Dipity
In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony...and the list goes...
ChipHacker -- collaborative FAQ site for electronics hacking. Based on the same StackExchange software as RedMonk's FOSS FAQ for open source software. Democracy Live -- BBC launch searchable cov...
Your Botnet is My Botnet (PDF) -- 2008 USENIX Security paper analysing >70G of data gathered when security researchers hijacked the Torpig botnet. A major limitation of analyzing a botnet from th...
Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challeng...
Better BBQ Through Chemistry -- food is the perfect ground for geek training: there are measurements, there's science, it's easy to know whether you've succeeded, and you can eat all but the wors...
Since my last post on the number of active Facebook users, the company once again doubled in Asia, adding more than 14 million active users over the last 12 weeks. Through the latter part of ...
Guest blogger Carl Hewitt, Emeritus at MIT in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, is known for his research on strongly paraconsistent logic, privacy-friendly client cloud ...
Reboot Britain Video Archive -- video from the talks at Reboot Britain are online. The event also produced a essay set (PDF), CC-licensed. (via Paul Reynolds) Revealing Errors -- Benjamin Mako H...
Enabling Massively Parallel Mathematics Collaboration -- Jon Udell writes about Mike Adams whose WordPress plugin to grok LaTeX formatting of math has enabled a new scale of mathematics collabora...
Ignite Seattle 7 is being held a week from Monday, August 3rd, 2009 at the King Cat Theater. We have an all-star line up of some of the most ingenious, fascinating and inspiring geeks from across...
On Data Reconciliation Strategies and Their Impact on the Web of Data -- For years, I’ve been a fairly vocal advocate for the elegance and scalability of a-posteriori reconciliation via equivalen...
News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing...
IDEO's Human Centered Design Toolkit -- methodology and toolkit for inspiring new solutions to difficult challenges within communities of need. Full PDF of manual and cards available for free do...
The World Economic Forum started a research project at Davos 2009 concerning cloud computing, which they broadly define to include all kinds of remote services, from Software as a Service to virtu...
Half of All Friends Replaced Every 7 Years -- to put it another way, the half-life of friendship is 7 years. (via zephoria on delicious) Crowdsourced Car Design -- an interesting approach, and I ...
As some of you may know, I got my undergraduate degree in Greek and Latin Classics. So when Forbes asked me to do an interview on the subject of how my Classical education had affected my busines...
Harvard Study Finds Weaker Copyright Protection Has Benefited Society (Michael Geist) -- Given the increase in artistic production along with the greater public access conclude that "weaker copyr...
I love the idea of Fire Eagle, Yahoo's under-supported location-brokering service. However until recently I found myself unable to use it. I had no mobile service that I could consistently rely o...
Ignite! is coming to San Jose on Monday June 22, 2009 at 8:00 pm, attached to the Velocity Conference. Admission is free, open to all, and there will be a cash bar.The deadline for talks is May 1...
I've been reading a lot of philosophy lately -- Kierkegaard and Dawkins, Lewis, Hume, Calvin and Augustine, you name it -- for a class I'm taking, as well as for my own enjoyment. One of the inter...
In my previous post, I noted that despite the large decline in total number of job postings, the number Hadoop/MapReduce job postings increased by 49%. What is the current state of the online job ...
Some people never grow up. Some people wait to have children so that they can become kids again. When Hillel Coopermans's young ones were four he began his family's Lego collection. This led to ...
After the press conference following this morning's keynotes, I was part of a small group conversation with Lars Rasmussen, head of the Google Wave team. He told the story of how they pitched Ser...
Viral Epidemics Poised to go Mobile -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi (author of Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else) modelled mobile phone virus epidemiology for NSF and concluded tha...
This post is part three of a series raising questions about the mass adoption of social technologies. Here are links to part one and two. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcomi...
Ever since Twitter started suggesting accounts to new users, it was clear that those on the suggested users list were gaining thousands of followers. Setting aside the fact that number of follower...
There's a long-time debate between those who advocate for semantic markup, and those who believe that machine learning will eventually get us to the holy grail of a Semantic Web, one in which comp...
In a few weeks, the Facebook application platform will mark its second anniversary. While it garnered lots of press coverage in the months after it launched, the arrival of the iTunes app store sh...
Lacie 10TB Storage -- for what used to be the price of a good computer, you can now buy 10TB of storage. Storage on sale goes for less than $100 a terabyte. This obviously promotes collecting,...
Question: When you plug something in do you say “I’m using electricity” or “I’m using the wall socket”? Sometimes I feel the discussion about innovation in mobile tech sounds like a discussion of...
