Lovely NYT essay (reg required) on Einstein's love of Mozart, and the aesthetic sense that drove Einstein's theories....
Del.icio.us Tags: Einstein physics music beauty | URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/science/31essa.h...
David Isenberg gave an unusual talk at our
Emerging Telephony Conference. In Dr. Seuss-inspired rhyme, he gave a call to action to the net community to stand up for what he calls
Freedom to Connect, and what Tim Bray calls "
Fat Pipe, Always On, Get Out of the Way." David's organizing a conference in Washington D.C. April 3 and 4 to help raise awareness of these important policy issues. Hopefully, he'll get some attention from people who are currently being lobbied to protect entrenched telecoms at the expense of the net we know and love. Here's a bit of the Dr. Seuss:
Continue reading "Freedom to Connect"
Tags: end to end policy internet broadband
| Comments: 1
GeoRSS is rapidly establishing itself as a useful lightweight format for exchanging point data. Based on the widely popular RSS format (motto: "not just for spam blogs!"), GeoRSS has found homes in Yahoo!, worldKit, and mapbuilder. Now Mikel Maron (one of our Where Fair superstars from last year) has released MGeoRSS, a Google Maps extension that handles GeoRSS. Says Mikel, "this can be quite useful for quickly building maps, like Node.London, and promotes an interoperable geospatial web based on a common data format."
Tags: google where georss worldkit
| Comments: 4
Ryan Williams from Fourio wrote in email: "I wanted to share a new Google Maps mashup I've released today, the Web 2.0 Innovation Map. I've taken 200 (so far) applications and plotted them on a map to see how development is distributed across the US and Canada. It's an interesting way to chronicle the Web 2.0 trend."
It is indeed interesting. A lot of apps I haven't followed (and missing a lot that I have) so I can't speak to how thoroughly it covers Web 2.0 as I think of it. (There are a lot of different aspects to Web 2.0, so this is going to be hard to do.) But it's really interesting to see how many of the apps Ryan has selected are not in Silicon Valley.
Tags: mashups geo web 20
| Comments: 5
I recently heard through the grapevine about a deal done by one of my competitors, in which they are "publishing" a book for which most of the copies are bought and distributed by the vendor. Now vendor buybacks are nothing new, but the rumored scale of this deal reminded me of the ways things were back in the 80's, before the huge expansion of the computer book market made companies think they could dispense with publishing documentation altogether. (Hence the Missing Manual.)
Continue reading "Books as Documentation: The Wheel Turns?"
Tags: economics help documentation publishing
| Comments: 2
The other day, I came back from a couple of days out of the office, and Sandy, my assistant, said, "Oh, and you have these three bags of flour..." I was as puzzled as she was, till I read the letter from Josh Dorf:
Over the holidays, I took a bunch of back issues of some magazines I get but don't always read. In a Wired issue, you talked about baking scones and so I thought I'd send you some samples of the best baking flour available to consumers. I got out of the whole .com and tech space and bought a 100-year old wheat flour company. I still have an O'Reilly Vi Editor book around here somewhere...." [Link added.]
Josh may have gotten out of tech, but he clearly knows something about
the cluetrain and is applying it to his new business. So he clearly deserves a bit of link-love back to his flour company (and he's right,
Stone-Buhr is great flour!) Interesting how folks who started in tech have migrated out into old industries, taking with them what they learned. As with all diasporas, I expect a lot of benefit as the two cultures mix.
P.S. My scone recipe.
| Comments: 7
An account of the efforts of various members of Congress to sanitize their Wikipedia entries, removing information on past campaign promises. (Via Farber's IP List)...
Del.icio.us Tags: wikipedia politics dark_side | URL: http://www.lowellsun.com/ci_3444567
I was delighted to get the following email this morning from Danish hacker activist Tomas Krag:
"For the past 4 months I've been working to get a book out on wireless
networking.
Together with some of the smartest, most passionate people i've ever had
the pleasure to work with, and lead by experienced technical book author
and editor Rob Flickenger, we've completed the book. It's called
"Wireless Networking in the Developing World", and it is a free book
released under
a Creative Commons license.
Continue reading "Wireless Networking in the Developing World"
Tags: developing countries remix copyright free books wireless
| Comments: 0
James Governor of
RedMonk wrote in email: "I couldn't help but read
this and think hell's angels = foo." (The article he points to describes how Harley Davidson reinvigorated their brand by embracing the outlaw bikers who at one point seemed to be ruining the market for them.)
James is completely right on. Hackers are the hells angels of the computer industry -- and also its salvation. Every time the industry gets stuck, it's the hackers who show the way forward. Think: the homebrew computer club and the PC revolution; the explosive growth of the early web from the fringes to the mainstream; the open source revolution; and more recently, the mashup phenomenon and the rise of Web 2.0.
