- The Propaganda Newspapers — London councils increasingly providing their own newspapers, masquerading as mass-market popular appeal newspapers but without anything critical of the council that produces it. This is an evolutionary dead-end for reinventing newspapers, and is why the non-profit/trust structure works so well.
- Time for Computer Science to Grow Up — publish in journals so conferences can be community events. I’ve seen academics at Sci Foo look around at the unconference structure, or lightning talks, and say “why can’t my normal conferences be like this?!”, and not just in computer science too. Science conferences need a heart transplant. (via David Pennock)
- Science Online 2010 — conference on science and the Web. Our goal is to bring together scientists, physicians, patients, educators, students, publishers, editors, bloggers, journalists, writers, web developers, programmers and others to discuss, demonstrate and debate online strategies and tools for doing science, publishing science, teaching science, and promoting the public understanding of science. (via kubke on Twitter)
- E.W. Dijkstra Archive — a collection of over 1,000 manuscripts that EWD sent around during his career. EWD 1036, “On the cruelty of really teaching computing science”. “From a bit to a few hundred megabytes, from a microsecond to a half an hour of computing confronts us with completely baffling ratio of 109” (via S. Lott)
"newspapers" entries
Four short links: 10 August 2009
Propaganda, Computer Science, Web Science, CS History
Four short links: 6 July 2009
iPhone Maps, Tooth Milling, Scratch Updated, Newspapers for All
- Offline Mapping App for iPhone — carry Open Street Maps maps with you even when you’re not in 3G/wifi range. (via Elisabeth)
- My dentist used an in-office CAD & CNC mill to produce a new tooth for me today (Nat Friedman) — hello, future!
- New version of Scratch released — Scratch is an excellent way to teach kids how to program (I’ve had success with lots of 7 and 8 year olds). The new version includes keyboard entry, webcams, and support for Lego WeDo. The user interface has also been changed to work on a Netbook’s 800×600 screen. Kudos to the Scratch team! (via scratchteam on Twitter)
- Newspaper Club – a Work in Progress — blog for the Newspaper Club project. “We’re building a service to help people make their own newspapers. This is the blog where we’re alarmingly honest about where it’s all going wrong.” I can’t figure out whether this is a brilliant decentralisation move that will disrupt the newspaper industry, or a paper form of steampunk. (via Simon Willison)
"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"
A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example: In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're…
Four short links: 19 May 2009
Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects
- Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession’s Stories (AP) — The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
- Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) — Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
- San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content — congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it’s this. This business model didn’t fail in 1998 because there weren’t enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
- Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects — two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy “it’s just about how GOOD YOU ARE” individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn’t about what’s necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it’s what’s necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.
Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O'Reilly Titles Included)
The document-sharing site Scribd has launched a new “Scribd Store” selling view and download access to documents and books. As part of the launch, there are now more than 650 O’Reilly ebooks now available for preview and sale in the Scribd store, and all include DRM-free PDF downloads with purchase. (Scribd will soon be adding EPUB as a format, and we’ll make that available as soon as possible.)
Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers
The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle — rumored to make its debut tomorrow — will be partially targeted at the textbook market: Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief…
Ignite Show: Monica Guzman on Being an Awesome News Commenter
This week’s Ignite Show features Seattle PI reporter Monica Guzman. She’s spent most of her career writing for online properties and she’s been able to watch learn what makes for a good conversation around a news item. As someone who also spends a lot of time publishing content online I can appreciate Monica’s thoughts on good commenters and hearing some of what she deals with makes me very appreciative of our readers and how you add to the conversations on our site.
Four short links: 14 Apr 2009
Open data, lean startups, RSS-as-newspaper, and a design call to arms:
- OpenSecrets Goes Open Data — The following data sets, along with a user guide, resource tables and other documentation, are now available in CSV format (comma-separated values, for easy importing) through OpenSecrets.org’s Action Center […] : CAMPAIGN FINANCE: 195 million records dating to the 1989-1990 election cycle, tracking campaign fundraising and spending by candidates for federal office, as well as political parties and political action committees; LOBBYING: 3.5 million records on federal lobbyists, their clients, their fees and the issues they reported working on, dating to 1998; PERSONAL FINANCES: Reports from members of Congress and the executive branch that detail their personal assets, liabilities and transactions in 2004 through 2007; 527 ORGANIZATIONS: Electronically filed financial records beginning in the 2004 election cycle for the shadowy issue-advocacy groups known as 527s.
