- A Room to Let in Old Aldgate — a lovely collection of photographs of lost buildings from The Society for Photographing Relics of Old London. Think of them as the Wayback Machine of their day. (via Fiona Rigby on Twitter)
- Wikipedia Fundraising A/B Tests — get a glimpse into the science that resulted in Jimmy Wales’s hollow haunted gaze staring at you with the eerie intensity of a creepy hobo talking about how tasty human liver is.
- It Takes A Lot of Money to Stay in Business (Ponoko) — guest blogs by Chris Anderson on the lessons and rules of maker businesses. Most Maker businesses that I’ve talked to have to hold parts inventory closer to 25% of their annual sales.
- Sencha Touch — mobile multitouch Javascript toolkit, now fully GPLed. (via Simon St Laurent)
"Wikipedia" entries
Four short links: 16 November 2010
Preserving History, Jimmy's Thousand Edit Stare, Maker Businesses, and Mobile Javascript
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)
Four short links: 17 September 2010
BBC Machine Learning, Wikipedia for History, Nuggets from Websites, and Lawbreaking Robots
- BBC Jobs — looking for someone to devise advanced machine intelligence techniques to infer high level classification metadata of audio and video content from low-level features extracted from it. (via mattb on Delicious)
- A History of the Iraq War Through Wikipedia Changelogs — printed and bound volumes of the Wikipedia changelogs during the Iraq war. This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification. And for the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future. (via Flowing Data)
- Nuggetize — pulls highlights out of a page before you visit it. (via titine on Delicious)
- Antimov — SparkFun running contest where a robot violates one of Asimov’s three laws (not the one about hurting people though). I am in LOVE with the logo, check it out.
Four short links: 28 May 2010
Understanding a Shuffle, Bias, Open Source a Success in Malaysia, and Guardian APIs
- The Intuition Behind the Fisher-Yates Shuffle — this is a simple algorithm to randomize a list of things, but most people are initially puzzled that it is more efficient than a naive shuffling algorithm. This is a nice explanation of the logic behind it.
- Wikipedia and Inherent Open Source Bias — a specific case of what I think of as the Firefly Principle: what happens on the Internet isn’t representative of real life.
- Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Program — the Malaysian government is a heavy and successful user of open source.
- Guardian’s Platform Now Open for Business (GigaOm) — elegant summary breakdown of services from the Guardian: metadata for free, content if you pay, custom APIs and applications if you pay more. I’m interested to see how well this works, given that the newspaper business is struggling to find a business model that values content.
Four short links: 12 March 2010
Seasonal Colours, Fast Peripherals, Wikipedian-in-Residence, Location Abomination
- Flickr Flow — a “season wheel”, showing the relative popularity of colours in Flickr photos at different times of the year. Beautiful. (via gurneyjourney)
- Light Peak — optical peripheral cabling and motherboard connections. (via timoreilly on twitter)
-
British Museum Pilots “Wikipedian in Residence” — Liam’s underlying task will be to be to build a relationship between the
Museum and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities both
internally and public-facing. (via straup on Delicious) - Twitter’s Location Policy — If you chose to tweet with a place, but not to share your exact coordinates, Twitter still needs to use your coordinates to determine your Place. In order to improve the accuracy of our geolocation systems (for example, the way we define neighborhoods and places), Twitter will temporarily store those coordinates for 6 months. Because how could anything go wrong if there’s a database containing 6 months of my precise locations stored on the Internet even when I’ve chosen not to share my precise location? (via straup on Delicious)
Four short links: 11 August 2009
- The Slowing Growth of Wikipedia and More Details of Changing Editor Resistance — researchers at PARC analysed Wikipedia and found the number of new articles and number of new editors have flattened off, and more edits from first-time contributors are being reverted. This is a writeup in their blog, with the numbers and charts. It’s interesting that coverage in New Scientist talked about “quality”, but none of the metrics PARC studied are actually quality. Wikipedia launched a strategic review which aims to tackle this and many other issues. (via ACM TechNews)
- The Information Architecture of Social Experience Design: Five Principles, Five Anti-Patterns and 96 Patterns (in Three Buckets) — teaser for upcoming O’Reilly book with some really good stuff. Balzac once wrote, “The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly,” and many successful social sites today founded themselves on an original sin, perhaps a spammy viral invitation model or unapproved abuse of new users’ address books. Some companies never lived down the taint and other seems to have passed some unspoken statute of limitations. (via BoingBoing)
- Skulpt — entirely in-browser implementation of Python. (via Andy Baio)
- Why Can’t Local Government and Open Source Be Friends? — the Birmingham example is one of many. Government procurement and tendering processes are often fishing expeditions, which biases responses in favour of commercial software companies making mad margins such that they can respond to RFPs that are really RFIs, etc. It’s an issue everywhere in the world because it happens at local, not just central, level.
Patrick Collison Puts the Squeeze on Wikipedia
How to Cram the Wikipedia onto an 8GB iPhone
Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that’s just what Patrick Collison’s iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison’s open source application can browser and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or as defined by AT&T coverage…) Collison will be presenting a talk on how he did it at OSCON, O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention at the end of July, and he spent some time talking to me about it recently.
Twitter is Not a Conversational Platform
Perhaps the most common reason given for joining the microsharing site Twitter is "participating in the conversation" or some version of that. I myself am guilty of using this explanation. But is Twitter truly a conversational platform? Here I argue that the underlying mechanics of Twitter more closely resemble the knowledge co-creation seen in wikis than the dynamics seen with…
Wikirank: A Zeitgeist for Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the most significant sites on the web. It produces vast quantities of data and the Wikimedia foundation tries to make all of it available to the public. Wikipedia's traffic data can be an insight into what's interesting on the web. Wikirank, currently in closed beta, shares that information very cleanly. On its homepage Wikirank shows…
Wikipedia and RNA Biology
I love the RNA Biology journal's new guidelines for submissions, which state that you must submit a Wikipedia article on your research on RNA families before the journal will publish your scholarly article on it: This track will primarily publish articles describing either: (1) substantial updates and reviews of existing RNA families or (2) novel RNA families based on computational…