Earlier today, O'Reilly found itself at the center of a controversy on the popular news site, digg.com. Steve Mallett, O'Reilly Network editor and blogger, was very publicly accused, via a Digg story, of stealing Digg's CSS pages. The story was voted up rapidly and made the homepage, acquiring thousands of diggs (thumbs-up) from the Digg community along the way. There was only one problem: Steve didn't steal Digg's CSS pages.
The real story is that Steve's iTunesLove.com and LinuxFilter sites are built on Pligg, an open source project that recreates the user, story, and voting backends behind Digg. Pligg in turn is based on a Spanish Digg clone, Menéame, and Menéame is where the copying originally took place. Pligg copied Digg's CSS files, so Steve's sites had them too. Steve had assumed the open source code didn't violate copyrights, as we all do, and was surprised to learn otherwise. Things were muddied because Steve had been automatically submitting stories from his other sites to Digg (because a Digg front-page story gets a lot of traffic), which leant credence to the claim of "spammer" made by the poster of the "Steve's stealing Digg's CSS" post. The main claim of stealing CSS was superficially true, but substantially false.
In the meantime, of course, there's a small matter of hundreds of thousands of readers and thousands of active voters voting up the article about how "O'Reilly writer Steve Mallett" is a thief and a spammer. Only if you took the time to read through the hundreds of comments do you get to intrepid readers who tracked the copying back through Pligg (kudos to Digg reader caldroun, who was the first to identify pligg). But it was obvious by the rapidly-increasing Digg count that nobody was doing research (or even reading to see whether the claim had been refuted), they were simply indicating their condemnation of someone who had transgressed against the Digg community. The anonymous and quite pointed ("negative, but apparently true", as one person put it) article was designed to raise maximum ire in the minimum of words.
This is a classic Web 2.0 problem: it's hard to aggregate the wisdom of the crowd without aggregating their madness as well. In this case, the situation was amplified because it wasn't just any site that Steve was accused of ripping off, it was the very site that the community belonged to and identified with. Every news site figures out what to do when thumbs-up turns to bums-up: Slashdot has issued retractions, often updates stories, and regularly posts collections of "further details on ..." notes. BoingBoing updates stories as soon as new facts come to hand, even if it means they've admitted "whoops, that wasn't true at all!". It's more complex with community sites, because editors don't make the editorial decision to run a faulty story but nonetheless have to live with its consequences. And everyone has to deal with the situation when their site has been used to further someone else's agenda. Digg is still learning how to deal with this, and I look forward to seeing how they tackle it in the future.
Tags: oreilly digg slashdot social
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Malta, if you believe this Infoworld article, which presents the results of Eurostat surveys into exports. Here's the relevant sentence from the article:
For instance Malta, a member of the European Union since May 2004, derives a greater proportion of its export revenue from high technology than any other European country, according to figures from Eurostat, the statistical service of the European Commission. High-tech goods and services accounted for 55.9 percent of Malta's exports in 2004.
Ireland: 29%, UK: 22%, France: 20%, Germany, 14.8%. Compare US: 27%, Japan 22.8%. I wouldn't rush to invest in the Maltese currency (Falcons, perhaps?)--percentages don't take into account the relative size of the economies in question. Malta may appear to have a lot of high-tech exports, but that's because it's a tiny island with scarce freshwater resources and not a huge agricultural export industry like mainland Europe. More interesting is that Italy has the most high-tech companies, though they are smaller on average--in other words, Italy has a lot of lifestyle businesses, small shops that service a few customers and aren't threatening IBM.
Also interesting is the funding of R&D: European research and development is typically less (proportional to GDP) than the US, and more funded by government. It's interesting that those countries that exceed US R&D spending are those associated with high-tech in Europe: Sweden, Finland, Denmark.
And finally: "while Denmark had broadband penetration of around 18 percent at the end of 2004, and Finland, Sweden and Norway hovered around 15 percent, according to IDC report published in June, the figure was nearer 10 percent for France and the U.K., and less still for Germany." I'm sensitive to broadband penetration: it's just 6.9% here in New Zealand, which is appalling and inexcusable. It looks like Nikolaj's onto a good thing: Denmark wins on R&D spending and broadband penetration. I have got to make it to a Reboot conference ...
Tags: innovation broadband europe
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Talking to Lucas Gonze over the weekend, I discovered that Yahoo! is announcing today that they have acquired his music playlist community site,
WebJay. According to Lucas: "They are true believers in the playlist. They really are serious about being an internet media company and they see the playlist (correctly) as an atomic part of media on the internet. ...we're pretty much the only playlist action that Apple doesn't own. Webjay is is the canonical site, my survey of formats is the canonical documentation, XSPF is the dominant open format, etc." Lucas will be relocating from Honolulu to Santa Monica to work with Yahoo!'s music division. Kudos to Yahoo! for recognizing once again the importance of the remix culture.
Tags: playlists open content music web 20
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Lego is the cover story for next month's Wired. As classy.dk puts it, if it weren't that the product is in a case down at the store, this would be totally Web 2.0....
Del.icio.us Tags: userdriveninnovation lego fan-designed cocreation | URL: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/1,69946-0.html
iSpecies is one among several mashups to have emerged within the science domain (also take note of Declan Butler's avian flu mapping using Google Earth). Worthy of notice is also that 'mashup' is currently the top search item on nature.com!...