Baby nerds, evil URL shorteners, reasoned discussion, and the Government straps its Web 2.0 on: Books for Wee Nerds -- Forget Pat the Bunny -- your baby wants to Pat Schrodinger's Kitty! Help bab...
As I've written here recently, we've got some amazing sessions scheduled for Web2Open--the free unconference hosted by Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. One that I'm particularly excited about is a ne...
Eric Ries, a serial entrepreneur, most recently was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of IMVU, his third startup. He's the author of the blog Lessons Learned, co-author of several books inc...
I love this. Two university researchers are asking real world coders how they code. They want to learn whether the theory taught in software design courses is actually used in the real world. T...
Guest blogger Dylan Field is an intern at O'Reilly and Senior at Technology High School in Rohnert Park, CA, where he is a member of the FIRST Robotics team, Dylan is especially interested in Com...
Programming language security, robot laws, open data platform, and telephony recharged: Languages and Security Reading (Ivan Krstić) -- I love his tripartite division of language security work, a...
Eye candy, kid brain candy, game code, and some hero worship. If that's a smooth segue to your weekend, you've got a heck of life! GE's awesome Flash/Computer Vision hack. Has to be seen to be b...
A lot of what I've been working on the past two years has been built on the assumption that the model that social networks use today will fundamentally change. Social networks have largely been b...
Hey, I'm happy to see this in the news today:Amazon.com will begin selling e-books for reading on Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod Touch.Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can downlo...
Artist-Engineer Marc Bohlen uses some fairly advanced technology to express his artistic visions. It's not often you find an artist with a degree from CMU in robotics, or an engineer with an Mast...
In this fourth post (parts one, two and three are found here) on the State of the Computer Book Market, we will look at programming languages and drill in a little on each language area. Overall t...
Google released App Engine less than a year ago (Radar post). It was the first chance for external developers to use the power of Google's servers. The powerful platform supported Python and was...
Click to enlarge this visualization. Created using Processing by Nick Bilton. Data collection by Evan Sandhaus. I repeatedly hear from people with information overload disorder. From news and in...
Work in Small Batches -- I'm obsessed by the pursuit of quality, but at human scale and not in the stultifying ISO9001 process. The ever-wonderful Startup Lessons Learned blog ties together Toy...
If you've gotten tired of hacking firewalls or cloud computing, maybe it's time to try your hand with DNA. That's what Reshma Shetty is doing with her Doctorate in Biological Engineering from MIT...
Stimuluswatch.org is a great example of how easy it is today for people to, as Clay Shirky says, “organize without organizations.” Stimuluswatch.org began after Jerry Brito attended a mayor’s Con...
Today is Waitangi Day in New Zealand, our National Day of Scratching Our Heads and Wondering Whether We Should Scrap This Day and Get Ourselves A Real National Day Instead. Despite the obvious de...
Data, climate change, and location: Details on Yahoo's Distributed Database (Greg Linden) -- summary of Yahoo!'s PNUTS, "a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Ya...
Driving through Napa over the weekend, I saw a roadsign that said "Milling Today" at the Old Bale Grist Mill. I had to stop and take a look. The restored mill has a 36' "overshot" waterwheel s...
If you watch sports, as many will do this with the Super Bowl on Sunday, you know that games can change direction. Something happens and momentum changes quite suddenly. A team that was piling...
I decided to turn the "Twitter quote of the day" series into real posts, rather than simple "retweets." There is so much great stuff on twitter, but some links stand out. Someone posts a short bi...
@gnat: a city is a schematic for a computer of citizens. library=memory. industry=cpu. sewage=waste heat. traffic lights=clock ticks. discuss.
Sensors, games, recession indicators, and book prep in today's four short links: New Networks Take Nature's Pulse - an article in Christian Science Monitor about sensor networks. Makezine pointed...
Fantasy, feedback, facts, and flies, all will be revealed in today's links of loops and life: Blueful - a story told in text, but delivered through the medium of web sites. It's like an xkcd car...
Pledges, phone, fake brains, and real brains. All here on your Monday dose of four short links: Ada Lovelace Day - Suw Charman has kicked off a day of blogging about women in technology in honou...
FDR was our radio president, JFK was our television president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.
Today we have Tom's Brain on Flickr, the Newspaper Industry's Death in Context, REST with friends, and Filthy Lucre from Twitter. A map of my brain - Tom Coates mindmaps his interests as part of ...
