- The Most Popular Phone in the World (Gizmodo) — I have a mate who does prototyping R&D type stuff at a telco and this is his phone. “Why’d you carry a crap phone like that?” “Because this is the most popular phone with our customers.” The Gizmodo article talks about an upcoming Nokia that looks very promising: full keyboard, camera, et al. for under $100. (via Andrew Hedges on Twitter)
- Aloha Editor — very nice open source (AGPL3) HTML5 text editor widget for web apps. (via Jessy Cowan-Sharp on Twitter)
- How Do We Solve a Problem Like Geographic Restrictions — if you’re building a new business in the US around ebooks, digital music, or digital video, then be aware that your international uptake will be absolutely buggerized by rights issues. YouTube is the only US media site that doesn’t suck for overseas users: don’t rave to us about Hulu, it’s inaccessible to the rest of the world. (via Liza Daly on Twitter)
- Needlebase — tool with AI-type smarts to help you merge, munge, and export data. Check out Thread, the query language, for an interesting way of querying graphs. Was made by ITA Software, now owned by Google. Wonder what it’ll be wrapped into or released as …
"DRM" entries
Four short links: 1 November 2010
Crap Phones, HTML Editors, Digital Rights Minimization, and Data Munging
Is DRM More Costly Than Piracy? Thoughts on leveraging marketing strategy and DRM-free content
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about building better (read: strategic) eBooks. The more that I’ve tried to wrap my head around what would work and what wouldn’t, I keep coming back to the idea of reversing self-imposed constraints and searching for opportunity in areas from which we’ve closed off opportunity. One such area is DRM. As a practice,…
Four short links: 26 April 2010
Brand in China, Radio Apps, Valued Free Text, and Brain TV
- E-Commerce Booming in China (Economist) — bad time for Google to be leaving, just as online sales take off. Chinese consumers in stores check quality by hand but buying online requires trust, aka brands. This is a turn towards Western-style commerce built on trademarks and brand promise of quality, and away from the prevalent wild East style of commerce built on cut corners, deception, and mistrust.
- Comprehensive GNU Radio Archive Network — collection of GNU Radio applications. (via Hacker News)
- The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book (Steven Johnson) — essay on connected useful text vs frozen glass-walled text. As with paywalls, I am not dogmatic about these things. I don’t think it’s incumbent upon the New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to allow all their content to flow freely through the infosphere with no restrictions. I do not pull out my crucifix when people use the phrase “Digital Rights Management.” If publishers want to put reasonable limits on what their audience can do with their words, I’m totally fine with that. As I said, I think the Kindle has a workable compromise, though I would like to see it improved in a few key areas. But I also don’t want to mince words. When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a paragraph and paste it into another application: when this happens your news feed is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken.
- Charlie Rose Brain Series — streaming video of the TV shows about the brain. (via Mind Hacks)
Four short links: 4 March 2010
Achievement Design, Estimation, DRM Usability, and Ubicomp v AR
- Achievement Design 101 — advice from the guy who designs the site-wide achievement awards for Kongregate. 7. Achievements will thrust their subject matter into the spotlight; make sure it’s worthy. This can be good or bad. In most cases on Kongregate, adding achievements to games will cause the user rating to drop. There are many theories about why this is — my best guess is that there’s a difference in psychology between people who play a game just to have fun (how weird!) and people who play a game to earn achievements. For the latter category, the whole game can be viewed as merely an obstacle. (via diveintomark)
- Fundamental Constants and the Problem of Gravity — huge variation uncertainty in different fundamental constants: we know one to 1 part in 100 million, but another to only 1 in 10 thousand. Led me to wonder whether anyone’s done project estimation with error bars, analysing past projects to figure out the error rates in estimates of programmer time, etc.
