Four short links: 1 October 2009

Objectivity Be Gone, Public Screens, Lobbying Patterns, DIY Africa

1. The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version -- Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh)
2. Screens in Context -- ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, it’s a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers at the coal face of web and mobile encounter every day. Everything can be considered in context, be timely, reactive, and data-driven. I’m going to try to outline some dimensions to think about, with some incredibly quick, simple, off the cuff dumb ideas [...] The technology to achieve some of these may be over and above what is possible now, but the biggest step - installing powered, networked computers in the real world - is already being taken by advertising media companies.
3. Interactive Network Map of Lobbying Patterns Around Key Senators in Health Care Reform -- fascinating visualization of political activity, via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. The Doers Club -- How DIY design gave a teenager from Malawi electricity, and can help transform Africa.

Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don’t Need It

Speculation about the demise of the news business and advice about what they should do about it is everywhere. It makes for great, self-congratulatory sport but it won’t help the news industry.

Why?

Because the news industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution during a time of disruptive change.

While we have all been busy telling the newspaper institution what they should do differently we have missed one big point: Institutions are structured to precisely NOT do much of anything different.

The number one thing that ails newspapers? 70% of all costs lie in physical distribution and printing while readership and revenues have dramatically moved away from paper. This leads to a simple-minded but commonsense conclusion (and my superfluous piece of advice): maximize your online presence, build your online community, concentrate on journalistic talent, and jettison all costs associated with print; stop the presses.

Even if I you think I am wrong, just play along with me for a moment and, for the purpose of this exercise, assume I am right. If you can’t go that far substitute your own radical therapy (you know you have one!) in place of mine and answer the next question. Which major newspaper could have gone to its board anytime before 2009 and successfully proposed such a radical solution? The answer if you have ever worked in a large, “institutionalized” organization is zero. The scenario is so horrific, involves pains so great, outcomes so unknown and certain near-term revenue loss such that no institutional body would be capable of acting on it - much less restructuring around so medieval a remedy.

The failure of newspapers is not a failure of imagination or foresight nor is it a failure of individuals. This kind of failure is the hallmark of all institutions in the face of tectonic disruption. Institutions are a set of agreements that perpetuate a social order beyond individual intention or tenure. Changing those agreements is costly and time-consuming. So when the rate of change accelerates beyond the institution’s adaptive capacity - extinction follows.

The question is not “what should newspapers do?” but “how can a large institution effectively organize in response to disruptive change?” Taken thus, it is not only the fundamental question to ask of newspapers - but to ask of ourselves in relation to a host of big-ticket game-changers such as peak oil, environmental collapse and climate change that simultaneously require and defy our capacity for institutional response.

The stakes are much bigger than news. Let’s put our mind to that question instead of making more to-do lists. From the Radar audience I would like to ask for historical examples of institutions that have effectively responded to disruption? What are the lessons that we can draw from them?

Four short links: 15 September 2009

Delegation, Journalism, Dating Numbers, Learn Git

1. Why You Shouldn't Do It All Yourself -- this resonated with where I am in a few projects. One of the hardest things to learn in management is how not to do it all yourself. People often call this a problem with "delegation". But the problem isn't with telling others what to do. The problem is learning how not to do it all yourself. (via br3nda)
2. The Story Behind The Story (The Atlantic) -- I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger’s role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all “news” is unapologetically propaganda.
3. OkTrends -- analytics from a dating site show what works in email. We analyzed over 500,000 first contacts on our dating site, OkCupid. Our program looked at keywords and phrases, how they affected reply rates, and what trends were statistically significant. The result: a set of rules for what you should and shouldn’t say when introducing yourself online. (read their note on how they protected privacy before freaking out)
4. Learn GitHub -- Here we have tried to compile the best online learning Git resource available. There are a number of articles and screencasts, written and arranged to try to make learning Git as quick and easy as possible.