Over the past few months I have been interviewing various people that are "on our Radar" so to speak. It recently occurred to me that we had never done a video with Tim. So last week Kirk Walte...
There's a lot to be said that's positive about our declining economy. (Yeah, it's an odd beginning. But hang in there with me.) In the publishing industry, for example, we're having to be a lot mo...
Apologies for the delay. Just remember Douglas Adams's great line: "Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." Misconceptions and Objections to Gaza Mapping - Mikel Maron deals to objections abo...
It's been a busy week for the "death of newspapers" camp. We've had Michael Hirschorn's Atlantic Monthly piece forecasting the demise of The New York Times by May, Jack Shafer weighs in at Slate, ...
Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what's the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark? End Times - gl...
Since Bernie Madoff has put Ponzi schemes back onto the front pages, it's worth considering whether we are all complicit in the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all, the that the global economy can gr...
Regular Radar contributor Linda Stone sent this in to be posted today. What game-changing scientific and developments do you expect to live to see? The Internet, television, antibiotics, automob...
Hahlo - a very sweet-looking mobile (iPhone in the particular) optimised Twitter interface. Although, as I said, every time a Twitter API-consuming web site makes me type in my username and pass...
Hahlo - a very sweet-looking mobile (iPhone in the particular) optimised Twitter interface. Although, as I said, every time a Twitter API-consuming web site makes me type in my username and passw...
I enjoyed this interview with Richard Jefferson (caution: PDF) from Com Ciência No. 102, October 05, 2008. Richard runs CAMBIA, a group that fights for open innovation in biological sciences. He...
At the Program For the Future event commemorating the 40th anniversary of Doug Englebart's "mother of all demos" in 1968, I was privileged to hear an inspired rant by Alan Kay about the unwillingn...
Google has been investing lots of money in geodata acquisition. Some of the money is being spent externally: they've inked an exclusive satellite imagery deal with GeoEye (Radar post) and a data s...
When I left Microsoft I switched to a Macbook Pro and didn't look back. I never thought that I would use a Windows machine regularly again. Then I got an Asus Eee PC 1000h (10.2 in screen, 1.6 GH...
Hat in hand the U.S. Auto Industry lined up for their slice of government aid and it appears as of this posting that they will get the money they are asking for. These titans spent years hiding...
Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the compa...
Tim sent around a link to the VisionMobile report on open source technology in the mobile space, which I really enjoyed. It covers not just the software used at different layers in the stack, it ...
Google Chrome did a smart thing: Less. They unified the search box and address bar, since that's what people do anyway. That gives us back precious pixels for the only thing that's as important t...
Taking a cue from Raven's recent post announcing the 10,000 iPhone app milestone, I decided to update some charts from earlier posts on the U.S. iTunes app store. First, the weekly growth in the n...
If you care what I think, you know that Twitter is just about the best way to learn what I'm paying attention to. I pass along tidbits of O'Reilly news, interesting reading from mailing lists and...
Just a reminder that the good folks at One Laptop Per Child are running the Get One Give One program again, in association with Amazon. Buy an OLPC XO for $399 and you'll be providing one to a ch...
Like a lot of people, I was feeling a bit of post-partum letdown after the election. Those of us who were really engaged, following the polls, making calls to undecided voters, arguing out the me...
"Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be President," declared Arianna Huffington from the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, the day after the election. In "The Web and Politics" session, mo...
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 t...
Over the weekend, TechCrunch postulated that with a frenzy of election-related activity, Twitter hit its hockey stick moment in late October. The theory goes that Twitter saw a 25 percent increase...
I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft's head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talkin...
I met recently with Vic Gundotra, formerly Microsoft's head of platform evangelism, and now VP of Engineering at Google, responsible for all their mobile efforts outside of Android. We were talki...
The bailout of the US financial system isn't working. The government's rescue plan has fundamental flaws, including incentives that favor the failed firms, not the country as a whole. New are need...
Recently I spoke with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs about the role of online communities in the enterprise. Francois has been evangelizing the learning gained from his recent study “The Trib...
One of my favorite sessions at the recent Web 2.0 summit was Tim's half-hour conversation with Shai Agassi, the CEO of Better Place. Better Place aims to make electric cars widespread ("the electri...
One of my favorite sessions at the recent Web 2.0 summit was Tim's half-hour conversation with Shai Agassi, the CEO of Better Place. Better Place aims to make electric cars widespread ("the electr...
Larry Lessig was busy last week: he was in New Zealand for the LIANZA (Library and Information Association of New Zealand Aoteatora) conference, flew back to California to man the phone banks for ...
