Four Short Links: 28 August 2009

The Future, Python Metrics, Distributed Version Control, and Stylish R

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

1. What The Future's All About (Webstock Words) -- Bruce Sterling on the future. We’re not going to get a future Cloud World as somehow opposed to a future Augmented Reality World. It can’t happen. The ideas can be clearly distinguished, but ideas about technology, labels for technology, predictions and suppositions about technology, they don’t map onto actual real-world technology. Human culture doesn’t work like a logical argument.
2. PyMetrics -- code analysis software that produces metrics for your code. (via the excellent 10 Ways To Let People Know You're a Bad Python Programmer by Noah Gift)
3. Prophet and SD 0.7 Are Now Available -- Prophet is a lightweight schemaless database designed for peer to peer replication and disconnected operation. Prophet keeps a full copy of your data and (history) on your laptop, desktop or server. Prophet syncs when you want it to, so you can use Prophet-backed applications whether or not you have network. SD (Simple Defects) is a peer-to-peer issue tracking system built on top of Prophet. In addition to being a full-fledged distributed bug tracker, SD can also bidirectionally sync with your RT, Hiveminder, Trac, GitHub or Google Code issue tracker.
4. Google's R Style Guide -- R is a high-level programming language used primarily for statistical computing and graphics. The goal of the R Programming Style Guide is to make our R code easier to read, share, and verify. The rules below were designed in collaboration with the entire R user community at Google. (via Bo Cowgill's blog)

Four Short Links: 24 August 2009

Distributed Version Control Systems, Ideas Tracking, OO Survey Results, New Barcodes

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Making Sense of Revision Control Systems (ACM Queue) -- good introduction to the subject from Bryan O'Sullivan, author of Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (aka Distributed Revision Control with Mercurial) that covers Subversion, Mercurial, and git. Under the distributed view of revision control, every commit is potentially a branch of its own. If Bob and Alice start from the exact same view of history, and each one makes a commit, they have already created a tiny anonymous fork in the history of the project. Neither will know about this until one pulls the other's changes in, at which point they will have to merge with them. These tiny branches and merges are so frequent with Mercurial and Git that users of these tools look at branching and merging in a very different way from Subversion users. The parallel and branchy nature of a project's development is clearly visible in its history, making it obvious who made which changes when, and exactly which other changes theirs were based upon.
2. Ideas Are Awesome -- Ideas Are Awesome is a web culture aggregator tracking emerging marketing, design, and technology memes. We are currently tracking: simplify, empower, give, inspire, connect, adapt. (via cheeky_geeky on Twitter)
3. OO Concepts Survey Result -- There were 3785 people who completed the survey. These charts show the proportion who gave the different possible responses for each question. If you're an OO programmer, use this to determine how aberrant your practices are (hint: most people are neither zealous nor consistent).
4. Bokode -- a new camera based interaction solution where an ordinary camera can detect small optical tags from a relatively large distance. Current optical tags, such as barcodes, must be read within a short range and the codes occupy valuable physical space on products. We present a new low-cost optical design so that the tags can be shrunk to 3mm visible diameter, and unmodified ordinary cameras several meters away can be set up to decode the identity plus the relative distance and angle. The design exploits the bokeh effect of ordinary cameras lenses, which maps rays exiting from an out of focus scene point into a disk like blur on the camera sensor. (via waxy)

Four short links: 11 June 2009

Trends, Graffiti, Games, and Streaming Video

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Trending Topics -- full source code for trendingtopics.org, Wikipedia trend analysis. Rails app running on the Cloudera Hadoop Distribution on EC2. (via mattb on Delicious)
2. Graffiti from Pompeii -- I can't help but read these as Tweets. Herculaneum (on the exterior wall of a house); 10619: Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here (see also olde style Twitter) (via OvidPerl on Twitter)
3. Online Games Dominate Beijing Startonomics -- presentations from sessions on Chinese game business at Startonomics conference. Though there are many differences between the US and China games market, the one that stands out most is China’s ability to massively monetize games. Tencent, a leading Chinese web portal, social network and game developer, famously announced revenue of over $1 billion earlier this year, much of it coming from their avatar service. (via TinaTranT on Twitter)
4. Ustream's Audience for Apple iPhone Announcement Greater Than Cable News -- Ustream is amazing, you can take a consumer handycam and video broadcast live to a greater audience than many TV shows get.

