- Wrong about the iPad (Tim Bray) — I am actively ignoring the iPad drivel, but this line caught my eye: Intelligence is a text-based application.
- Fertile Medium — online community consultancy, from the first and former Flickr community coordinator. One to watch: Heather and Derek really know their community. Again I say it: understanding of how open source and other collaborative communities can function is rare and valuable. (via waxy)
- pigz — parallel gzip implementation. Voom voom, so fast! (via kellan on Delicious
- Prefab: What If We Could Modify Any Interface? — screen-scraping for GUIs to bolt on new functionality to user interfaces. This is incredible. Watch the demo, it’s impressive!
"community" entries
Report from 2010 Community Leadership Summit
The topics we covered were deep and serious: how to prod established community members to leave room for new ones and encourage their growth, how to involve women and minorities in technical projects, how to raise funds and whom to accept funds from. The conference could also get personal. By the second day of CLS we turned the center into our lounge.
The art of community leadership
I stopped by the Community Leadership Summit 2010 as I was preparing for OSCON this coming week. It is an open unconference-style event, now in its second year, that’s held the weekend before OSCON. Everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any topic that is relevant. In these discussion sessions the participants can interact directly, offer thoughts and experiences, and share ideas and questions. There will be another more detailed post about this event later on Radar, but if you are in Portland, Ore. this weekend you can still register for Sunday’s sessions here.
Crowdsourcing and the challenge of payment
How can you set up crowdsourcing where most people work for free but some are paid, and present it to participants in a way that makes it seem fair? This situation arises all the time, with paid participants such as application developers and community managers, but there's a lot of scary literature about "crowding out" and other dangers. One basic challenge is choosing what work to reward monetarily. I can think of several dividing lines, each with potential problems.
Four short links: 5 April 2010
Intelligence, Community, Compression, and UI Hackery
Google Buzz and hybrid blogging
Long form posts and informal conversation find a home in Google Buzz
A couple Google Buzz experiments with long-form posts hint at a new use for the service. It's emerging as a hybrid option in the social/publishing space; a spot that's well equipped for deeper inquiry and conversation.
The future of publishing lives on and around the web
Richard Nash outlines his gameplan for uniting audiences and content
Richard Nash is passionate about the web’s ability to connect audiences and authors with the topics that excite them. Connections can be fleeting and the revenue model is in flux, but there’s a lot of opportunity in this model. What Nash discusses in this short video interview could very well be a blueprint for future publishing businesses.
Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between
To be or not to be: that is the question.
Hamlet’s famous utterance plays a trick on theater-goers, a mind game of the same type he inflicted constantly on his family and his court. While diverting his audience’s attention with a seemingly simple choice between being and non-being, Hamlet of all people would know very well how these extremes bracket infinite gradations. Our fascination with Hamlet is precisely his instinct for presenting a different self to almost everyone he met. Social networking gives us an impetus to review how we appear online. When people ask who we are, questions multiply far beyond the capacity of a binary “to be” digit.
Four short links: 6 November 2009
Barcode Scanning, Downloadable Community Book, Gov Hack Day, Android Kludges
- Red Laser — “impossibly accurate barcode scanning”. Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it’s $1.99 on the App Store … (via Ed Corkery on Twitter)
- The Art of Community For Free Download — Jono Bacon’s O’Reilly book on community management now available for free download (still available for purchase!).
- Gov Hack — Australian government ran a hack day with their open data, this is their writeup.
- Android Mythbusters — slides for talk by Matt Porter at Embedded Linux Conference Europe. A (long) catalogue of the kludges in Android.
Lessons from Digital Disruption in the Music Business
Last week's On The Media (mp3 download here) devoted the full program to challenges and changes during the past decade or so in the music business — from the unanswered legal questions about sampling (check out Girl Talk for the genre taken to the extreme) to the shifting economics of concert tickets and promotion to the changing role of…
Second "Open Feedback" Title Now Online
Over on the O'Reilly Labs blog, Keith Fahlgren talks about the latest title to go live in our Open Feedback Publishing System, which gives authors and readers a way to discuss a book while it's being written. The latest book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, also features a very nice upgrade to the system's CSS (its look-and-feel)….