- Mavuno — an open source, modular, scalable text mining toolkit built upon Hadoop. (Apache-licensed)
- Cow Clicker — Wired profile of Cowclicker creator Ian Bogost. I was impressed by Cow Clickers […] have turned what was intended to be a vapid experience into a source of camaraderie and creativity. People create communities around social activities, even when they are antisocial. (via BoingBoing)
- Unicode Has a Pile of Poo Character (BoingBoing) — this is perfect.
- The Research Works Act and the Breakdown of Mutual Incomprehension (Cameron Neylon) — an excellent summary of how researchers and publishers view each other and their place in the world.
"publishing" entries
Top stories: February 13-17, 2012
A brief history of O'Reilly books, how to think about and create visualizations, the fundamentals of publishing.
This week on O'Reilly: Tim O'Reilly looked back on important titles from O'Reilly's history, Pete Warden explained the thoughts and actions behind his latest visualization, and LeVar Burton reminded the TOC 2012 audience why storytelling matters.
Documentation strategy for a small software project: launching VoIP Drupal introductions
VoIP Drupal is a window onto the promises and challenges faced by a new open source project, including its documentation. A meeting at at MIT this week worked out some long-term plans for firming up VoIP Drupal's documentation and other training materials.
About the Emerging Battles Over Textbooks: Options from Apple to Open Initiatives
Two dramatically opposed announcements from Apple and the state of California put the textbook publishing industry on notice recently that it could be facing rapid disruption. But open textbooks can't be created and altered as easily as open source software.
Four short links: 8 February 2012
Text Mining, Unstoppable Sociality, Unicode Fun, and Scholarly Publishing
ValoBox wants to reward content creators and consumers
ValoBox looks to combine access to content, analytics and conversion.
ValoBox, a publishing startup we covered earlier this year, has launched. In this interview, co-founder Oliver Brooks describes the platform, its development, and how its social retail system works.
Developer Week in Review: Early thoughts on iBooks Author
The impact of iBooks Author, free vs usability, and Microsoft wants developers to level up.
It looks like Apple plans to totally disrupt yet another industry, but is that a good thing? Richard Stallman puts free above usability, and Microsoft adds incentives to Visual Studio — but some of them encourage the wrong behaviors.
Three reasons why we're in a golden age of publishing entrepreneurship
Digital is creating fertile ground for startups.
Books, publishing processes and readers have all made the jump to digital, and that's creating considerable opportunities for publishing startups.
Four short links: 10 January 2012
Emotional Phone, Standup Desk, Mobile Sensors, and eBook Travails
- Samsung Develops Emotion-Sensing Smartphone (ExtremeTech) — By analyzing how fast you type, how much the phone shakes, how often you backspace mistakes, and how many special symbols are used, the special Galaxy S II can work out whether you’re angry, surprised, happy, sad, fearful, or disgusted, with an accuracy of 67.5% From a research paper from a research group on an unannounced product. Nice idea and clever use of incidental data, though 2/3 accuracy isn’t something to write home about. Reminds me of Sandy Pentland‘s Reality Mining. (via James Governor)
- The $40 Standup Desk — we’ve solved the usability of software, but hardware remains stubbornly dangerous to use. There’s a reason nobody refers to “laptops” any more (if you use them on your lap, you might as well call them “wristkillers”).
- funf — an extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile devices being developed at the MIT Media Lab […] an open source, reusable set of functionalities, enabling the collection, uploading, and configuration of a wide range of data types. LGPL, Android.
- eBook Publishing Isn’t That Easy — list of the things you have to worry about when you self-publish. This line is gold: Locating a distributor. Amazon pays me 17 bucks for a 50-dollar book. Can you say “assholes?” LuLu pays me 43 bucks, but only if you buy on their site. Do the math. Platform vendors own authors and small publishers. (via Josh Clark)
Four short links: 1 December 2011
DRM Good for Amazon, Arduino Updated, Open Source Foundations, Distributed Search
- Cutting Their Own Throats (Charlie Stross) — DRM on ebooks gives Amazon a great tool for locking ebook customers into the Kindle platform. This essay is gold and so very true. Read, believe.
- v1.0 of Arduino Out — this is the dev environment, with language additions and lots of features in the libraries. Glad to see the 1.0 stamp put on this important piece of the homebrew hardware world.
- Koha and Why We Need Foundations — Simon Phipps looks into the Koha trademark dispute and says that it shows why open source needs foundations (collective IP ownership).
- Majestic-12 — a World Wide Web search engine based on concepts of distributing workload in a similar fashion achieved by successful projects such as SETI@home and distributed.net.
Why we needed EPUB 3
New reading devices, multimedia storytelling and accessibility needs made EPUB3 a necessity.
EPUB3 is more than just bug fixes and tweaks from the last version. It represents a major change in what an ebook can be. (This is an excerpt from the Tools of Change for Publishing report, "What is EPUB3