- On the Problem of Money, Politics, and SOPA (John Battelle) — My first step will be to read this new book from Larry Lessig, an intellectual warrior who many (including myself) lament as bailing on our core issue of IP law to tilt at the supposed windmill of political corruption. But I think, upon deeper reflection, that Larry is simply playing chess a few moves ahead of us all. It’s time to catch up, and move forward together. THIS.
- Google+ Scraper (GitHub) — Instead of scraping the HTML code itself, this script fights its way through OZ_initData, a big, mean and ugly inline JavaScript array containing the profile information. (via Pete Warden)
- Student Study Techniques — How to focus in the age of distraction. cf Clay Johnson’s Information Diet.
- Code Racer — interesting addition to the “teach me to program” world: a competitive game to drill your HTML/CSS recall. You race to add HTML and CSS in response to prompts like “add a level 1 heading with the words: Racing Car”. Requires Facebook login. It’s how kids learn to type these days, so it just might work for web design too. (In my day it was with a typewriter and a bib)
"google plus" entries
"The President of the United States is on the phone. Would you like to Hangout on Google+?"
Can a Google+ Hangout bring the president closer to the citizens he serves?
President Obama will join the first presidential Hangout on Google+ on January 30, 2012, as part of the White House's commitment "to creating a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration."
Four short links: 20 January 2012
SOPA Politics, Google+ Scraping, Information Overload, Coding Education Game
Radar is now on Google+ (officially this time)
O'Reilly Radar is extending coverage through Google+.
We've got big ideas for Radar's new Google+ page. For starters, we see it as a two-way channel, an experimentation hub, and a place to surface intriguing content.
Four short links: 16 September 2011
Gamification Critique, Google+ API, Time Series Visualization, and SQL on Map-Reduce
- A Quick Buck by Copy and Paste — scorching review of O’Reilly’s Gamification by Design title. tl;dr: reviewer, he does not love. Tim responded on Google Plus. Also on the gamification wtfront, Mozilla Open Badges. It talks about establishing a part of online identity, but to me it feels a little like a Mozilla Open Gradients project would: cargocult-confusing the surface for the substance.
- Google + API Launched — first piece of a Google + API is released. It provides read-only programmatic access to people, posts, checkins, and shares. Activities are retrieved as triples of (subject, verb, object), which is semweb cute and ticks the social object box, but is unlikely in present form to reverse Declining numbers of users.
- Cube — open source time-series visualization software from Square, built on MongoDB, Node, and Redis. As Artur Bergman noted, the bigger news might be that Square is using MongoDB (known meh).
- Tenzing — an SQL implementation on top of Map/Reduce. Tenzing supports a mostly complete SQL implementation (with several extensions) combined with several key characteristics such as heterogeneity, high performance, scalability, reliability, metadata awareness, low latency, support for columnar storage and structured data, and easy extensibility. Tenzing is currently used internally at Google by 1000+ employees and serves 10000+ queries per day over 1.5 petabytes of compressed data. In this paper, we describe the architecture and implementation of Tenzing, and present benchmarks of typical analytical queries. (via RaphaĆ«l Valyi)
Inside Google+: The virtuous circle of data and doing right by users
Key points from a Google+ discussion between Tim O'Reilly and Bradley Horowitz.
Data liberation and user experience emerged as core themes during a recent
discussion between Tim O'Reilly and Google+ VP of Product Bradley Horowitz.
Go inside Google+ with Tim O'Reilly and Bradley Horowitz
What does social data mean to Google? Find out in a free webcast on August 23.
Join Tim O'Reilly and Google VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz on August 23 for a free webcast that will go behind Google+ and Google's embrace of social data.
Scaling Google+
Joseph Smarr of Google+ on early lessons, an API, and pseudonyms.
In a recent interview, Google's Joseph Smarr discussed what he's learned from Google+ thus far. Specifically: how quickly the social network has scaled, the importance of the user interface, and future plans for a Google+ API.
Google Plus defines an era of disruption at a moment's notice
Google+ ushers in the G+ effect, a phenomenon that's unique to our times.
When an entrant quickly yields considerable power in an existing market, and elicits potential for rapid innovation, this is what Jonathan Reichental calls the "G+ effect."