Four short links: 1 September 2009

Social Investigative Journalism, Mozilla Service, Gov Data, Video Fun

1. Help Me Investigate -- find other people who want to investigate the same things you do ("on which streets in my town are the most parking tickets issued?", "why is there a giant unused TV screen in the downtown of this city?", "how much does this city council spend on PR?"), work together to resolve it, and leave a record of the answer for others. It's a different angle on MySociety's What Do They Know.
2. Mozilla Service Week -- We believe the Internet should make life better. Join us the week of September 14-21, 2009, as we take action to make a difference in our communities, our world, our Web. (via MySociety)
3. Open Government Data: Starting to Judge Results -- mall, tangible, steps that turn published government data into cost savings, measurable service improvements, or other concrete goods will "punch above their weight" : not only are they valuable in their own right, but they help favorably disposed civic servants make the case internally for more transparency and disclosure. Beyond aiming for perfection and thinking about the long run, the volunteer community would benefit from seeking low hanging fruit that will prove the concept of open government data and justify further investment.
4. Three Frames -- small fun. I love that there are still small fun things to do. (via pleaseenjoy on Twitter)

Four short links: 21 August 2009

Moody Twitter, Future Geohistory, News Sucks, Whyless in Wonderland

1. TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious).
2. What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published; between 1066 and 1086 more than half of Dunwich’s taxable farmland had washed away. Major storms in 1287, 1328, 1347, and 1740 swallowed up more land. By 1844, only 237 people lived in Dunwich. Today, less than half as many reside there in a handful of ruins on dry land. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
3. The Three Key Parts of Stories You Don't Usually Get -- In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites. Take a look at that WaPo page again. Currently, a link sits on the far right side of the page, a third of the way down, labeled “What you need to know.” Click on that link, and you’re taken here: a linkless, five-paragraph blog post from May. This basically captures our approach to providing the necessary background to follow the news.
4. Eulogy to _why -- a pseudonymous Ruby character, _why the Lucky Stiff, recently vanished from the net: all his sites and accounts were deleted. It's possible this is because someone tried to identify him, it's possible that his accounts were hacked. Either way, this is a touching tribute to him from John Resig. I for one would like to see more appreciation while the people are still around. Today, tell two good people that you enjoy what they do. You know you can.

Data Is Journalism: MSNBC.com Acquires Everyblock

Everyblock, Adrian Holovaty's local data aggregator, has been acquired by MSNBC.com. Many are hailing it as local news acquisition. For 15 major US cities Everyblock aggregates crime data, restaurant reviews, health inspections, local news and more. This is data that is only of interest to people within a certain area. I care much less about crime ten blocks away than I do about crime two blocks away. Everyblock lets me know what is happening within three blocks of my home and filters everything out (on the web and iPhone). So Everyblock is a hyperlocalnews acquisition, but that is only half of the story (maybe less).

The future of news is data and Everyblock is the premier startup in this area. As Adrian phrased it on his site this past May in a post entitled The definitive, two-part answer to "is data journalism?":

It's a hot topic among journalists right now: Is data journalism? Is it journalism to publish a raw database? Here, at last, is the definitive, two-part answer:
1. Who cares?
2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible.

MSNBC.com stopped wasting time just in time.

There is a coming deluge of data from the new administration. Sites like Data.gov, USASpending.gov and Recovery.gov are hopefully just the beginning of new data sources. It's already too much for many organizations to make sense of. Without the proper tools many stories will never be covered. People will not get the info they need. Everyblock has proven that by taking free local government data sources and making them readily available to interested citizens you can create value. Now it's time to turn those tools and thinking onto a problem of a national scale. (If you'd like to learn more about the Obama administrations efforts to release data check out Anil Dash's latest piece The Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009.)

It's important to note that Everyblock recently open-sourced the code to their site and as Techcrunch pointed out their traffic is not that high. So MSNBC could have easily duplicated Everyblock and just turned their traffic hose at the new property. Instead MSNBC.com realized that they are facing a new problem and they needed a new team to tackle it head on. Enter Adrian and Everyblock.

Of course many people know Adrian as one of the co-creators of DJango. In his acquisition blog post he states that he will have more time to work on Django, that Everyblock will stay Python (and presumably continue to roll their own maps) and that this does not effect ebcode, the open-sourced version of Everyblock (Radar post).

