- The Future of the Library (Seth Godin) — We need librarians more than we ever did. What we don’t need are mere clerks who guard dead paper. Librarians are too important to be a dwindling voice in our culture. For the right librarian, this is the chance of a lifetime. Passionate railing against a straw man. The library profession is diverse, but huge numbers of them are grappling with the new identity of the library in a digital age. This kind of facile outside-in “get with the Internet times” message is almost laughably displaying ignorance of actual librarians, as much as “the book is dead!” displays ignorance of books and literacy. Libraries are already much more than book caves, and already see themselves as navigators to a world of knowledge for people who need that navigation help. They disproportionately serve the under-privileged, they are public spaces, they are brave and constant battlers at the front line of freedom to access information. This kind of patronising “wake up and smell the digital roses!” wank is exactly what gives technologists a bad name in other professions. Go back to your tribes of purple cows, Seth, and leave librarians to get on with helping people find, access, and use information.
- An Old Word for a New World (PDF) — paper on how “innovation”, which used to be pejorative, came now to be laudable. (via Evgeny Mozorov)
- AlchemyAPI — free (as in beer) entity extraction API. (via Andy Baio)
- Referrals by LinkedIn — the thing with social software is that outsiders can have strong visibility into the success of your software, in a way that antisocial software can’t.
"Innovation" entries
How Free Software Contributed to the Success of Steve Jobs and Apple
In the great Second Coming, when Jobs returned to Apple 1996, he drove the adoption of the open source BSD as Apple's new operating system. This enabled some of the Mac's most popular features.
There's no such thing as big data
Even if you have petabyes of data, you still need to know how to ask the right questions to apply it.
Today's big companies are losing to small upstarts simply because those firms ask better questions. To compete, large enterprises need to learn how to harvest the data they have on customers, markets, competitors, and products.
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."
Four short links: 18 May 2011
Future Libraries, Innovation History, Entity Extraction API, and Outside Insight
5 reasons why we still don't have invisibility cloaks
Despite the rapid rate of IT innovation, many enterprises embrace technology at a glacial pace.
The rate of technology adoption at enterprises limits new innovation that can be introduced by technology providers. Were this not the case, I imagine we may already have pervasive teleportation and invisibility cloaks at our disposal.
Software patents, prior art, and revelations of the Peer to Patent review
Besides the greater openness that Peer to Patent promotes in
evaluating individual patent applications, it is creating a new
transparency and understanding of the functioning of the patent system
as a whole. Problems with prior art disproportionately affect
software.
The impact of IT decisions on organizational culture
Are IT decisions building the business or hurting it?
While I believe we recognize the limiting qualities of IT decisions, I'd suggest we've insufficiently studied the degree to which those decisions in aggregate can have a large influence on organizational culture.
Four short links: 21 December 2010
Big Companyitis, Spyware Apps, Maturing Cloud, and Mobile Sync
- Cash Cow Disease — quite harsh on Google and Microsoft for “ingesting not investing” in promising startups, then disconnecting them from market signals. Like pixie dust, potential future advertising revenues can be sprinkled on any revenue-negative scheme to make it look brilliant. (via Dan Martell)
- Your Apps Are Watching You (Wall Street Journal) — the iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.’s Android operating system […] Both the Android and iPhone versions of Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone’s ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies. […] Among all apps tested, the most widely shared detail was the unique ID number assigned to every phone. It is effectively a “supercookie,” […] on iPhones, this number is the “UDID,” or Unique Device Identifier. Android IDs go by other names. These IDs are set by phone makers, carriers or makers of the operating system, and typically can’t be blocked or deleted. “The great thing about mobile is you can’t clear a UDID like you can a cookie,” says Meghan O’Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile apps. “That’s how we track everything.”
- On Undo’s Undue Importance (Paul Kedrosky) — The mainstream has money and risks, and so it cares immensely. It wants products and services where big failures aren’t catastrophic, and where small failures, the sorts of thing that “undo” fixes, can be rolled back. Undo matters, in other words, because its appearance almost always signals that a market has gone from fringe to mainstream, with profits set to follow. (via Tim O’Reilly on Twitter)
- libimobiledevice — open source library that talks the protocols to support iPhone®, iPod Touch®, iPad® and Apple TV® devices without jailbreaking or proprietary libraries.
Four short links: 22 November 2010
Syntax Highlighting, Forkability, Product Invention, Science Animations
- Snippet — JQuery syntax highlighter built on Syntax Highlighting in JavaScript. Snippet is MIT-licensed, SJHS is GPLv3.
- Fear of Forking — (Brian Aker) GitHub has begun to feel like the Sourceforge of the distributed revision control world. It feels like it is littered with half started, never completed, or just never merged trees. If you can easily takes changes from the main tree, the incentive to have your tree merged back into the canonical tree is low.
- Product Invention Workshops (BERG London) — Matt Webb explains what they do with customers. Output takes the form, generally, of these microbriefs. A microbrief is how we encapsulate recommendations: it’s a sketch and short description of a new product or effort that will easily test out some hypothesis or concept arrived at in the workshop. It’s sketched enough that people outside the workshop can understand it. And it’s a hook to communicate the more abstract principles which have emerged in the days. Their process isn’t their secret weapon, it’s their creativity, empathy, and communication skills that make them so valuable.
- OneMicron — Janet Isawa’s beautiful animations of biological science. (via BoingBoing who linked to this NYTimes piece)
Can predictability and IT innovation coexist?
IT strategies that can reconcile process and innovation often have positive and measurable results.
Predictability and innovation: It's the combination every IT leader needs to consider. Organizations that can reconcile these agendas have positive and measurable results, while those that can't often see lower levels of innovation.