- Transparency is Not Enough (danah boyd) — we need people to not just have access to the data, but have access to the context surrounding the data. A very thoughtful talk from Gov 2.0 Expo about meaningful data release.
- Feed6 — the latest from Rohit Khare is a sort of a “hot or not” for pictures posted to Twitter. Slightly addictive, while somewhat purposeless. Remarkable for how banal the “most popular” pictures are, it reminds me of the way Digg, Reddit, and other such sites trend towards the uninteresting and dissatisfying. Flickr’s interestingness still remains one of the high points of user-curated notability. (via rabble on Twitter)
- Potential Policy Recommendations to Support the Reinvention of Journalism (PDF) — FTC staff discussion document that floats a number of policy proposals around journalism: additional IP rights to defend against aggregators like Google News; protection of “hot news” facts; statutory limits to “fair use”; antitrust exemptions for cartel paywalls; and more. Jeff Jarvis hates it, but Alexander Howard found something to love in the proposal that the government “maximize the easy accessibility of government information” to help journalists find and investigate stories more easily. (via Jose Antonio Vargas)
- Smokescreen — a Flash player in Javascript. See Simon Willison’s explanation of how it works. Was created by the fantastic Chris Smoak, who was an early Google Maps hacker and built the BusMonster interface to Seattle public transport. (via Simon Willison)
"flash" entries
Four short links: 31 May 2010
Data and Context, Twitpic Hot or Not, Failing to Save Journalism, Flash in Javascript
Why HTML5 is worth your time
Eric A. Meyer on HTML5's future and the skills developers need to acquire
HTML5 vs. Flash debates are engaging. No doubt about that. But if you strip away the bombast, you'll find that HTML5 also offers an interesting feature set that's worth investigating. In this Q&A, HTML/CSS expert and author Eric A. Meyer explains why HTML5, CSS and JavaScript are the "classic three" skills developers and designers need to acquire.
Four short links: 14 January 2010
Google for Good, Flash in JS, Pop Software, and Scientific Publishing
- Four Possible Explanations for Google’s Big China Move (Ethan Zuckerman) — I’m staying out of the public commentary on this one, but Ethan’s fourth point was wonderfully thought provoking: a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today. It’s deliciously provocative to ask what the world’s strongest tech company could do if it wanted to be actively good, rather than merely “not evil”.
- Gordon — An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript. (via Hacker News)
- Pop Software — great blog post about this new category of software. The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who used to do so. At one time, especially on the Mac, we’d see people chose software based upon how well it suited their requirements to get a job done. This new generation of software consumers isn’t like that – they’re less likely to shop around for something rather they shop around for anything. These are people who want to be entertained as much as they want to have their requirements met. […] Apps are not Applications – they are their own things. They are smaller. They are more fun. Pop software has amazing scale, is hit-driven, is a very hard business for developers, and isn’t going away. (via timo on Delicious)
- Why Hasn’t Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted? — an analysis of the scientific publishing world: what roles it serves, how some of those roles can be better served by new technology, and which roles are still mired in traditions and performance plans anchored to the old models. As is often the case, people won’t move to the new system when the amount they’re paid is determined by the old system. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
Steve Souders: Making Web Sites Faster in the Web 2.0 Age
How huge JavaScript libraries, rich content, and lame ad servers are slowing the web down
As much as anything else, a user’s impression of a web site has to do with how fast the site loads. But modern Web 2.0 websites aren’t your father’s Oldsmobile. Chocked full of rich Flash content and massive JavaScript libraries, they present a new set of challenges to engineers trying to maximized the performance of their sites. You need to design your sites to be Fast by Default. That’s the theme of the upcoming Velocity Online Conference, co-chaired by Google performance guru Steve Souders. Souders is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, and spent some time discussing the new world of web site performance with me.
The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around
If you've wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!
An interview with Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative
director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the
casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the
challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being
frustrating.
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.
Four short links: 18 August 2009
iPhone App Backstory, Cookie Resurrection, The Entrepreneuralism Lickmus test, and An Interesting Database
- The Making of the NPR News iPhone App — interesting behind-the-scenes look, with sketches and all. Station streams, however, presented a larger challenge. To begin with, NPR didn’t have direct stream links for any of its stations, so we built a Web spider that identified and captured more than 300 iPhone-compatible station streams. After that first pass, we worked with our station representatives to manually test each stream. In the process they found enough new streams to double our database. All of these streams are delivered to the app from NPR’s Station Finder API. (via mattb on Twitter)
- You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired) — Flash keeps its own cookies, which are harder to delete. Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being “killed,” the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the “backup.” (via Simon Willison)
- Would You Lick It? (Rowan Simpson) — clever example of what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
- FluidDB — a shared “in the cloud” database built around tags: an object is a container for a set of tags which are name:value pairs, tag names have simple namespaces (e.g., “gnat/review” is the “review” tag in my namespace), all objects are world readable and writable but there are ACLs for tags, values can be any type (string, number, URL, Excel spreadsheet), and there’s a simple query language. I’m curious to see what applications spring up around shared data. They’re in limited alpha, controlling the # of users, so register now to play before everyone else.
Is Adobe Still Sleeping Well?
Last May, Tim O'Reilly posted a piece on whether or not Adobe was worried about the new threat to their dominance in the RIA space by the introduction of Silverlight from Microsoft. In a nutshell, the answer was no. From a book sales perspective, that was true and remains true today. But there is more to that answer than what…
What's Keeping Adobe Up at Night? Probably Not Silverlight.
Roger Magoulas, our director of research, sent out the recent comment and graph as part of his weekly analysis of the latest load of our Bookscan-based data mart: What's keeping Adobe up at night? Probably not Silverlight. I noticed the Silverlight topic looking bright red [in the treemap visualization that shows week-to-week changes by topic] and thought I would…
Adobe Eyes Interactivity in Ebooks
Adobe just launched the Open Screen Project, an initiative designed to easily move content and applications across devices: This initiative provides one more motivation for adopting Flash for rich media and interactivity to take eBooks beyond static paper-like experiences and make digital content more compelling to consumers … More and more, digital publications — whether downloaded or consumed online…