Congrats Adrian it looks like you solved the dilemma (Radar site) of what to do once you've open-sourced your site; you tackle a bigger problem.

Post updated to reflect that it was MSNBC.com, not MSNBC, that bought Everyblock.

Four short links: 24 June 2009

Open Source Kids, Crowdsourcing Lessons, Flickr Secrets, Hadoop Spatial Joins

1. The Digital Open -- The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers.
2. Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian's Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment -- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like a game. "Any time that you’re trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what they’re doing is having an effect," Willison said. "It’s kind of a fundamental tenet of social software. … If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around." (via migurski on delicious)
3. 10+ Deploys/Day: Dev & Ops Cooperation at Flickr -- John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's talk from Velocity. You tell any mainstream company in the world "10 deploys/day" and you'll be met with disbelief.
4. Reproducing Spatial Joins using Hadoop and EC2 -- bit by bit the techniques for emulating important operations from trad databases are being discovered and shared in the new database scene. (via straup on delicious)

Completing the circle on journalists and public participation

Journalists, politicians, and foundations are all tinkering with forms of amateur input: inviting bloggers to major events, quoting popular online sites in newspapers, etc. But Capital News Connection has really jumped in full-tilt with Ask Your Lawmaker. A creative combination of public input and ratings with professionals who have their boots on the ground in the US Capitol building, Ask Your Lawmaker is a case study in progress concerning how to get experts and the public to work together.

I heard a talk from CNC founder and executive director Melinda Wittstock this evening at the Ethos Roundtable, a forum for non-profits in Eastern Massachusetts. CNC gets consulting input from Ethos Roundtable organizer Deborah Elizabeth Finn, and Wittstock came looking for volunteer help with such matters as developing a Facebook or iPhone application. As Wittstock said, Ask Your Lawmaker is still working on how to complete the circle of public input, feedback, and outreach.

Step one is the simple form (on the web site's "Ask A Question" tab) for submitting a question to any Congressman or Senator of your choice. Step two is the simple voting mechanism, reminiscent of the pre-inauguration Change.gov site.

At this point, the journalists working for CNC--who have years of experience at leading media sites--take over. They don't merely choose the highest-rated questions. Sometimes a question shouldn't have to wait around and gather votes because the topic is hot. The reporters use their judgment in combination with votes to pick timely and provocative questions, and sometimes direct a question to a more appropriate lawmaker (such as the sponsor of a bill or the head of a committee).

The next step invokes the power of professional journalism. CNC sends its reporters into the Capitol and congressional office buildings daily. Although they have regular routines with their typical journalists' questions, they throw in citizen questions where appropriate and tell the lawmaker how many people voted for each question. Wittstock mentioned that it's very hard for a congressperson to dismiss a question that came from a constituent, especially one that got a lot of votes.

Videos are very hard to make in the Capitol, unfortunately, because filming is severely restricted there by law and the lawmakers are understandably leery of allowing themselves to be filmed any place at any time.

The next step goes from real-time back to the web site, along with conventional radio stations. Questions and answers are taped and transcribed so they can be offered as both audio and text. CNC has contracts with a number of PBS stations who work public questions into regular news broadcasts.

Podcasts and texts are posted on the web site and served through an RSS feed, but you can also follow AskYourLawmaker on Twitter or search for hashtag #ayl. (Right now they're discussing the talk I attended.) This can bring the answers back to those who asked the questions.

Ask Your Lawmaker also offers a feed that visitors can add to their own web sites, and an iframe for each individual report, suitable for embedding.

Most powerful at all, citizens' questions can change policies. Lobbyists harangue lawmakers day after day, but sometimes they're more impressed by a simple question revealing a deep-seated need in their communities. They have been heard walking away from journalist interviews saying to their staff, "Brief me about that issue."

All very impressive for an effort that's so provisional, the journalists run the web site themselves. Several weak points remain before the circle is complete.

