Four short links: 3 July 2009

Stats, Public Domain, Sewers, and Garbage

1. OECD Factbook -- Flash-built impressive data explorer from OECD. Go to Indicators > Load and, in the words of Ben Goldacre, "prepare for nerdgasm". (via bengoldacre on Twitter)
2. James Boyle is on Twitter -- author of the book The Public Domain.
3. Sewers and Startups (Pete Warden) -- designing to last, reminds me of Saul Griffith's heirloom design riff. When I joined Apple back in 2003, the central build farm for all projects had both PowerPC and x86 Darwin boxes, and our code had to compile on both. Steve was playing a long game, years before the Intel switch he was obviously planning for it, (though I only caught the significance in retrospect).
4. Open Data Makes Garbage Collection Sexier, Easier, and Cheaper -- pragmatic use for open government data. For more on the author of this post, see Hello World for Open Data by Tim Bray.

Four short links: 2 July 2009

1. UNESCO book: Open Educational Resources -- UNESCO's first openly licensed publication, a collection of papers and reports in the area of Open Educational Resources. (via glynmoody on Twitter)
2. ETSI 2.0 -- Paul Downey ventures into the belly of the telco beast and gives them both barrels. The whole thing is great--his talk was one of the best overviews of "how we think on the Web" I've seen. I can only imagine the sound it made as it bounced off the thick dinosaur hides of the attendees. I was reminded of the old, apocryphal quote from a Kodak executive dismissing digital cameras and their poor quality with "people love photos", when in reality it's the taking of photos that people love. Sometimes it's hard for an incumbent with large sunk costs and a vested interest in business as usual to foresee and embrace change. Indeed for a telco or large commercial software vendor the best way to predict the future is to prevent it. (via benjaminblack on Twitter)
3. Asia Pacific FTTH Market Study -- notable for Hong Kong's discovery with fibre-to-the-home customers: Uplink traffic is 3 times of downlink traffic. That link appears dead, but Google has it cached. (via previous link)
4. Shownar -- tracks blogs and Twitter plus other microblogging services, finds people talking about BBC television and radio, shows trends in appealing ways. Made by Schulze and Webb (and Dopplr's delicious Matt Jones), more detail available that you should read.

Four short links: 1 July 2009

Web Awards, Speed Thrills, Magazines in the Cloud, Augmented Reality

1. The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
2. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away! -- wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click increases at a more extreme rate (1000ms increases by 1900ms). The theory is that the user gets distracted and unengaged in the page. In other words, they've lost the user's full attention and have to get it back. [...] As much as five weeks later, some users, especially those who saw delays greater than 400MS, were still searching less than before. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Printcasting -- very simple content management system for print magazines that lets anyone start a magazine, add content, sign up contributors, sell ads, and go. Clever!
4. Pachube Augmented Reality Hack -- sexy hack that pushes all my buttons: computer vision, Arduino, sensor network, ubiquitous computing, pervasive alternate reality cyborg villians with chalk designs hellbent on world domination and the enslavement of the human race to use as meatsack AA batteries for their sex toys. Okay, four out of five ain't bad. (via bruces on Twitter)

Four short links: 30 June 2009

Military Open Source, Social Govwork, Dietbot, and US IT Dashboard

1. Military Open Source Software Conference -- 12-13 August 2009 in Atlanta.
2. Govloop -- a "Social Network for Gov 2.0". Gov 2.0 could easily become the intersection of talk radio and social media consultant inanity. As with the Web 2.0 lunacy, when everyone who could spell wiki tried to sell one, you should cultivate the art of identifying and sidestepping the bozos, the time-wasters, and the charlatans who use buzzwords as a convenient alternative to thought. (via cheeky_geeky on Twitter)
3. Introducing the Autom -- a personal robot to help you lose weight. Developed by Initiative Automata as an offshoot from MIT researcher Cory Kidd, Autom has conversations that encourage you to record your diet and exercise. The theory is that the added benefit of interaction will help you stick with the diet longer, increasing the chance that it will stick. Trials showed Autom users stick with their "weight loss regimen" twice as long as pencil-and-paper. (via So, Where's My Robot?)
4. USA Government IT Dashboard Launches -- Vivek Kundra's latest project, a dashboard giving insight into government spending. Contractors, CIOs, projects, schedules, and data via an API. Built in Drupal!

