- The Obfuscation of Culture — Tumblr and LJ users sep ar ate w ords thr ou gh o dd spacin g in o rde r to fo ol sea rc h en g i nes. Chinese users hide political messages in image attachments to seemingly benign posts on Weibo. General Pretraeus communicated solely through draft mode. 4chan scares away the faint of heart with porn. More technically astute groups communicate through obscure messaging systems. (via Beta Knowledge)
- log2viz — an open-source demonstration of the logs-as-data concept for Heroku apps. Log in and select one of your apps to see a live-updating dashboard of its web activity.
- Doctorow at LoC (YouTube) — video of Cory Doctorow’s talk on ebooks, libraries, and copyright at the Library of Congress.
- When TED Lost Control of its Crowd (HBR) — golden case study. You can’t “manage” a crowd—or a community—through transactional exchanges or economic incentives. You need something stronger: shared purpose
ENTRIES TAGGED "ebooks"
Four short links: 21 March 2013
Obfuscation, Logging, Copyright, and Control
Four short links: 8 March 2013
Comparing Algorithms, Programming & Visual Arts, Data Brokers, and Your Brain on Ebooks
- mlcomp — a free website for objectively comparing machine learning programs across various datasets for multiple problem domains.
- Printing Code: Programming and the Visual Arts (Vimeo) — Rune Madsen’s talk from Heroku’s Waza. (via Andrew Odewahn)
- What Data Brokers Know About You (ProPublica) — excellent run-down on the compilers of big data about us. Where are they getting all this info? The stores where you shop sell it to them.
- Subjective Impressions Do Not Mirror Online Reading Effort: Concurrent EEG-Eyetracking Evidence from the Reading of Books and Digital Media (PLOSone) — Comprehension accuracy did not differ across the three media for either group and EEG and eye fixations were the same. Yet readers stated they preferred paper. That preference, the authors conclude, isn’t because it’s less readable. From this perspective, the subjective ratings of our participants (and those in previous studies) may be viewed as attitudes within a period of cultural change.
Four short links: 1 March 2013
Drone Journalism, DNS Sniffing, E-Book Lending, and Structured Data Server
- Drone Journalism — two universities in the US have already incorporated drone use in their journalism programs. The Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska and the Missouri Drone Journalism Program at the University of Missouri both teach journalism students how to make the most of what drones have to offer when reporting a story. They also teach students how to fly drones, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations and ethics.
- passivedns — A network sniffer that logs all DNS server replies for use in a passive DNS setup.
- IFLA E-Lending Background Paper (PDF) — The global dominance of English language eBook title availability reinforced by eReader availability is starkly evident in the statistics on titles available by country: in the USA: 1,000,000; UK: 400,000; Germany/France: 80,000 each; Japan: 50,000; Australia: 35,000; Italy: 20,000; Spain: 15,000; Brazil: 6,000. Many more stats in this paper prepared as context for the International Federation of Library Associations.
- The god Architecture — a scalable, performant, persistent, in-memory data structure server. It allows massively distributed applications to update and fetch common data in a structured and sorted format. Its main inspirations are Redis and Chord/DHash. Like Redis it focuses on performance, ease of use and a small, simple yet powerful feature set, while from the Chord/DHash projects it inherits scalability, redundancy, and transparent failover behaviour.
Four short links: 26 November 2012
Drone Burnout, Middle-Class IoT, ePUB Interactive Fiction, and Minecraft Booming
- High Levels of Burnout in US Drone Pilots (NPR) — 17 percent of active duty drone pilots surveyed are thought to be “clinically distressed.” The Air Force says this means the pilots’ stress level has crossed a threshold where it’s now affecting the pilots’ work and family. A large majority of the pilots said they’re not getting any counseling for their stress. (via Beta Knowledge)
- The Internet of Middle-Class Things (Russell Davies) — my mind keeps returning to this: you know, commercially, that a technology has succeeded when it’s used for inane middle-class tasks.
- First Draft of the Revolution (Liza Daly) — interactive fiction, playable on the web and as epub book. Very nice use of the technology!
- Minecraft for Raspberry Pi — see also Minecraft augmented reality for iOS. Minecraft is Lego for kids, and it can be a gateway drug to coding.
Where are the apps for ereaders?
Developers and ereader vendors are missing an app opportunity
I read on my GlowLight NOOK much more frequently than I read on my Asus Transformer tablet. I’d say there’s at least a 10:1 differential, so for every hour I read on my tablet I read at least 10 hours on my Glowlight Nook. I’ll bet I’m not alone and people who own both an E Ink…
New life for used ebooks
Old ebooks and clever thinking can create new opportunities for publishers.
This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert’s Publishing 2020 Blog (“The Used Ebook Opportunity“). This version has been lightly edited.
I’ve got quite a few ebooks in two different accounts that I’ve read and will never read again. I’ll bet you do, too….
Publishing News: Subscription experiments and the dangers of paving cow paths
Subscription sales models tested, a "holy trinity" of web opportunities missed, and publishing's future assessed.
Here are a few stories from the publishing space that caught my attention this week.
Publishers test subscription model waters
TED Books launched a new app this week, TED Books for iOS, that not only allows them to sell directly to consumers, but also to…
Amazon, ebooks and advertising
Amazon's adoption of ad-supported ebooks is shifting from possible to likely.
Amazon already sells ads on the Kindle. Joe Wikert explains why ad-supported ebooks are a logical next step for the company.
Why I can't shake my ereader
Battery life and device weight keep E Ink devices on wish lists.
Ereaders are now commodities — improvements are incremental at best — but the fundamental qualities of these devices still make them compelling.
B&N and Microsoft: The potential beyond digital
Thoughts on how Microsoft could play a role in Barnes & Noble's stores.
Joe Wikert: Microsoft should use its investment in B&N's digital business to create an end-to-end consumer experience that rivals Apple's.
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