Twitter Approval Matrix

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 6

There is a lot of interest in figuring out how to most effectively use Twitter. The Twitter Book is a great start to put some of the of the puzzle pieces together. The book got me thinking about some of the people and tags that are popular. I was amazed at how Ashton Kutcher, @aplusk, surpassed 2 million followers relatively quickly. My curiosity led me to scraping his tweet archive and producing a Wordle of his tweets. I found very little substantive content as compared to Kathy Sierra (@kathysierra) or Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly). Don't get me wrong, Ashton does tweet, but it's about boring stuff, IMO. But boring to me could be exciting to one of his followers.

This got me thinking further about tastes. We all have different tastes. I like to make sense of the world around me by collecting as much information as I can, analyzing it (in my head and in programs), and then visualizing it. So, that led me to the matrix idea. Why not plot Twitter activity, trends, users, tags on a matrix? For years, I've been reading the New York Magazine and always scanned its Approval Matrix. They describe their Twitter version as, "Our deliberately oversimplified guide to whose tweets are worth following." I thought I'd do the same, but with more than just who but also what is worth following. I decided to throw in some analysis and a user contributed component: you. The "you" part is for the future. That is, I would like you to contribute coordinates for where you think items should land on a future grid similar to the one below.

This matrix shows four quadrants used to describe tastes found on Twitter, or related sites such as hashtag.org, tweestats.com, etc. The Y-axis is partly analytical and shows popularity (mostly through scraped numbers) or perceived popularity (in the future nominated by you). The other part of the grid is more curated and subjective. The X-axis has been plotted based on my personal opinion. You may agree or disagree with my placements and that's all good to me. After all, it is about taste. The matrix and plots do not represent a thorough analytical treatment, but rather a view of the trends that could be found in data sources allowing me to plot with some sense of relevance.

For this post, I've limited the data and activity to the month of May. I will make this a monthly post if I get enough feedback/help. So, here's how you can nominate topics or people for the matrix:

• You can tag any of your tweets, RTs using #approvalmatrix and I'll find it.
• Tweet to @mikehatora
• DM mikehatora
• Send email to mikeh {at} oreilly {dot} com

If you want to suggest where the tweet or subject belongs on the matrix, do this:

• Notice the numbers on the grid, 1-10, in North/South and East/West directions.
• Notice the quadrant tags NE, SE,NW,SW, on the outer corners of each quadrant.

So NE, 6,8 would put your suggestion between #jobs and #followfriday.

Here are a couple of examples that could end up on future ApprovalMatrix postings:

• @mikehatora #wwdc, NE 5,9 Interesting new stuff from Apple, but seems to have NOT leapfrogged ahead again this year. The plot is hot [N], because lots of hastags have #wwdc and the comment shows it is interesting [E] but not at the 8-10 scale of smart but rather a 5-right, 9-up on the plot]. You could say a topic like this is hotter than it is smart/interesting/useful.
• Starting new job on Monday, thanks to Twitter posting. #ApprovalMatrix This will be picked up in a scrape and added to the jobs/careers bucket. It'll likely will be a NE 5,8 aggregated with the other job data and comments.
• #approvalmatrix NE 7,8 RT @timoreilly Three-part series on how Google does search quality evaluation, starts here: http://bit.ly/QIgwX Here the tweeter is Re-Tweeting someone (timoreilly) and indicating that it is an important item in the Hot and Smart quadrant (NE). I'd look to see how many RTs have happened after the initial tweet.
• DM mikehatora SE 7,8 #hr Indicates the hashtag #hr, which is Human Resources, is not trending up, and is boring according to the sender.

Feel free to nominate people, tags, related news, etc. I can't guarantee your nomination will make it into next month's post, but it just might. This is a chance for you to put things on our Radar while letting us know what your tastes are.

I hope you enjoy this and see it as a potentially useful tool to monitor trends that your fellow readers are tracking.

Experience Syndication: Powered by Zappos

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 5

I have been thinking a lot about the new Powered by Zappos service.

According to Zappos:

Powered by Zappos (PBZ) is a feature Zappos.com offers to its partners where we design, host, fulfill and own a partners web site. Our goal is to provide Zappos customers as well as our partner's customers with the best possible service experience. By building partnerships through PBZ we can deliver great service to more people. Ultimately if you are purchasing through a PBZ site you are making a purchase from Zappos, your package with free shipping will even arrive in a Zappos.com box and you will receive all the great benefits Zappos has to offer.

