Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing:
- 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?
- 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?
- Academic Earth — takes open courseware from different universities and integrates them into a coherent UI. Transcripts. Slurp.
- 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.