- Copyright and Other Legal Issues Posed by the Google Book Search Settlement (Pam Samuelson) — slides from a talk that comprehensively runs through the questions posted by GBS settlement. Staying in GBSS means authors give up possible claim to 100% rights in e-books, which they might o/w have under Random House v. Rosetta. Lots of angles I hadn’t thought of before.
- Turn Your Kitchen Counter into a Touchscreen (Gizmodo) — researchers [at Intel Labs] have created a rig with two cameras, one to capture the image of the objects and the other to capture depth. The depth cameras help recognize the objects and the difference between the hand touching the table or hovering over it. A pico-projector helps beam the virtual menus. The cameras and the pico-projector can be combined into devices just a little bigger than your cellphone, says Harrison. Sprinkle a few of these in different rooms and point them on tables, and the system is ready to go. (via RDiva on Twitter)
- Hypocrites and Pharisees — Or consider Fast Company, which posted a picture out of context of me holding a bag of white powder. This bag of white powder was something called Piracetam. It is a perfectly legal nutritional supplement along the lines of Ginkgo Biloba- it improves memory. It was in a thread with me asking people what nutritional supplements they take. Out of context, it makes me look like a drug dealer. Such deliberate dishonesty has become a matter of course for “journalists” who have a personal dislike of me. It’s bloody hard to fight Big Media on credibility and win, because Big Media have years of “oh, it’s in print, it must be true” behind them. As is often said, you only need to see a newspaper story on a subject you know something about to question every other story too.
- Poyozo — Poyozo is an automatic, personal diary system to help reclaim and consolidate your ever-expanding digital life with simple visualizations that you can use every day. (via jonrb8 on Delicious)
"Web 2.0" entries
"Knowledge is a mashup"
Dig into the Smithsonian Commons and you'll find Gov 2.0 in action.
This Smithsonian Commons project is a marriage of government resources and the web's capabilities. It combines offline and online information, makes experts available in any topic you could want, provides global collaboration, and gives everyone access to valuable knowledge. And since it's driven by iteration and immediate feedback, the Commons is bringing a Web 2.0 approach to the Gov 2.0 world.
Startup Showcase submissions at the Web 2.0 Expo NYC due 8/2
We are looking for startups to show-off at the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC. We always find a place to showcase them and this year is no different. This year we’re hosting our first ever Startup Showcase. Highlighting the startup ecosystem’s creativity and variety, the Showcase will give you a chance to get in front of hundreds of potential users and a couple of high-profile investors. The submissions for the Startup Showcase are open until next Monday, 8/2. Let us know you are interested now. The Web 2.0 Expo runs from September 27-30th.
Web 2.0 risks and rewards for federal agencies
Potential security and privacy issues balance gov. innovation and cost savings.
Testimony from government officials and a consumer watchdog before Congress highlighted how social media is affecting government, including the changing nature of official records in the digital age.
Four short links: 8 July 2010
Book Law, Ubiquitous Touchscreens, Asymmetric Reputation Warfare, Data Liberty
Four short links: 21 May 2010
Evilbook, Design Story, Openness Rating, Web 2.0 Sharecropping
- Infrastructures (xkcd) — absolutely spot-on.
- The Michel Thomas App: Behind the Scenes (BERG) — not interesting to me because it’s iPhone, but for the insight into the design process. The main goal here was for me to do just enough to describe the idea, so that Nick could take it and iterate it in code. He’d then show me what he’d built; I’d do drawings or further animations on top of it, and so on and so on. It’s a fantastic way of working. Before long, you start finishing each others’ sentences. Both of us were able to forget about distinguishing between design and code, and just get on with thinking through making together. It’s brilliant when that happens.
- Open Government and the World Wide Web — Tim Berners-Lee offered his “Five-Star” plan for open data. He said public information should be awarded a star rating based on the following criteria: one star for making the information public; a second is awarded if the information is machine-readable; a third star if the data is offered in a non-proprietary format; a fourth is given if it is in Linked Data format; a fifth if it has actually been linked. Not only a good rating system, but a clear example of the significantly better communication by semantic web advocates. Three years ago we’d have had a wiki specifying a ratings ontology with a union of evaluation universes reconciled through distributed trust metrics and URI-linked identity delivered through a web-services accessible RDF store, a prototype of one component of which was running on a devotee’s desktop machine at a university in Bristol, written in an old version of Python. (via scilib on Twitter)
- Data Access, Data Ownership, and Sharecropping — With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system. Every photo, in every size, plus the completely untouched original. (which we store for you indefinitely, whether or not you pay us) Every tag, every comment, every note, every people tag, every fave. Also your stats, view counts, and referers. Not the most recent N, not a subset of the data. All of it. It’s your data, and you’ve granted us a limited license to use it. Additionally we provide a moderately competently built API that allows you to access your data at rates roughly 500x faster then the rate that will get you banned from Twitter. Asking people to accept anything else is sharecropping. It’s a bad deal. (via Marc Hedlund)
State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars
As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system, an operating system that manages access by devices such as personal computers, phones, and other personal electronics to cloud subsystems ranging from computation, storage, and communications to location, identity, social graph, search, and payment. The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from multiple providers horizontally integrated via open standards.
Government transparency: Using search data to connect with your audience
When Americans want to know about health care reform, they don't go to opencongress.org and search for "H.R.3200" or H.R.4872". They go to Google and type in "health care reform". One key to making sure that the information you are working so hard to surface makes its way to the citizens who are looking for it? Use free search data to find out the language people are using to refer to that information. At Transparency Camp, I demonstrated a number of these tools.
Four short links: 7 April 2010
HTML5 Widgets, RDF and Unix, Movie Piracy, and Online Complaints
- SproutCore — open-source HTML5 application framework (i.e., lots of Javascript goodness) that’ll work with any backend. To code for this, you put most of the logic in the front-end and leave the back-end much simpler.
- RDF for Intrepid Unix Hackers — an interesting series, showing how to use common Unix tools to manipulate RDF data from the commandline. (via Edd Dumbill)
- How to Thrive Among Pirates (Kevin Kelly) — a look at how indigenous movie-makers make money in countries like China, India, and Nigeria where piracy is rampant. In short, they make cheap movies, sell near the price of inferior-quality knockoffs, and take advantage of unique experiences that movie theaters offer (e.g., air-conditioning).
- On Complaints (PublicStrategist) — a very good analysis of complaints departments and expectations of people who complain. But there is also a vital question of what the organisation thinks the purpose of a complaints process is. If it is a safety valve, a means of finding and correcting the most egregious failures or a means of channelling immediate anger and dissatisfaction into a swamp of unresponsiveness, then it can’t provide any broader value. That’s where the Patient Opinion model starts to look really attractive. It is deliberately and carefully constructed to elicit feedback, not just complaints. More than half the stories it gets told are positive, even some of the most harrowing, and it therefore creates a picture which is as clear about what is valued as it is about what is seen as in need of improvement.
What's the Secret to Submitting a Great Conference Proposal?
You may know that we hold Web 2.0 Expo NY in the fall. But here's something that may surprise you: the drop-dead deadline for submitting a proposal is next Monday (April 12). In the past, we've extended the deadline a week, but we don't have time for that this year. For a lot of people, that means a big scramble…
The State of the Internet Operating System
Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet? I’ve been talking for years about “the internet operating system“, but I realized I’ve never written an extended post to define what I think it is, where it is going, and the choices we face. This is that missing post.