• Ask Your Lawmaker doesn't get enough publicity. It may or may not be mentioned on the radio station that reports its results. Hardly any listeners, I wager, realize that questions were generated by ordinary citizens, much less realize that anyone can ask a question.
• The site needs a way to accept questions through SMS. Attendees at this evening's talk speculated about the power of accepting questions for US lawmakers from victims of wars or globalization policies around the globe.
• The site doesn't exploit the potential for social networking to let questioners promote the site. Someone whose question is chosen should be informed when the answer is posted or broadcast on the radio, and should be encouraged to invite her friends and fellow workers to view the answer.

CNC is looking for ways to complete the circle--and will gladly accept volunteer help, as I mentioned--but they're doing a lot in the meantime to firm up their appeal and raise funds. They plan to allow cobranding and to let sites select the length and subject matter of the material they post, just as they now serve up very customized reports to the radio stations they serve. They may start accepting advertising, and they're looking for fun contests that will publicize their work.

Ask Your Lawmaker demonstrates a unique solution to a situation whered for amateur input can augment expert practice and expertise can augment what the public has to offer. In this regard, Ask Your Lawmaker is worth comparing to the landmark Peer-to-Patent project and to two commercial ventures I analyzed a few months ago, uTest and TopCoder. The opportunity for a virtuous cycle of public input, professional processing, and listener loyalty--especially in a field whose death has been predicted by many--puts Ask Your Lawmaker into an intriguing category of its own.

Hackers wanted! Scholarships available to coders who'll come to journalism and help save democracy

Guest blogger Brian Boyer is a hacker journalist who writes about the intersection of technology and journalism. He's worked at public-interest journalism site ProPublica and is now at the Chicago Tribune, building their new News Applications team.

It's not news that journalism is in crisis. CNN turned newspapers into first-day fishwrap and Craigslist killed the business model. Solutions are scarce, and our democracy is at risk. I don't have a chart to guide our way through the darkness to Citizenry 2.0, but there are some who can navigate the singularity.

Journalism needs great hackers. Not just nerds, but programmers who care -- about the values of journalism and the power of a free press to hold government accountable. Luckily, hackers are a freedom-minded bunch. The free software movement is rooted in many of the same principals that guide journalism. But news organizations aren't very sexy places to work -- especially now, as layoffs, bankruptcy and closures plague the industry. So how can we bring nerds to the news? One old-skool school is trying.

Free beer school!

Tell your programmer friends: The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University is giving away full scholarships, plus expenses, to software developers.They can get a masters degree in journalism, gratis, from one of the most prestigious J-schools around.

I recently graduated from the year-long program, during which I studied with with one other hacker and ~45 brilliant 'normal' journalism students. I interviewed lawmakers, farmers and shopkeepers and wrote stories about agriculture, waterways, and the diabetes epidemic in Illinois. It was difficult to shake my introverted, google-first, face-to-face-as-a-last-resort programmer nature. But it was also thrilling.

Journalism is an info-geek's dream. You're constantly learning new topics, speaking with experts, and distilling real-world issues to their essence -- all in the mission of informing the folks who don't have time to soak up all that data. It's like being paid to write a new Wikipedia article every day.

We also wrote some software. My programmer colleague and I banged out enviroVOTE in a frenetic weekend of coding and coffee in the days preceding the election. The night of, we were tied to our keyboards, tallying results and tweeting updates while the rest of the world was watching TV. Such is the life of a journalist.

For our final project at Medill, the two coders and four non-coder new-media students built NewsMixer, an experiment in integrating social networks with news coverage. It was one of the first applications to roll out on Facebook Connect, and remains one of the only apps that explores its full potential. All the code is GPL'ed and has already spawned other open-source projects.

This is the time to remake journalism

Programmers have been making an impact in the news world for some time, but until recently most innovation in this space has been in creating new ways to present the old style. With a few shining exceptions like the datavisuals by the New York Times, most online news could have been written on a typewriter and mailed to Google for indexing.