Four short links: 29 June 2009

Syadmin Wiki, Physics, National Archives, and Reinventing the British Government

1. Server Fault -- Wikipedia-like sysadmin guide, built by the Stack Overflow team, who are branching out to reach a more general IT Professional audience. (via Brady in email)
2. Sixty Symbols -- 5m videos about the symbols of physics and astronomy. Great stuff! (via Glutnix on Twitter)
3. US National Archives launches YouTube Channel -- a mixture of archives-nerd stuff (directors of Presidential Libraries talking about their favourite items) and wider-interest collections (such as Touring 1930s America).
4. Open House in Westminster -- the ever-insightful Tom Steinberg from MySociety has an article in the Independent about British plans to reinvent government. Now the talk of Westminster is all about democratic reform. By my count there are over 50 different ideas for changing the way our democracy works being touted by different pundits at the moment. [...] What all these ideas, though, have in common is that they propose structural reforms that could have been achieved any time in the last 200 years.[...] My view is that these proposals are all interesting, and some may be quite critical for a better democracy. But I am also concerned that they do not see Parliament and the process of making laws as a native to the internet would. They don’t ask: “What reforms are possible that just weren’t conceivable ten years ago?”

Four short links: 26 June 2009

Biz Numbers, Progress, Curse of the Mummy Tweets, and Crime Viz

1. Size vs Growth vs Acceleration (Rowan Simpson) -- you can tell how well a company is doing by the basis on which they report their progress.
2. Engineers Are The Best Deal, So Stock Up On Them (TechCrunch) -- Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999! (via Simon Willison)
3. Livetweeting a Mummy CT Scan -- this is why I love my Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans membership--I know that I'm supporting the museum with the coolest online outreach.
4. 20 Visualizations to Understand Crime (Flowing Data) -- thoughtful analyis of a set of visualizations of crime statistics.

Four short links: 25 June 2009

Twitter Bucks, Nike Numbers, Map Apps, and Digi Shiz

1. How an Indie Musician Can Make $19,000 in 10 Hours Using Twitter -- as Zoe Keating pointed out: "cash made by @amandapalmer in one month on Twitter = $19,000; cash made by @amandapalmer from 30,000 record sales = $0".
2. The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics (Wired) -- And not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it as well, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance. Collective intelligence + sensor networks can = happiness. (Mathematics gets by with just an "equals" operator. The rest of us need a "can equal" operator ...)
3. Old Map App -- iPhone app with old maps. Reminds me of David Rumsey's keynote at OSCON 2004.
4. Make It Digital -- Digital NZ site that helps organisations wanting to produce digital content, by offering them guidance on formats, metadata, and other issues they'll have to tackle. Includes a voting system to promote the (NZ) content you want to have digitised.

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)

Four short links: 23 June 2009

1. Easter Eggs for Real Life (Neil Gaiman) -- ok, I know easter eggs are already part of real life, but this is still cool. Gaiman recommends a restaurant run by a friend, and the friend has set up a special phrase that to mention to the server, at which point something good and special will happen for them to eat or drink. Think of it as a restaurant Easter Egg. I love language, I love Gaiman's books, I love surprises, and I love that here Gaiman's using the digital sense of Easter Egg (surprise hidden in a program) rather than the analog sense (because there's no searching involved).
2. ASCAP Wants To Be Paid When Your Phone Rings (EFF) -- what the title suggests. You are lost in a twisty maze of rights, all policed by vampires. From ASCAP's point of view, this is a legitimate claim. From anyone else's point of view, it's ridiculous.
3. Tooling Up The Body (MInd Hacks) -- using tools has lots of interesting effects on our perception is the general gist of an intriguing study that provides further evidence for the theory that the brain treats tools as temporary body parts. We talk about using the Internet as our "offsite brain", so it tickles me to learn that the brain treats tools as offsite body parts.
4. Email Patterns Can Predict Impending Doom (New Scientist) -- when Enron was about to collapse, email patterns changed: the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before the December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees. Menezes thinks he and Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely. (via BoingBoing)

Four short links: 22 June 2009

Decaying Friendships, Crowdsourced Cars, Aussie Gov 2.0, Zoomable Presentations

1. Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years -- to put it another way, the half-life of friendship is 7 years. (via zephoria on delicious)
2. Crowdsourced Car Design -- an interesting approach, and I can imagine it being described as "threadless for cars". (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. Australian Gov 2.0 Taskforce -- The Aussies are getting their Gov 2.0 on. Check out Senator Kate Lundy's Public Sphere event today got a lot of Twitter action.
4. Prezi -- sexy zoomable presentation creator. Keynote meets Ken Burns Effect on PCP. Nifty look from a Budapest-based startup.

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