I wrote this piece about a month ago as the Welcome for Make: 16, which will be on the newsstand soon. As I write this, there is panic on Wall Street despite Washington’s $700 billion rescue attem...
If I'm blogging it, is still a tweetup? Either way, we're hosting a little shin dig tonight (Thursday) to celebrate the release of our new report, "Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Comm...
To help make the most of this week's Web 2.0 Summit, I wanted to understand the overall audience gestalt - what are the broad themes, interests, and that are important to the people going to the c...
This morning at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, the Windows Live ID team announced that Windows Live ID will support OpenID 2.0 with a Community Technology Preview today and produc...
Nick Carr's difficulty in understanding my argument that cloud computing is likely to end up a low-margin business unless companies find some way to harness the network effects that are the heart ...
November 7th is World Plone Day, when the Plone community will run outreach events around the world to "promote and educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using Plone in education, ...
As Tim mentioned earlier this week during tough times it's important to work on things that matter. The LA Times dives into Tim's thinking with a piece published yesterday. From the story:O'Reilly...
I’ve been meaning to write a post about open-source software in defense for a while and today my inbox achieved critical mass with the arrival of yesterday’s GCN article on the subject. The artic...
As the financial markets battle the fallout of years of poorly regulated unwise greed, the language of analysis is revealing. Commentators talk of "contagion spreading", financial "gears jammed"...
Don't miss this great post by Chris Heathcote deconstructing Google's first steps into map advertising on the web and mobile map apps. There's still some usability and use-case work to be done, b...
Here's the state of play as I see it: it is expensive and difficult to borrow and this shows no sign of change; the US debt is rising instead of falling, propelled by the Iraq War and the reliance...
The Internet changes the power relations between companies and customers. Social technologies like blogs, social networks, ratings and reviews etc. allow customers to share experiences; good and ...
Tele Atlas is going to start selling Tomtom speed profile data. This is the first sign of the acquisition having an impact on customers and potentially the geo-data market. The speed profile data...
I had a powerful conversation recently in Europe with one of the top executives of a major industrial company. They have 100K+ employees in over 50 countries. When he joined five years ago the...
In case you missed them in Jim's post on Ignite Philly II, there are two great 5m talks on education online that you should really check out.Mark Yim: Engineering Education and the GRASP Lab is re...
The Web 2.0 Expo in SF is our largest conference for the web community. It brings together over 10K web professionals to meet in the hallways, attend sessions and keynotes, and explore the Expo f...
Rowan Simpson and Koz have released Wingman, a Firefox plug-in that automatically sends the pages you visit to an HTML validation server. This lets you validate dynamically-generated pages locked...
Software Freedom Day is free and open source's open day, a chance for the general public who might have been curious about open source to come along and learn more. I'll be in Wellington on Satur...
I have been thinking a lot about the new Powered by Zappos service. According to Zappos: Powered by Zappos (PBZ) is a feature Zappos.com offers to its partners where we design, host, fulfill and...
A couple of weeks ago Matt gave an Ignite talk at Gnomedex about his experiences dancing around the world. If you've seen the video you'll enjoy his talk - plus it ends with bonus footage of 100 o...
This year has seen a glut of books on topics in that strange area occupied awkwardly by behavioural economics, cognitive psychology, and experimental philosophy. Some fail to distinguish themselv...
GeoEye, an imagery provider, is launching their latest satellite, GeoEye-1, tomorrow. This satellite will offer half-meter resolution imagery to commercial companies and even greater resolution t...
Yesterday's Microsoft Watch had an incisive article about Microsoft's failure to compete in the mobile phone marketplace. Echoing my own assertions that Microsoft's obsessive focus on competitio...
The geo hackers were out at Burning Man in full force this year. Above is a screen capture from a GigaPan taken by Rich Gibson. The view I've chosen is centered on the Man's heart, but he captu...
I just saw the trailer for Sony's new game The Last Guy. In it you run around a city trying to lead people to safety with a top down view reminiscent of Google Earth or Yahoo! Maps or Live Maps...
Microsoft has received a patent on a "new and improved" Page-Up and Page-Down system. Timothy D. Sellers et al. was awarded the patent on August 19, 2008 for a "Method and system for navigating ...
The New York Times today has a fascinating profile of Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, entitled Is This The Most Trusted Man in America? The article is a wonderful celebration of the person an...
Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastati...
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly] All civilization depends on energy, and always has done so. Oil is rising rapid...
Foo camp attendee Ben Black alerted me to Adhearsion, a framework for developing applications in the VoIP space. Think of it as a Ruby on Rails for telephony. Developed by Jay Philllps who got fru...
