database -- MckoiDDB is a database system used by software developers to create applications that store data over a cluster of machines in a network. It is designed to be used in online environments where there are very large sets of both small and big data items that need to be stored, accessed and indexed efficiently in a network cluster. The focus of the MckoiDDB architecture is to support low latency query performance, provide strong data consistency through snapshot transaction isolation, and provide tools to manage logical data models that may change dramatically in physical network environments that may experience similar dramatic change. (via joshua on delicious)

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: 14 August 2009

EPub FTW, SQL Horror, Computer Vision Explained, and A Massive Dump of Twitter Stats

1. Page2Pub -- harvest wiki content and turn it into EPub and PDF. See also Sony dropping its proprietary format and moving to EPub. Open standards rock. (via oreillylabs on Twitter)
2. SQL Pie Chart -- an ASCII pie chart, drawn by SQL code. Horrifying and yet inspiring. Compare to PostgreSQL code to produce ASCII Mandelbrot set. (via jdub on Twitter and Simon Willison)
3. How SudokuGrab Works -- the computer vision techniques behind an iPhone app that solves Sudoku puzzles that you take a photo of. Well explained! These CV techniques are an essential part of the sensor web. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
4. Twitter by the Numbers -- massive dump of charts and stats on Twitter. I love that there's a section devoted to social media marketers, the Internet's head lice. (via Kevin Marks on Twitter)

Four short links: 11 August 2009

1. The Slowing Growth of Wikipedia and More Details of Changing Editor Resistance -- researchers at PARC analysed Wikipedia and found the number of new articles and number of new editors have flattened off, and more edits from first-time contributors are being reverted. This is a writeup in their blog, with the numbers and charts. It's interesting that coverage in New Scientist talked about "quality", but none of the metrics PARC studied are actually quality. Wikipedia launched a strategic review which aims to tackle this and many other issues. (via ACM TechNews)
2. The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets) -- teaser for upcoming O'Reilly book with some really good stuff. Balzac once wrote, “The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly,” and many successful social sites today founded themselves on an original sin, perhaps a spammy viral invitation model or unapproved abuse of new users' address books. Some companies never lived down the taint and other seems to have passed some unspoken statute of limitations. (via BoingBoing)
3. Skulpt -- entirely in-browser implementation of Python. (via Andy Baio)
4. Why Can't Local Government and Open Source Be Friends? -- the Birmingham example is one of many. Government procurement and tendering processes are often fishing expeditions, which biases responses in favour of commercial software companies making mad margins such that they can respond to RFPs that are really RFIs, etc. It's an issue everywhere in the world because it happens at local, not just central, level.

State of the Computer Book Market - Mid-Year 2009

If you have read previous State of the Computer Book Market posts, you know we typically publish between 3-5 posts that summarize the computer book market for a given year. SInce it's mid-year, I thought I'd do a shorter, one-post summary of where things stand in 2009 thus far. The picture looks like our US economy: lots of bad news peppered with small glimmers of hope. So let's look at the Market, Categories, Publishers, and Languages.

The market has been on a steady decline since mid-2008 and has continued downward right through the first half of 2009. And there are very few signs that the book-buying slump is going to turn around anytime soon. Overall, the market saw 595,821 fewer units sold in the first half of 2009 than were sold in the same period of 2008. Although we do not have data to show the trends between 2000 and 2003, the market performance this year is the worst we've seen since the fall of of 2001. You'll notice in the chart below that the seasonal patterns have remained consistent, but sales are at a much lower volume than any previous year.

(continue reading)

Programming Contests, Community, and Business

Attending the TopCoder Open, the final in-person rounds of an intense programming competition, in support of the TopCoder Cookbook, showed me possibilities that go way beyond programming or books into business models and community I came expecting to see a competition, but found a much more inclusive (and compelling) business model which builds and applies an international community of dedicated developers.

TopCoder runs programming contests designed to produce results for paying customers. The programming contests I joined as a kid were extremely abstract, put on by adults hoping to inspire us to learn. This approach turns competitive energy toward real problems, provided by companies who are even willing to pay for solutions. Competitors may not do well their first few times out, but as they learn the ropes, they can earn cash, not just understanding.

TopCoder rented a ballroom at the Mirage and flew its finalists there. They had two stages with a dozen booths each, and monitors in the middle that let you watch what competitors are doing. And yes, people studied those screens!

(continue reading)

John Viega Talks About Beautiful Security

John Viega is the co-editor of Beautiful Security, the latest in O'Reilly's "Beautiful" series. He recently talked to me a bit about what makes security beautiful, and what demands modern security problems place on end users and administrators.