- The Lean Startup Presentation at Web 2.0 — with audio. I’ve raved about Eric Ries blog before.
- Times — an RSS feedreader with a newspaper’s layout. News reading can be improved and newspapers are in the middle of dying, so it makes sense that someone would try a face transplant. I’m not convinced that the newspaper’s front page is the model for perfect news delivery, although I do love the ultimate in dense news layouts: Arts & Letters Daily. (via joshua’s delicious feed)
- Designing Through a Depression (NY Times blog) — exhortation to work on stuff that matters. This rethinking needs to come not just from designers but from the manufacturers, companies and other clients who decide what products and projects will be produced. There’s no excuse not to examine and re-examine what’s made, how it’s manufactured, what materials are used (and which are recyclable), what benefit it’s giving the consumer (or lack thereof) and what contribution, if any, it’s making to anything other than landfill. I believe recessions are when good things flourish.
Four short links: 30 Mar 2009
A great free book, dead newspaper dig, movie Torrent wakeup, and money from free:
- Digital Foundations with Adobe Illustrator — CC-licensed book that gets you started using Adobe Illustrator. I’m loving it, and I have the artistic ability of a particularly philistine rock. See also their advice to authors on how to negotiate a Creative Commons license. (via bjepson’s delicious stream)
- How to Become a Death Of Newspapers Blogger — tongue-in-cheek dig at the recent imminent deaths of newspapers being predicted. Point taken about how unproductive these are: The point’s not to fix anything. It’s to describe the problem more dramatically than the next guy. If Steve Outing says newspapers have a “death spiral” and Clay Shirky predicts “a bloodbath,” the point goes to Shirky. Basically, imagine a group of people watching a building burn down and bickering amongst themselves about whether it’s a conflagration or an inferno. It’s like that, but with consulting fees. (via migurski’s delicious stream)
- BarTor, Android BitTorrent with a Twist — take a picture of a DVD’s barcode, it looks up the movie, and sends the torrent file to your desktop to be automatically downloaded. NetFlix should have a legit form of this. If iTunes Movie Store had it, you could have racks of “DVDs” in stores that you could browse and snap to “buy” (giving a cut to the store). This feels monumental.
- Survey of Free Business Models Online — an interesting breakdown of ways to make money from “free” on the web. (via glynn moody)
Four short links: 23 Mar 2009
Digital rights, digital wrongs, newspaper science, and hardback socializing. Just another four short links:
- Twitter Mistrial — this isn’t a calamity for justice, we’re just able to do something we couldn’t do before (were there many jurors running pamphlets off on their printing presses in the old days?) so we need to figure out whether we want it or not.
- UK Government Outlines Digital Rights Agency — a strawman proposal for a rights agency to mediate between producers and consumers. The conservative in me bucks at market intervention, but I find it hard to argue with the problem statement: Consumers are no longer prepared to be told when and where they can access the content that they want. They do not see why a TV show that is airing in the US should not be available in the UK. They are not willing to wait to see a film at home until several months after it has passed through the cinemas. They don’t accept the logic that says that if you have bought a CD you cannot then copy that music onto your iPod. And of course with digital content perfect copies can be made with very little time and at virtually no cost.
- With a Newspaper Gone, Who’s the Watchdog and Where Do Advertisers Go? (Julie Starr) — roundup of people treating the closure of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, which leaves the town print-free for news, as a science experiment: if local councils really become unaccountable when local papers cease to investigate them, I’d expect to see a big increase in the value of positions of financial authority at local government level. Those positions will suddenly become a lot more valuable if no-one is watching the purse-strings all that carefully, so more candidates will want them and those candidates will spend more to win them.
- The Tweetbook — two years of tweets as a hardcover book. Fascinating to see the ephemeral preserved in print, although in general I wonder about the wisdom of trading ephemeral for eternal. (via Waxy)