For lack of a better term, I am calling this “experience syndication” since PBZ is essentially syndicating the value of the entire experience - not just one aspect such as content or business process or infrastructure. A quick Google search reveals that would-be competitors such as Clarks Shoes, Stuart Weitzman, Bostonian Shoes etc. are already utilizing PBZ.

I am of two minds on PBZ. As a business strategy I think it is a brilliant play. Zappos is syndicating the very thing that makes them great - the entire experience; from browsing to buying and especially post-sales support. In the hyper-competitive world of ecommerce, individual, mid-market brands like Clarks simply can’t compete with that so they better join. It also raises an interesting question. What other companies might look at syndicating their experience?

On the negative side: I am a big fan of Zappos but I am not blind to the fact that the more successful the PBZ offering gets, the more power they will wield over individual companies that depend on them for survival. In that sense I fear that Zappos may ultimately do to shoe companies what Amazon appears headed to do to book publishers - and what Walmart has already done to countless small brands - put them in a death grip and squeeze the life out of them. Let's hope I am wrong.

Ignite Boston 4 - Tonight!

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 7

The fourth Ignite Boston is this Thursday, September 11, from 6 to 10pm at The Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston. Don't miss out on hearing a special keynote by Tim O'Reilly. There is no cover charge or any sort of fee. The event is free as in 'Free Beer'. In fact, Microsoft is sponsoring the night and there will be a free beer for those of you who check in when you get there.

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will be other giveaway items like tee-shirts and O'Reilly books that will be distributed during the event.

(continue reading)

OFF=ON Trend and Ubiquitous Computing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 6

The good folks at trendwatching.com have a new trend report up, called OFF=ON. In their words:

More and more, the offline world (a.k.a. the real world, meatspace or atom-arena) is adjusting to and mirroring the increasingly dominant online world, from tone of voice to product development to business processes to customer relationships.

They're absolutely right, the signs are right there for all to see. They have been for a while--Matt Webb has been one of the few voices banging this drum (read Matt's take on OFF=ON here). The best articulation of it, though, has to go to William Gibson in a Rolling Stone interview:

One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real. In the future, that will become literally impossible. The distinction between cyberspace and that which isn't cyberspace is going to be unimaginable. When I wrote Neuromancer in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was there, and we were here. Now cyberspace is here for a lot of us, and there has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. There is where they don't have Wi-Fi.

It's worth repeating that great line: "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real". It's been an organizing principle for how I view the world in the last year.
For example, when I read "Beyond the Flickering Screen: Resituating eBooks" by Sherman Young, see Gibson reflected in Young's statement "Instead of seeking to make an e-book culture a replacement for print culture, effectively placing the reading of books in a silo separated from other day-to-day activities, it might be better to situate e-books within a mobility culture, as part of the burgeoning range of social activities revolving around a connected, convergent mobile device."

When I read about smart home monitoring letting us detect when our elderly relatives are hurt, I bask in Gibsonian glee. Granny's got an IP address and we can ping her!

When I see that all the Android Developer Contest winners used GPS, I see Gibson's face beaming back from me. That's why Google drive the streets, why Nokia's buying Navteq. The revolution won't be televised, but it will be geotagged.

Technorati Tags: google, geo, ubicomp, williamgibson

Radar Theme: Collective Intelligence

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

"None of us is as dumb as all of us," but the opposite of this profound truth is also true. Systems that channel individual behaviours to create new and valuable data are showing up everywhere. We point to Amazon Recommendations as the canonical example, but it's hard to find an area that isn't using individual actions to produce collective wisdom.

Watchlist: Luis von Ahn, Intrade, Robin Hanson, David Pennock, Slashdot Karma.

Radar Theme: Art and Technology

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

Art is emotion hacking, intended to provoke or illuminate rather than profit. Artists play on the boundaries of new materials, new modes of interaction, new technologies. Often what they build can inspire or inform useful and commercial hacking.

Watchlist: Natalie Jeremijenko, NYU ITP, We Make Money Not Art.

Radar Theme: Open Beyond Source

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 5

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

The lessons and techniques of open source are applicable beyond source code. Open standards, open hardware, open data, open government are all borrowing from the legal, cultural, and technical toolbox of open source.

Watchlist: Sunlight Foundation, Limor Fried, Change Congress, Wesabe Data Bill of Rights, Creative Commons.