James Turner: With Beautiful Code and Beautiful Data, you can think about code or data that's elegant or has a simplicity to it. When you think about security, you tend to think about diligence and slogging and going through logs and not things you would associate with being beautiful. How do you make security beautiful?

John Viega: The idea behind Beautiful Security was that -- you're right, security is not beautiful in the same way that code is. It's often a lot of grunt work, and it's just very challenging to build a good system, not necessarily fun. Although, there are a lot of people who do enjoy it. The idea behind Beautiful Security is more that it's beautiful when you can actually provide somebody an experience that's both secure and easy to use.

James Turner: To some extent, isn't that, in most organizations, diametrically opposed in that the more secure things get, the more you start hearing, "Oh, we can't do that because we can't open that port up or whatever"? And, in my experience, the more of one you get, the less of the other you get.

John Viega: It's usually the case that as you add more security, the usability goes away or as you add more usability, the security goes away. But it doesn't have to be that way. With a well designed system, often you can make it both easy to use and more secure at the same time. And there are certainly examples of that in Beautiful Security, the book. Things like password systems, for instance. If you do them very well, you can make something that's more easy to use and more secure than a traditional password system.

James Turner: When you think about security, there's different layers depending on your level of savviness and the needs you have. If we could just take a couple of minutes to address the various levels. Let's start at the lowest level. For Joe Blow, home user with cable or a fiber or a DSL line, has it gotten to the point where they have no way of realistically knowing if they're secure or not?

John Viega: For the home user, I think the security industry does a disservice about making things seem a lot worse than they really are. The security industry sells fear, uncertainty and doubt. Pretty recently, it was revealed that Symantec had been giving gross overestimations of the number of people infected by Conficker, I think. The average home user, as long as they are not doing anything dangerous that leaves them prone to social engineering or out in a very hostile environment like potentially a conference, they're usually okay. So on your home network, you're behind a NATing firewall usually. So there's really little threat from the outside world, except what the user browses to. And then there are tools like Site Advisor that can help make the browsing experience a lot more safe as well.

(continue reading)

Four short links: 8 June 2009

3D Geometry, The Printable Web, Government Internet Fail, and Real World Cloud Computing

1. How to Project on 3D Geometry -- the fine art (and math) of distorting an image so that it looks undistorted when projected onto a non-flat 3D surface. Confused? See the images below. (via straup on Delicious)
2. ZinePal -- Create your own printable magazine from any online content. (via warrenellis on Delicious)
3. What The Government Doesn't Understand About The Internet And What To Do About It -- Tom Steinberg from MySociety lays it out. As true for US, NZ, and every other country as it is for the UK (for which it was written). Accept that any state institution that says “we control all the information about X” is going to look increasingly strange and frustrating to a public that’s used to be able to do whatever they want with information about themselves, or about anything they care about (both private and public). This means accepting that federated identity systems are coming and will probably be more successful than even official ID card systems: ditto citizen-held medical records. It means saying “We understand that letting train companies control who can interface with their ticketing systems means that the UK has awful train ticket websites that don’t work as hard as they should to help citizens buy cheaper tickets more easily. And we will change that, now.” What I like about Tom vs the US's Gov 2.0 is that Tom puts down philosophy that's hard to argue with, whereas the US is dangerously close to simply focusing on techniques and that's subvertible.
4. Real World Cloud Computing -- summary from a panel of startups who are using EC2. The lock-in is latency. Transfering data within the Amazon services is free. Transfering data to an Amazon competitor: not free.

Four short links: 26 May 2009

Databases, Sensors, Visualization, and Patents

1. Flare -- dynamically partitioning and reconstructing key-value server. Currently built on Tokyo Cabinet, but backend is theoretically pluggable. (via joshua on delicious)
2. Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer Monitoring -- the sensor network begins to extend into our bodies. The cylindrical, 5-millimeter implant contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies specific to the target molecules. Target molecules enter the implant through a semipermeable membrane, bind to the particles and cause them to clump together. That clumping can be detected by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The device is made of a polymer called polyethylene, which is commonly used in orthopedic implants. The semipermeable membrane, which allows target molecules to enter but keeps the magnetic nanoparticles trapped inside, is made of polycarbonate, a compound used in many plastics. (via FreakLabs)
3. Visualizing Data source -- the source code to examples in Visualizing Data.
4. The First Software Patent (Wired) -- was issued on this day in 1981, for a complex full-text storage and retrieval system. Tellingly, business strategy of the owner of the first software patent was ... to become a patent lawyer. A day that will linger in irritation, if not live in infamy. (via glynmoody on Twitter)

Four short links: 20 May 2009

Cognitive Surplus, Data Centers=Mainframes, Django Microframework, and a Visit To The Future

