Four short links: 23 July 2012

Drone Show, Ads, GitHub's Importance, and Crowdfunding Science

  1. Unmanned Systems North America 2012 — huge tradeshow for drones. (via Directions Magazine)
  2. On Thneeds and the Death of Display Ads (John Battelle) — the video interstitial. Once anathema to nearly every publisher on the planet, this full page unit is now standard on the New York Times, Wired, Forbes, and countless other publishing sites. And while audiences may balk at seeing a full-page video ad after clicking from a search engine or other referring agent, the fact is, skipping the ad is about as hard as turning the page in a magazine. And in magazines, full page ads work for marketers. If you’d raised a kid on AdBlocker, and then at age 15 she saw the ad-filled Internet for the first time, she’d think her browser had been taken over by malware. (via Tim Bray)
  3. The Most Important Social Network: GitHubI suspect that GitHub’s servers now contain the world’s largest corpus of commentary around intellectual production.
  4. Crowdfunded Genomics — a girl with a never-before-seen developmental disorder had her exome (the useful bits of DNA) sequenced, and a never-before-seen DNA mutation found. The money for it was raised by crowdfunding. (via Ed Yong)
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