- Send Us Your Thoughts (YouTube) — from the excellent British comedians Mitchell and Webb comes this take on viewer comments in the news. (via Steve Buttry’s News Foo writeup)
- Amazon proves that REST doesn’t matter for Cloud APIs — with the death of WS-* and their prolix overbearing complexity, the difference between REST and basic XML RPC is almost imperceptible. As this essay points out, the biggest cloud API is Amazon’s and it’s built on RPC instead of REST.
- Kinect Piano (YouTube) — turn any surface into a piano. (via David Ascher on Twitter)
- Google Maps Label Readability — detailed analysis of the design decisions that make Google’s labels so much more readable than the competition’s. Fascinating to see the decisions that go into programmatically building a map: leaving white space around cities, carefully avoiding clustering, even how adding an extra level of information can make things simpler.
ENTRIES TAGGED "web services"
Four short links: 8 December 2010
User-Contributed News, Web Services, Kinect Piano, and Designing Maps
Four short links: 15 October 2010
Long Tail, Copyright vs Preservation, Diminished Reality, and Augmented Data
- Mechanical Turk Requester Activity: The Insignificance of the Long Tail — For Wikipedia we have the 1% rule, where 1% of the contributors (this is 0.003% of the users) contribute two thirds of the content. In the Causes application on Facebook, there are 25 million users, but only 1% of them contribute a donation. [...] The lognormal distribution of activity, also shows that requesters increase their participation exponentially over time: They post a few tasks, they get the results. If the results are good, they increase by a percentage the size of the tasks that they post next time. This multiplicative behavior is the basic process that generates the lognormal distribution of activity.
- Copyright Destroying Historic Audio — so says the Library of Congress. Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken. Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal. Copyright laws related to preservation are neither strictly followed nor strictly enforced. Consequently, some audio preservation is conducted.
- Diminished Reality (Ray Kurzweil) — removes objects from video in real time. Great name, “diminished reality”. (via Andy Baio)
- Data Enrichment Service — using linked government data to augment text with annotations and links. (via Jo Walsh on Twitter)
Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud
Yesterday I gave a talk to the Privacy Forum in Auckland, New Zealand, titled Web Meets World: Privacy and the Future of the Cloud. The talk was intended as a scene setter for a discussion with the audience, about 70 lawyers, technologists, consultants, and public policy wonks. They responded well to the challenge, and we talked about the nature of…
The Kindle, the Cloud and Mixed Signals
Adam Hodgkin notes a discrepancy between Amazon's cloud-computing efforts and the Kindle. From Exact Editions: If Amazon decides to switch tack on the Kindle and treat it simply as a blank slate on which users can rent rather than outright buy titles, they will have the infrastructure in place to make this change. Amazon is a true believer in…
Processing the Deep Backlist at the New York Times
At OSCON, Derek Gottfrid explained how the New York Times is using Amazon cloud computing services to make the paper's historical archive viewable on the Web.
Amazon's Non-Media Products Show Growth
New financials show a slight dip in the total percentage of Amazon's revenue generated by books, DVDs and other media. From MarketWatch: Amazon is also relying less on sales of media products such as books, DVDs and music, which has been its historical strength. In the second quarter, media sales accounted for 59% of the company's total revenue compared to…
Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory for production services!
Google App Engine went down earlier today. GAE is still a developer preview release, and currently lacks a public monitoring dashboard. Unfortunately this means that many people either found out from their app and/or admin consoles being unavailable or from Mike Arrington's post on TechCrunch. Google has a strong Web Operations culture, and there are numerous internal monitoring tools in…
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