Radar Theme: Materials Science

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

New materials follow a curve: initially expensive and so used by R&D only, but many eventually become mass-produced and cheap and so enable mainstream applications. By tracking new materials with interesting possibilities, we can be ahead of the mass-manufacturing curve. The trick is to identify the alpha-hardware-geeks prototyping great things from the new materials.

Watchlist: Inventables.

Radar Theme: Overload

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 4

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

We have access to more information than ever before, so now rather than attempting to acquire more information sources we're challenged to filter the ones we have. We want technology to make us more productive, more effective, and smarter. Life hacking was the start, and intelligent software tools are the next step.

Watchlist: Linda Stone. (Pointers to other interesting people in this area gratefully accepted)

Radar Theme: Digital Democracy

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

We can no longer smugly claim that the Internet exists separate from the law. Copyright, patent, and taxation are all pressing issues. From the other side, we can use our web techniques to fix a broken and corrupt political system.

Watchlist: Larry Lessig, Sunlight Foundation, Greg Elin, MySociety.

Radar Theme: Clean Energy Tech

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

All civilization depends on energy, and always has done so. Oil is rising rapidly in price and alternative energy and energy consumption management have become viable businesses. We're interested in the IT use of energy technology (green data centers) and the energy industry's use of IT (smart monitors, intelligent grids, data center placement).

Watchlist: IBM/Sun/Google, Amazon/Microsoft, Wattzon, Vinod Khosla.

Radar Theme: ARGs

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

As the players of The Lost Ring watch the Beijing Olympics, they'll see more than the rest of us. They've been playing an Alternate Reality Game, creating new significance for events and locations in the real world. Companies are interested in ARGs because they see players able to interact with brands at multiple levels, as well as creating mystery and excitement around the brand. These games are player-constructed, unpredictable, and may not even survive under the moniker "Alternate Reality Games". Whatever they grow into, they're showing us new ways of collaborating, recreating, and engaging the world around us.

Watchlist: Jane McGonigal, Jordan Weisman, Elan Lee.

Radar Theme: Neo-Geo

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

Google Maps and Google Earth changed our ideas of what a map on a computer could do for us. We now have tremendously detailed data about the real world and software to manipulate it. Some of the data and code are open, some closed. More and more companies want to connect their products and services to the real world with these data and services.

Watchlist: Google Maps, Google Earth, the open source geospatial community, Where 2.0.

Radar Theme: Index

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

This post is an index to a series of posts made in August 2008 outlining major O'Reilly Radar themes. New posts will be linked in here as they go up.

Bio

• Synthetic Biology
• Neuro-Everything
• Personal Genomics

Real World

• Physical Web
• Neo-Geo
• Clean Energy Tech

Web

• Web Ops
• Social Networking
• Web 2.0
• Money/Web

People

• New User Interfaces
• ARGs
• Digital Democracy
• Overload

Hardware

• Make
• Materials Science
• Art and Technology

Strength in Numbers

• Collective Intelligence
• Open Beyond Source

Radar Theme: New User Interfaces

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 6

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

The iPhone is called the JesusPhone for a reason. Its ease of use is a revelation, and the multitouch display is part of that. Since the iPhone's release, multitouch displays have shown up in tradeshows and on CNN. The hardware is becoming cheaper and the software more ubiquitous, opening people's minds to UI possibilities beyond mice and menus.

Watch list: iPhone, Jeff Han, John Underkoffler.

Radar Theme: Make

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 3

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

DIY culture is back, from rocket cars to simply tweaking things you already own to make them better. People want control over their devices again, whether access to the internal computer systems of their car or the ability to make a simple flashing LED toy. Physical electronics skills are important but, thanks to the low price of microcontrollers, hardware is becoming software.

Watch List: Arduino, Tom Igoe, NYU ITP, Make Magazine, Maker Faire.

Radar Theme: Web Ops

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

It has been reported that every 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of profit. Every company whose web site drives their business is in the same situation, they just don't know it yet. The techniques of web ops are being hoarded by some companies (e.g., Amazon) as competitive advantages yet many of the best tools are open source. This is an emerging field with huge direct bottom line value. Our Velocity Conference tackles web ops head-on.

Watchlist: Jesse Robbins (second blog), Steve Souders, Varnish, memcached/Perlbal/MogileFS, Firebug, Jiffy.