- Joshua at Seven on Seven — Delicious creator Joshua Schachter participated in a Rhizome “Seven on Seven” recently. He was paired with artist Monica Narula and together they explored guilt and absolution with the help of the Mechanical Turk. Check out the presentation PDF for the quick summary.
- How to Align Researcher Incentives with Outcomes (Cameron Neylon) — the open science data movement battles entrenched forces for closedness. We need more sophisticated motivators than blunt policy instruments, so we arrive at metrics. […] What might the metrics we would like to see look like? I would suggest that they should focus on what we want to see happen. We want return on the public investment, we want value for money, but above all we want to maximise the opportunity for research outputs to be used and to be useful. We want to optimise the usability and re-usability of research outputs and we want to encourage researchers to do that optimisation. Thus if our metrics are metrics of use we can drive behaviour in the right direction. It sounds good, but I have one question: I remember The Rise of Crowd Science. Alex Szalay didn’t have to change researcher incentives to promote shared astronomical data. I’d ask: what can the other sciences learn from astronomy?
- Making an iPad HTML5 App and Making it Really Fast (Thomas Fuchs) — some curious hard-won facts about iPad web development, like that touch events are delivered faster than click events. (via Webstock newsletter)
- Appcelerator — open source platform for building native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies. Local filesystem access and native controls, but built with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, Python, and Ruby. OS X, Linux, Blackberry, iPad, …. I’ve not tried it, but it may be the variation on desktop web apps whose time has come. (via ptorrsmith on Twitter)
"apps" entries
What publishers can and should learn from "The Elements"
Theodore Gray on true interactivity and apps vs. ebooks.
Theodore Gray, author/creator of "The Elements," shares his thoughts on interactivity in ebooks, why programmers should be treated like authors, and why he believes the print form will continue to exist for quite some time.
Four short links: 11 June 2010
Delicious Absolution, Open Data Incentives, Curious iPad, and Desktop Web Apps Again
The iPad in Europe (the English speaking part at least)
Editor's note: This is the first in a series of posts exploring the reception–and potential impact, of the iPad in locations other than the good ole USA. In today's entry, Eoin Purcell chimes in from Ireland. ~ Kat MeyerIt can be hard to envision the impact a device will have when you have only demo videos and second hand reports…
Customer Loyalty for Mobile Devices
Some of the most interesting data on trends in mobile development has been coming from Flurry, an app analytics company (developers insert little snippets of Flurry code in their apps to gather usage data). They've plotted frequency of usage against app "retention" (what percentage of buyers returned to the app within 90 days of downloading it), and put each…
The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake
A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. Our success got me wondering why there’s not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.
Would an Apple Tablet be an Ereader? Yes and No.
Last Friday the latest round of rumors of an Apple Tablet swelled considerably after a piece from Apple Insider asserted the device is now on the 2010 product roadmap. The news sparked considerable interest among publishers, who apparently see this development as a “Kindle killer” that will upset Amazon’s apparent dominance of the ebook ecosystem. It’s understandable from the perspective of a publisher, but if this device actually exists, it’s doubtful anyone at Apple sees it as an “ereader” any more than it sees the iPhone as “a GPS device.”