[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends were currently tracking here at O'Reilly: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.] The iPhone is called the JesusPhone for a reason. Its ease of use ...
The iPhone knows my location, but it doesn't let me share it with websites via the built-in browser. For an application developer to auto-magically provide me location-aware benefits they need to...
Today at OSCON, we'd like to announce the creation of the Open Web Foundation, an organization that will help the creation and acceptance of Open Web. As the web grows there is an increasing nee...
Its good to be back in Portland for my favorite geek convention: O'Reilly's Open Source Conference. The overcast sky in Portland is making it a little easier this year to focus on the plethora of...
I am a Perl hacker. I have written parts of the core, created CPAN modules and written tons of perl code. In fact I am addicted to it ; or rather, CPAN. I have been wanting to play around with Goo...
As promised last month, O'Reilly has released 30 titles as DRM-free downloadable ebook bundles. The bundles include three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single ...
The iPhone's location-aware APIs are being used by developers for all sorts of applications. I wrote some of my initial thoughts about the implementation on Friday. I've downloaded a ton of appli...
David Brooks gave a talk last week in Aspen that inspired me and that I can't stop thinking about. Note that it comes in three parts. His book is due to come out in the fall of 2009.Brooks discu...
This past February at Social Graph Foo Camp, Google released the first version of their Social Graph API. (see past Radar coverage) This API was focused on making it easier for developers to und...
SocialMedia is an advertising network which places ads within social applications such as those on Facebook and MySpace. SocialMedia claims to be more effective in this type of advertising, due t...
I read recently about the cease and desist letters sent to 23andme and other personal genomics companies selling tests directly to consumers. 23andme has responded, saying that they agree with th...
Two stories I read yesterday morning are worth sharing. The first, an editorial by science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg, was entitled The Death of Gallium, a meditation on the increasing scarc...
Now that the dust has settled from last week’s Twitter rollback of the reply feature, I’ve been thinking about how Twitter and other services with passionate users incorporate user-generated usage...
Seesmic is a company built specifically to encourage asynchronous video conversations.
Congratulations to the organizers of Peer-to-Patent, which is carrying off one of the most audacious experiments in Internet activism in our day. A lot of ink has been spilled about Barack Obama'...
I am happy to announce that the Money:Tech site is up and running. We've been working on the program for a while. We are looking for people in both the Finance and Technology communities to par...
An easy way to increase Twitter's signal-to-noise ratio is to follow less people. I'm sure you've heard of Twitter users who follow several thousand twitterers. How they keep up with that many mic...
I fell in love with email in 1983. I was a computer-savvy educator and children’s librarian teaching teachers about the new technologies available to them. Email came into my life, offering immed...
How walkable is your neighborhood? Walkscore, one of my favorite mashups. does a good job of rating the walkability of areas in cities. Give it an address and it will use the Google Local Searc...
BarCamp Nairobi took place this past weekend and according to several bloggers estimated that there were over two hundred participants. As part of BarCamp, Erik Hersman, kindly conducted a simple ...
Several years ago, my friend Upendra Shardanand tried to get me to join him in starting a company that would remake the way news is created and understood -- overturning the worst, ambulance-chasi...
The other day, Hugh, Pinny, Mark and I recorded another of our podcasts. It's very much in our tradition of non-linear conversation. Sorry, no show notes for this one - I've not found time to do ...
Mark Jacobsen from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures asked me to post this announcement about Startup Camp:We received an overwhelming response to our call for participants in the first annual OATV Star...
code_swarm was created by Michael Ogawa with Processing.This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes chang...
At Velocity next week there will be two significant open source projects debuting. The first is the Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation tool created by Scott Ruthfield...
Hugh, Pinny and I invited Ben Keene of Tribe Wanted onto our podcast. I heard Ben give a talk in London and found his story inspiring. We chatted to him for 30 minutes about his experience setting...
The latest Hugh and the Rabbi podcast features Hugh, Pinny, me and guest Euan Semple. Recorded a few weeks ago, we've only just round to posting it but I hope you enjoy it. We went round the hous...
Hugh's just posted the latest Hugh and the Rabbi Podcast with Hugh, Pinny, Mark and yours truly. Hugh's also written some good show notes which I appreciate as I know that's harder work than it lo...
Hugh Macleod has put up a podcast of a chat he had with me, Mark Earls and Pinny Gniwisch. We kick around a few different starting with the debate about influencers. Towards the end, I squeeze in...
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