1. Distributed Proofreaders Celebrates 15000th Title Posted To Project Gutenberg -- a great use of our collective intelligence and cognitive surplus. If I say one more Clay Shirkyism, someone's gonna call BINGO. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
2. Datacenter is the New Mainframe (Greg Linden) -- wrapup of a Google paper that looks at datacenters in the terms of mainframes: time-sharing, scheduling, renting compute cycles, etc. I love the subtitle, "An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines".
3. djng, a Django powered microframework -- update from Simon Willison about the new take on Django he's building. Microframeworks let you build an entire web application in a single file, usually with only one import statement. They are becoming increasingly popular for building small, self-contained applications that perform only one task—Service Oriented Architecture reborn as a combination of the Unix development philosophy and RESTful API design. I first saw this idea expressed in code by Anders Pearson and Ian Bicking back in 2005.
4. Cute! (Dan Meyer) -- photo from Dan Meyer's classroom showing normal highschool students doing something that I assumed only geeks at conferences did. I love living in the future for all the little surprises like this.

Four short links: 8 May 2009

1. Citizen Journalism and Civic Reporting -- Gawker rebuts the nonsense that reporters will be the only people at council meetings: as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as "gadflies" — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived. I know my local newspaper only paraphrases council press releases, they rarely actually attend the meetings. (via waxy)
2. Keeping Score (Rowan Simpson) -- It makes me wonder what other things we dismiss as being too simple to be useful. Inspired by Atul Gawande's books, which I highly recommend.
3. The Extraordinaries -- micro-volunteer opportunities on the mobile phone. (Think of it as Mobile Turk) Another way to harness our great cognitive surplus.
4. Visualization in Sports -- roundup of the use of computer graphics and visualization in sports. Sports is competitive, lucrative, and quite fast-paced. I love to see sport and business learning from each other. (via tomc on delicious)

Four short links: 6 May 2009

Hamster Maps, Open Flu Data, Smart Grid Dollars, and Remixable Remix

1. Hamster Wheel Maps -- Jack Schulze has created an interesting way to see the world, in the form of "horizonless maps". The city unfolds in front of you like it was built on the inside of a hamster wheel and you're the hamster. Wired UK shipped an enormous foldout version.
2. Why Pig Flu is Better Than Bird Flu: Open Data (Glynn Moody) -- Glynn points to GISAID (Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data), a system set up in 2006 because scientists were finding it hard to get timely H5N1 data. Following the correspondence letter in Nature, we have all pledged to share the data, to analyze the findings jointly, and to publish the results collaboratively, on the basis of open sharing of data respecting the rights and interests of all involved parties. This system has been used in the Mexican H1N1 outbreak.
3. IBM Plays Sugar Daddy to Smart Grid (CleanTech) -- IBM said it's making $2 billion available to jump-start IT projects, including the smart grid, because of the continued difficulty for partners to get project financing. The $2 billion would come from the company's lending and leasing arm, IBM Global Financing, in the form of low-rate loans, deferred payments, and other forms of project financing. The money is tied to projects authorized under the U.S. stimulus plan, which set aside $4.5 billion for smart grid projects. (via Freaklabs)
4. Lessig's "Remix" Book Now ccFree -- the latest book by Larry Lessig is now available under a CC-BY-NC license. (via Lessig blog)

Four short links: 26 Mar 2009

Books, Money, Collective Despair, and a Dashboard of Doom:

1. Will The Real iPod For Reading Please Stand Up -- Sebastian Mary argues eloquently that we're too focused on long-term writing because of the requirements and constraints imposed upon us by a mass-market paper book, whereas text online is basically an experiment in different lengths and sizes to find new balances for the new medium. a glance at the self-help or business shelves of your local bookshop will show you plenty more. And yet to make economic sense they have to be padded out for publication in 'proper' book size. But to conclude from this (as many unwittingly do) that long-form books are necessarily the best, rather than just the most familiar, way of communicating ideas is mistaken; and to assume that this practice will transplant to e-readers, imagined as a kind of iPod for these long-form essays, is just wrong.
2. What I've Learned in Angel Investing -- fascinating concrete lessons learned by an ex-Yahoo! angel. Be Wary of Entrepreneurs Who are Building for Businesses They Have No Experience In: I don't like it when people are theorizing about how a certain market is or isn't. They will most likely find problems that they have no experience tackling. It's better to find a company who has a veteran of the industry they are tackling so that they have at least have some first hand knowledge of what goes on in that industry.
3. Eco Datamining -- By trawling scientific list-serves, Chinese fish market websites, and local news sources, ecologists think they can use human beings as sensors by mining their communications. Reminiscent of InSTEDD's Golden Shadow project.
4. Check In On the State of the Economy -- a very appealing idea: a dashboard for the economy that is continuously refreshed as new data comes in. The difference between a one-off infographic and a live-updating dashboard is the difference between seeing the train and watching it race towards you. (via >Flowing Data)