The "alpha geeks" and FOOs are also the heart of O'Reilly's brand. As we reach out to different audiences and topics, we do our best to remember that, and to tell a story about how our core value proposition is in our ability to spot those people and technologies that are going to turn things upside down. This is our mission: Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. And in 2002, after the dotcom bust, we made it a goal to reinvigorate the industry by helping pour some fuel on this bottom-up fire, and help the industry give more credit to the people who don't have business plans, but just want to have fun.
Continue reading "Bikers as Alpha Geeks"
Tags: alpha geeks where 20 branding foo
| Comments: 3
On the O'Reilly editors list, Mark Brokering writes: "Check out this bookshelf in the Microsoft ad that just ran in PC Magazine". (Popup image.)
Interesting indeed. The ad, with the caption, "Find tools and guidance to defend your network at microsoft.com/security/IT" features a developer at his desk. On the desk is a shelf full of books. Leaving aside the fact that most of them aren't security books, what caught our attention was that the three books on the end were O'Reilly books, with the cover of the book visible on the end photoshopped to take the animal off the cover and to modify the title on the spine.
Continue reading "Afraid to tell people what books their developers are really reading?"
Tags: copyright fun branding
| Comments: 5
Next week I'm speaking at the 10th annual Israel Internet Association Conference: Connecting the Dots, in Tel Aviv. I'll be giving a tutorial on the "Anatomy of a Web 2.0 Application." I'm really looking forward to the trip, as I've never been to Israel. The talk has also proven a great forcing function for me to figure out what I think about all the discussion of what the term "Web 2.0" means, if anything. I'm happy to say I have something to say about that, and am interested to see what the ISOC attendees think of it. (If you read Hebrew, an Israeli newspaper published an interview with me about the talk, and used some of the talented Duncan Davidson's photos in it.)
I'm also speaking at O'Reilly's Emerging Technologies conference (a.k.a. ETech) again this year. I'll be reprising and revising my popular "Business for Geeks" tutorial, which I was gratified to find sold out at OSCon last year. I've had fun giving these talks, and think it's a nice specialty to have built up -- turning engineers into better company founders (I hope!). I'm also leading a fun pseudo-competition called the Data Dump, where we're getting people running some great web applications to take five minutes to show us something they've learned from the usage of their sites. We have participants from Flickr, Technorati, Feedburner, and others I'm forgetting at the moment signed up. It's looking like the results will be amazing. If you know someone who should be participating, yourself included, drop me a line (my first name at the obvious domain).
If you'll be at either event, come up and introduce yourself.
Tags: isoc appearances etech data dump israel
| Comments: 2
Voipster announced OpenZoep today at ETel. They want it to be the de facto client side code for embedding VoIP into desktop apps, web browsers, games, and so on. The wiki has information on the subversion and trac repositories for the source. It's Windows at the moment, being actively ported to Linux and OS X. They've had over 3,000 downloads in the first few hours since they launched through word of mouth. Surj said, "I can see this becoming the Mozilla of VoIP." Definitely one to keep on the radar.
Tags: voipster mozilla voice etel
| Comments: 0
The Poly9 hackers who were at Where 2.0 in 2005, showed up at Emerging Telephony today with Jabphone, a service built on libjingle, Jabber, and Asterisk that lets you call out to regular telephone numbers from Google Talk. This is the power of open standards and open source, folks--they've been able to add the Skype Out feature to Google Talk without any assistance from Google. You can't do that with Skype, Yahoo Messenger with Voice, or MSN Messenger. I don't know what blows me away more--that these guys are so creative in two very different areas, or that they have another surprise up their sleeve to show off at the ETel Fair tomorrow night ....
Tags: google voice etel
| Comments: 0
Chris Anderson famously named the long tail-- the idea that in the internet era, success belongs to companies that can address the end of the demand curve that is populated by millions of low-volume products, rather than a small number of high-volume products. Last year, noodling on the long tail concept, Rael Dornfest somewhat waggishly pointed out that there's an analogous phenomenon on the front end of product creation, which he called "the long snout." That is, there are millions of emergent products and technologies that may or may not catch on (consider the fact that there are over 100,000 projects on sourceforge alone), and that we needed a lightweight way to document and present information about those projects, so we could start publishing about them early on, and track them up the development curve as well as the demand curve.
Continue reading "The Long Snout"
Tags: long snout economics content long tail online books
| Comments: 2
It's hilarious that the US Justice Department is taking Google to court with a subpoena for "1 million random Web addresses." Why don't they just ask the US Chamber of Commerce for those addresses? Or, hey, O'Reilly has a book that can help. Maybe those characters over at NSA could use it to collect some, you know, public Web addresses for their Justice Department brethren. They've been fighting about this for six months now -- in that time, who knows how many millions of addresses they could find! "Billions and billions...."
Sigh. I have to laugh, because, you know, the rest of the story is just so incredibly depressing I can't even believe it.
Tags: spider boneheaded justice
| Comments: 0