Del.icio.us Tags: mashup declanbutler genomics tarsier nature | URL: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies/?q...
Those
Pragmatic Programmers are bringing their pragmatism to
Ajax with the addition of
Ajax Studio to their lineup.
Mike Clark mentioned it to me in passing and I immediately scrambled to see just how I could make it out to the three-day seminar.
(Aside: If you're using Ruby on Rails for anything approaching deployment, be sure to read the writings of Mike and my friend
James Duncan Davidson on the subject: I couldn't have made it through the past few days without their insights.)
Tags: tutorial rails ruby ajax
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This is clever: Bookslut's Teen Mag Makeover. A blogger compiled her own table of contents for several fashion magazines, mashing them up to make the one magazine she wanted (instead of the half-dozen ad-filled craptacular glossy anorexia advertisements that she had). If you're struggling to explain the value of aggregators to offline people, this is a good place to start: magazines are often only 10% relevant to you, so what if you could extract the few good articles from a lot of mediocre magazines to get one really good magazine?
Tags: attenuation teen
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Mobile development is just busting out all over the place. I got dropped a note after posting about Nokia on Radar this morning about the Flash Lite 2 update....
Del.icio.us Tags: mobile flash development | URL: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashlite2_upda...
After my post this morning about the Y!/O' Buzz Market Game, I was pointed at
Smarkets, a prediction market for Amazon products.
Each new product added becomes a "stock".
Chart_pie If a product's Amazon's sales rank improves, its stock price goes up. And vice-versa.
Chart_pie Traders buy, sell, short, and cover.
Here's this month's Oprah's Book Club choice:
"A Million Little Pieces". Very nice!
Oh, and it's YARoR (Yet Another Ruby on Rails) site... who'd have thunk it.
Tags: amazon web20 web services prediction
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I was just chatting with Jeff Veen of Adaptive Path and Measure Map fame. He pointed out that the measure mappers have quietly left a wee New Year's gift for those who want to slide more easily into 2006.
The Measure Map Date Slider is a nifty flash component for meandering time. And they've made a version of this available for public consumption under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You can grab the Flash ready-to-run SWF or developer's FLA bundle from the Measure Map site.
This is just the sort of componentized innovation I wrote about in my post on sliders being the new drop-downs. Ajax--while the technologies underlying have existed for some time now--has done wonders for pragmatic interface design. And rather than the initial Ajax vs. Flash debates, there's been a re-perception of Flash as rich componenture rather than Java applet replacement and of course you see quite a bit in Ajax implementations that draw heavily from Flash.
P.s. Now if only they would take my feedback about allowing you to drag-and-adjust the points on my visitors graph--if not to simply increase the number of visitors, but space them out a little more evenly ;-).
Tags: measure map flash web20 component
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Generation OS
By nikolaj on January 03, 2006
MySQL CEO Marten Mickos' New Year greeting reminds us that "there will be a growing group of young software professionals not knowing that there was a time in the 20th century when software was not open and free."
With the OSCON '06 Call for Participation just open, and the MySQL User Conference only a few months away, there's no alibi for not enlisting.
Tags: oscon opensource mysql
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Python for the Nokia Series 60 makes its way out of the rather constrained (but not unexpected) sandbox, allowing you to interact with contacts and calendars, dialing, and much more....
Del.icio.us Tags: mobile programming python nokia | URL: http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/0,,034-821,00.html
Our
Blackberry Hacks author
Dave Mabe dropped me a line mentioning
the appearance of Gmail Mobile just before the holidays. While I'm only now pointing at his writeup, I've been using Gmail Mobile from my Blackberry for the past two weeks to keep in touch with friends and family (I use Gmail only for my personal correspondence). While hitting a spot just beneath the capabilities of the Blackberry's reasonable browser, it's a cut above trying to use the traditional Gmail interface on such a small screen.
And while I'm pointing out Dave's article, I can't but mention how amazingly useful
Blackberry Hacks was, even for someone who thinks they truly know their Blackberry. I'm now a mobile chatting, ssh'ing, IRC'ing, RSS-reading fool.
Tags: blackberry email hacks gmail
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As you may have noticed, the O'Reilly Radar's tag cloud (there's a summary version in the right-hand sidebar on the front page as well as a full cloud view) reflects tag usage on two axes: popularity (sheer number of times applied to posts) as size and recency (when last was the tag applied to a post) as colour density.
I was thrilled to notice this morning (January 3rd) that the cloud has all but faded into the background: a wispy grey of quietude. The full cloud view shows only the barest whiff of blue for "wisdom of crowds", "markets", and "prediction" resulting from the story I posted just before this one.
While this may not mean much to you, dear readers, it does signify that the we Radar bloggers appear (if blogging's anything to go by) to have spent a relaxing week or so offline (or at least in read-only mode). Good on us!
Tags: holidays attention tags blogging
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The Economist ran an
article on technology prediction markets, including the Yahoo! Research / O'Reilly Tech Buzz Game just before the holidays
The most important thing about the Tech Buzz Game, says [Wharton School economist] Mr Wolfers, may be that people are actually playing it, because it is so well designed. Encouraging employees to use prediction markets has always been a challenge.
One of the reasons O'Reilly made a good partner for Yahoo! Research on this project was our core, diverse, active audience--"extra-ployees," if you will-- of alpha geeks.
Tags: markets prediction wisdom of crowds
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