Four short links: 23 Mar 2009

Digital rights, digital wrongs, newspaper science, and hardback socializing. Just another four short links:

1. Twitter Mistrial -- this isn't a calamity for justice, we're just able to do something we couldn't do before (were there many jurors running pamphlets off on their printing presses in the old days?) so we need to figure out whether we want it or not.
2. UK Government Outlines Digital Rights Agency -- a strawman proposal for a rights agency to mediate between producers and consumers. The conservative in me bucks at market intervention, but I find it hard to argue with the problem statement: Consumers are no longer prepared to be told when and where they can access the content that they want. They do not see why a TV show that is airing in the US should not be available in the UK. They are not willing to wait to see a film at home until several months after it has passed through the cinemas. They don't accept the logic that says that if you have bought a CD you cannot then copy that music onto your iPod. And of course with digital content perfect copies can be made with very little time and at virtually no cost.
3. With a Newspaper Gone, Who's the Watchdog and Where Do Advertisers Go? (Julie Starr) -- roundup of people treating the closure of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which leaves the town print-free for news, as a science experiment: if local councils really become unaccountable when local papers cease to investigate them, I’d expect to see a big increase in the value of positions of financial authority at local government level. Those positions will suddenly become a lot more valuable if no-one is watching the purse-strings all that carefully, so more candidates will want them and those candidates will spend more to win them.
4. The Tweetbook -- two years of tweets as a hardcover book. Fascinating to see the ephemeral preserved in print, although in general I wonder about the wisdom of trading ephemeral for eternal. (via Waxy)

At Risk: Universal Online Access to All Knowledge

I’ve been following Brewster Kahle and Robert Darnton, a University Professor and director of Harvard’s Library, recently, and they’re concerned over the settlement of the lawsuit between Google and the authors and publishers, over the scanning and use of books in Google Book Search. In my experience, Brewster is extraordinarily thoughtful and takes a long view. Early in my career, I was a librarian. I love books. So while I’m not a lawyer and I find this settlement confusing, I’m writing about it because I think it merits awareness and a serious discussion.

The key issues appear to be whether the business model created by the settlement will lock up content that essentially belongs to the public domain (per Brewster) and whether the publishers’ and authors’ creation of a Google monopoly for books will harm access to knowledge in the future (per Darnton). Below, I’m relying on their words to explain this further.

Last week Brewster posted “It’s All About the Orphans” (http://www.opencontentalliance.org/2009/02/23/its-all-about-the-orphans/) on the blog of the Open Content Alliance, focusing on the plight of “orphan works” - that vast number of books that are still under copyright but whose authors can no longer be found:

"After digesting the proposed Google Book Settlement, it becomes clear that the dizzyingly complex agreement is, in essence, an elaborate scheme for the exploitation of orphan works… The upshot, if the Settlement is approved, would be legal protection for Google, and only for Google, to scan and provide digital access to the orphan works. Presto! … So, should the Settlement be approved, Google will be handed exclusive access to the orphans, and the public loses out… I, personally, am amazed at this creative use of class action law. The three parties have managed to skirt copyright law, bypass legislative efforts, and feather their own nests - all through the clever use of law intended to remedy harms. This Settlement, if approved by the judge, will accomplish things appropriate to a legislative body not to private corporate boardrooms. Let’s live under the rule of law, as arduous as that might be, and free the orphans, legitimately, not for one corporation but for all of us."

And in “Google & the Future of Books” (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281), an article that Darnton published in The New York Review of Books last month, the focus is slightly different but the upshot is the same:

"After reading the settlement and letting its terms sink in—no easy task, as it runs to 134 pages and 15 appendices of legalese - one is likely to be dumbfounded: here is a proposal that could result in the world's largest library… Moreover, in pursuing the terms of the settlement with the authors and publishers, Google could also become the world's largest book business - not a chain of stores but an electronic supply service that could out-Amazon Amazon… The class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition… We are allowing a question of public policy - the control of access to information - to be determined by private lawsuit… As an unintended consequence, Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly - a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information… The settlement creates a fundamental change in the digital world by consolidating power in the hands of one company… This is also a tipping point in the development of what we call the information society. If we get the balance wrong at this moment, private interests may outweigh the public good for the foreseeable future, and the Enlightenment dream may be as elusive as ever."

A lot seems to be at stake and the court may approve the settlement in June! I don't care if the settlement means that Google will get even richer (disclosure: I’m a Google shareholder). The question is: to what extent will WE become poorer?

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!")