Then, something amazing happened: Software won a Pulitzer Prize. Created by hacker journalist Matt Waite and other fantastically clever folks at the St. Petersburgh Times, PolitiFact is form of news that could only exist online. Aron Pilhofer, leader of the innovations team at the NYT, put it perfectly:

But is it journalism, some people asked? There's no lead per se, no narrative and no pyramids anywhere to be found, much less the inverted sort.

Journalism is about helping people make sense of important issues, and how those issues affect them personally. It's about uncovering that which someone wants to keep hidden. It's about holding people we place in high public office accountable. And by those definitions... PolitiFact more than meets the test. It takes a traditional form of newspaper reporting -- fact-checking what politicians say -- and scales it up in a way only possible on the web.

The NYT's Represent and its open-source cousin, Repsheet, are innovations much in the same vein, and their existence is a sign of the times. The tools now available to hackers are so great that we can think far beyond content management systems. The moment has come when a couple of great hackers can knock out a fully-fledged new form of media in a matter of weeks. Tell the Twitterati: there are lights in the distance.

Hackers wanted

The news is waiting to be saved. We have the technology, all we need is more nerds. So ditch your boring corporate gigs and come to journalism! Democracy is one hell of a fun problem to hack.

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: 9 Apr 2009

Scifi, audiences, transparency, and the peril of public life. No links tomorrow, as I'll be preparing for our village fete:

1. The Fantastic That Denies It's Fantastic: Science Fiction Talk at the Royal Institution -- Matt Jones's fascinating notes from this talk by two academics make thought-provoking reading. “SF is a response to the cultural shock of discovering our marginal place in an alien universe” ... “an attempt put the stamp of humanity back on the universe”
2. Visualize Your Audience (Rowan Simpson) -- If you don’t think it’s a big deal for your site to be broken or off line while you make changes … think of all of the people who happen to be visiting at that point and imagine what it would feel like to have them all in the room with you while you flick the switch. No matter how small the number it would probably feel like a lot of people. And, you might be motivated to get the site back up more quickly if they were all standing behind you impatiently looking over your shoulder.
3. Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital (Waxy) -- this reminds me how rare it is to see someone about an Internet blowup where someone has actually talked to the parties involved.
4. We Live in Public (Caterina Fake) -- Caterina watched "We Live in Public" by Ondi Timoner and concurs with Jason Calacanis's musings about the Internet's ability to promote the worst behaviour: This kind of sociopathic behavior -- treating people like things -- is one of the most horrifying aspects of online interactions, and something that its very nature promotes.

Four short links: 27 Feb 2009

The Economist in Chinese, online news, concurrency, and community. Have a great weekend!

1. Translating the Economist -- Andy Baio reports on a Chinese electronic community that, each week, splits up and translates The Economist articles into Chinese. The DIY ethos here, "we want this, it's not here yet, let's make it happen", is tremendous.
2. Business Models of News -- excellent insight into the travails of newspaper business. "In essence to secure the advertising for the print edition, they have in the past completely undermined the business they need to survive in the future. They have told every one of their advertisers that online adverts are not worth paying for." (via Julie Starr)
3. Embracing Concurrency -- Ignite UK North talk on parallel coding, at a high and clear level, by Michael Sparks of BBC R&D, who is also author of Kamaelia.
4. Things I've Learned From Hacker News -- Paul Graham on social and community lessons from running Hacker News. "Probably the most important thing I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people. User behavior turns out to be surprisingly malleable. If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa."

Four short links: 26 Feb 2009

Three stories about old-media in new-media age, and some patent goblins to leave a bad taste in your mouth:

1. The Kindle Swindle -- the Authors Guild president argues that the robot voice of the Kindle does away with audiobook royalty streams, lucrative for some titles. Doesn't mention the vast majority of books for which there is no audiobook. Creators have attempted to regulate use with licenses, but I think the plasticity of bits argues against this being possible for much longer. Now "audiobook"-ness is a feature of the device, not a feature of the retailed artistic work, and the question is not only how to charge for it but whether it makes sense to continue to charge for it. Neil Gaiman, by the way, doesn't feel the same way as the head of the Author's Guild.
2. If You Want to Save Newspapers, Learn to Love Your iPhones -- a long Observer piece about the "future of newspapers", reinvention in the mobile age, subscription models, the curse of Google, etc. Many great quotes, for example: "Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively. And if you are going to get people to pay for content, you have to encourage them to make qualitative decisions about that content." -- Robert Thomson, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal.
3. NYT ArticleSkimmer -- reminscent, vaguely, of Arts & Letters Daily, the original "big heap o' content" page. Between this and Big Picture, I'm enjoying the experimentation in online newspaper formats.
4. Microsoft Sues TomTom Over Patents, Including Linux Kernel -- Microsoft patented elements of the FAT filesystem, including the system for representing long filenames on systems that only handle 8.3 filenames like CRAPWARE.EXE. This filesystem is used in pretty much every digital camera and Flash filesystem device, and the TomTom system in question. This Ars Digita article raises the interesting possibility that the Open Invention Network could respond by flexing its patent portfolio muscles and make it clear that nobody wants a battle over patents (except lawyers who are paid by the hour).

Radar Interview with Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky is one of the most incisive thinkers on technology and its effects on business and society. I had the pleasure to sit down with him after his keynote at the FASTForward '09 conference last week in Las Vegas.
In this interview Clay talks about

• The effects of low cost coordination and group action.
• Where to find the next layer of value when many professions are being disrupted by the Internet
• The necessary role of low cost experimentation in finding new business models

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there's a third Feb 11 post, I'm changing my name to Bill Murray.

1. Hacking the Earth -- an environmental futurist looks at "geoengineering", deliberately interfering with the Earth's systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act of the highest folly, or all of the above? (via Matt Jones)
2. Reinvention Draws Near for Newsweek -- fascinating look at how Newsweek are refocusing their magazine. "If we don't have something original to say, we won't. The drill of chasing the week's news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable." gives me hope. Newsweek are hoping to target fewer but richer advertisers, essentially a business strategy of tapping existing customers for more. This feels like they're ceding the contested parts of their business (commodity news stories) and doubling down on the bits that nobody else is fighting for yet (their columnists, pictures, whitespace). What else could they do? Possibly nothing (see Innovator's Dilemma), but the alternative is figuring out something new that people want and giving them that. Easy to say, hard for anyone to do.
3. Tinkerkit - a physical computing kit for designers. Arduino-compatible components for rapid prototyping. Sweet!
4. Stanford University YouTube Channel -- short interesting talks by Stanford researchers. Brains on chips, stem cells to fight deafness, and brain imagery are some of the first up there. The talks aren't condescending or vague, they're aimed at "a bright and curious audience", as the Mind Hacks blog post about them put it.

Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing:

1. EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming -- Adrian Holovaty's project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that's about to run out. The software will be open sourced but he's inviting suggestions of business models that would enable the project team to continue working on it full-time. Having used and created open source to show newspaper companies how to do journalism online, will he now work on an open source way for them to make money?
2. Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites -- Leonard Lin lays out what's required in systems and platforms for modern web sites. Perl succeeded in part because its data types were the things you had to deal with (files, text, sockets). Will the next gen of tools (the 'Rails killer' if you will) offer users, taggable objects, social objects, etc. as primitives?
3. Academic Earth -- takes open courseware from different universities and integrates them into a coherent UI. Transcripts. Slurp.
4. Love2D -- a Lua-based 2D game engine. I'm looking at it to see whether it works for me as the next step for 9 year-old kids interesting in programming games in my computer club.