- How to Download an eBook From The Cleveland Public Library — aka “Why DRM Doesn’t Work”. The usability of this 22-step process is appalling. (via BoingBoing)
- Defining Ubiquitous Computing vs Augmented Reality — not arbitrary terms but there are some interesting concepts that ubicomp has which don’t seem to be coming out in the current AR fad. (via bruces on Twitter)
David Pogue Revisits DRM Question about Ebooks
In a blog post today, New York Times Columnist (and bestselling O’Reilly author) David Pogue responds to a reader question about DRM (he calls it “copy protection”) in light of all the recent ereader buzz, and he’s very honest and open about his (very natural) reaction to finding copies of his books out in the wild: “As an author myself, I, too, am terrified by the thought of piracy. I can’t stand seeing my books, which are the primary source of my income, posted on all these piracy Web sites, available for anyone to download free.” He then discusses sales for one of his books since we began offering it as a (DRM-free) ebook: “The thing was pirated to the skies. It’s all over the Web now, ridiculously easy to download without paying… The crazy thing was, sales of the book did not fall.”
Kindle Device and Clipping Limits Now Lifted for O'Reilly Books in Kindle Store
Earlier this year, one of our authors reported hitting some sort of undocumented limit when using the "Clipping" feature on Kindle. And then other readers discovered they were unable to load Kindle books onto either additional Kindles or their iPhone running the Kindle app because there's a limit to the number of simultaneous devices a Kindle book can live on….
Microsoft Press Enters Strategic Alliance with O'Reilly
Today, Microsoft and O'Reilly Media announced an agreement to support and expand Microsoft Press. Under the terms of the strategic alliance, O'Reilly will be the exclusive distributor of Microsoft Press titles and co-publisher of all Microsoft Press titles, on Nov. 30, 2009. We'll be working with Microsoft to develop new books, as well as distributing both existing and new co-published books to bookstores, and, perhaps most importantly, to the emerging digital book channels that represent the future of book publishing.
Four Short Links: 25 August 2009
Reverse Search, PDF Stripping, Flash Visualization, Failure
- Tineye — reverse search engine; you upload an image and they find you similar images so you know where else it’s used. Check out their cool searches.
- PDF Pirate — upload a PDF and this web site will give it back to you minus the restrictions on copying/printing/etc.
- Flare — an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. BSD-licensed, modelled on Prefuse. When there’s a visualisation library for every platform, will we start to get people who know how to make them?
- The Importance of Failure (Marco Tabini) — This is a point that I don’t often hear made when people talk about failure; the moral behind a failure-related story is usually about preventing it, or dealing with the aftermath, but not about the fact that sometimes things go bad despite your best efforts, and all the careful risk management and contingency planning won’t keep you from going down in flames. This is important, because it forces every person to establish a risk threshold that they are willing to accept in every one of their life efforts.
Content is a Service Business
What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.
Four short links: 14 May 2009
Open Source Ebook Reader, Libraries and Ebooks, Life Lessons, and Government Licenses
- Open Library Book Reader — the page-turning book reader software that the Internet Archive uses is open source. One of the reasons library scanning programs are ineffective is that they try to build new viewing software for each scan-a-bundle-of-books project they get funding for.
- Should Libraries Have eBooks? — blog post from an electronic publisher made nervous by the potential for libraries to lend unlimited “copies” of an electronic work simultaneously. He suggests turning libraries into bookstores, compensating publishers for each loan (interestingly, some of the first circulating libraries were established by publishers and booksellers precisely to have a rental trade). I’m wary of the effort to profit from every use of a work, though. I’d rather see libraries limit simultaneous access to in-copyright materials if there’s no negotiated license opening access to more. Unlike the author, I don’t see this as a situation that justifies DRM, whose poison extends past the term of copyright. (via Paul Reynolds)
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Lessons Learned from Previous Employment (Adam Shand) — great summary of what he learned in the different jobs he’s had over the years. Sample:
- More than any other single thing, being successful at something means not giving up.
- Everything takes longer than you expect. Lots longer.
- In a volunteer based non-profit people don’t have the shared goal of making money. Instead every single person has their own personal agenda to pursue.
- Unfortunately “dreaming big” is more fun and less work than “doing big”.
- Flickr Creates New License for White House Photos (Wired) — photos from the White House photographer were originally CC-licensed (yay, a step forward) but when it was pointed out that as government-produced information those photos weren’t allowed to be copyright, the White House relicensed as “United States Government Work”. Flickr had to add the category, which differs from “No Known Copyright”, and it’s something that all sharing sites will need to consider if they are going to offer their service to the Government.