Four short links: 27 Jan 2009

Fantasy, feedback, facts, and flies, all will be revealed in today's links of loops and life:

1. Blueful - a story told in text, but delivered through the medium of web sites. It's like an xkcd cartoon embodied in the web. Interesting, artistic, and makes you look at web sites in a new way. From Aaron A. Reed.
2. The Case Against Candy Land - Steven Johnson talks about how dull the children's games of our youth are. "What’s irritating about the games is that they are exercises in sheer randomness. It’s not that they fail to sharpen any useful skills; it’s that they make it literally impossible for a player to acquire any skills at all." Every process in life should have a feedback loop that lets you get better at it.
3. Journo Data - a Guardian journalist publishes data resources about the US economy as Google spreadsheets. This is the start of something interesting, where the raw data is available from journalists not just the (textual or programmatic) interpretation. As mentioned in the fantastic presentation Tim just linked to, access to the data behind our world view is essential if we are to critically assess that world view.
4. Userfly - a usability tool that records and then recreates your users' sessions on your web site, so you can see where and when they type, click on, backtrack, etc. (via

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Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

In today's edition: the spread of fake news, keeping track of your real power use, a Javascript library and a less-than-impressed take on mobile location apps.

1. Echo Chamber - the British tabloid The Sun posted a story that turned out to be fabricated. This site tracked that story's spread and uncritical acceptance by other news outlets and web sites.
2. Real Time Web-Based Power Charting - build the software and hardware to get a live chart in a web page that updates every 10 seconds with the instantaneous power usage for your entire house.
3. ActiveRecordJS - just what it sounds like, ActiveRecord for Javascript. AR is a complex subsystem of Rails, and it's interesting to see the functionality ported to Javascript.
4. I Am Here: One Man's Experiment with the Location-Aware Lifestyle - a reporter tries all the location apps, and discovers the future isn't all here yet. Interesting: only three paragraphs of this long story are about the good bits of location services, the rest question its implementation, privacy, and utility.

Four short links: 14 Jan 2009

Something beautiful, something informative, something mindblowing, something revealing: something for everyone in today's link set.

1. Trees and Forests on Old Russian Maps - old maps, like old books, are works of art. I loved this collection of symbols; it reminded me how much creativity and beauty we've lost (temporarily, I hope) in modern maps.
2. Distinguishing Decorative from Meaningful Elements in UI Design - as a thoughtless cloth-eyed coder who designs CSS with the same care and attention that a boar on Viagra devotes to lovemaking, I appreciate this detailed explanation of why a simple design choice (a border around something) turns out to have been the wrong thing to do.
3. Interview with Clay Shirky and Part 2 - from Columbia Journalism Review. This is as good as the Bruce Sterling improv on the future from last week. Every paragraph has a philosophically sound quotable nugget. This is about the future of newspapers, the fiction of "information overload", the bogosity of Luddism, and a fine fine rebuttal to Nick Carr's Google stupidity.
4. Sampling Twitter - serious geekery by Dewitt Clinton, who tried to sample the Twitter ID space for an indication of representative user behaviour--follows, friends, active, etc. "Again extrapolating for accounts too new to test and private accounts, this suggests that 23% of all assigned ids, and thus 6.8% of all potential user ids, are assigned to someone who is posting regularly, is following other users, and is being followed by at least one other user. This implies that there there are up to 1,200,000-1,300,000 active, connected users on Twitter."

Four short links: 9 Jan 2009

Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what's the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark?

1. End Times - gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism (e.g., Bad News, Good News). The critical problem is still how to pay for journalism if the new media revenues are significant lower than old, and if the new media economics decree that journalism is dead then who fills the social good role that journalism's death will leave?
2. Ward Cunningham's Visible Workings - an intriguing glimpse, from March last year, into the way Ward lays out web interactions. Nice system for laying out these interactions, but it's also fascinating for how it makes transparent what will happen as a result of the data you submit. How scalable is this? Could it tackle privacy?
3. Project Euler - fun programming exercises that require more than math to finish. We learn by doing, not by reading, so interesting exercises are part and parcel of training. It's interesting to see educators are moving from being authors to being game designers, providing a series of staged challenges that make us stronger by defeating them. I'm presently dieing in as many ways as I can while learning iterators and generators in Python, as a way of ensuring I have Python's "game physics" sussed.
4. Rise of the Garage Genome Hackers - more on hobbyist molecular biology. It mentions DIYBio, the Cambridge biohacker collective that I first heard about at BioBarCamp. (via Glynn Moody)