Podcast: Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle discuss the upcoming Web 2.0 Summit

Beginning on November 5th, 2008 a wide array of thought leaders and practitioners of Web 2.0 are converging on San Francisco to attend the 5th annual Web 2.0 Summit. This year's theme, "Web Meets World" reflects how much Web 2.0 has evolved over the past five years. I recorded an informal conversation with co-chairs Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle to...

How the Hell Did Matt Get People to Dance With Him?

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 of us dancing with him....

Book Review: Nudge

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 themselves, merely rehashing the many ways in which we aren't perfectly rational creatures. Others, however, find an original angle to tack the last 30 years of work since Daniel Kahneman first thought...

Experience Syndication: Powered by Zappos

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 own a partners web site. Our goal is to provide Zappos customers as well as our partner's customers with the best possible service experience. By building...

StartWithXML: Why and How

To better understand the issues surrounding XML and to help publishers deal with them, we've teamed up with the Idea Logical Company on a project we're calling "StartWithXML: Why and How."

Sandbox: Think like Apple

Apple allows read access to nearly the entire iPhone file system. This is a mixed blessing. Your Application can read that data -- but it shouldn't. Apple has been rejecting apps that stray outside their sandbox. From the various rejection letters that I've seen, Apple cites non-specific "violations". These violations have nothing to do with the actual reason that application will not get into AppStore. It helps to see a cross section of these letters because you wouldn't necessarily pick up the point directly from the email.

What I Learned about OmniFocus When I Came Back from Vacation

The week that my family and I spent at the Jersey Shore was rejuvenating for all of us, but I've paid a price since coming back to work. OmniFocus, which was so helpful to me over the first four weeks...

Audio: Mozilla's Frank Hecker on Politics 2.0, Open Source, and Participatory Democracy

O'Reilly News interviews Mozilla's Frank Hecker at Personal Democracy Forum 2008 in New York City. In this 25 minute interview you'll hear Frank Hecker talking about Mozilla's mission and structure, as well as his own views on how open source could provide a model for involving citizens in participatory democracy.

Poor Man's XQuery Update

The IETF just published RFC 5261, an XML patch update framework. It's not a complete diff utility for XML, but it's somewhere between the obsolete XUpdate and the complex XQuery Update Facility.

The state of the art?

The problem is that the bottom line for document interoperability is not the format, but the feature match of the applications. The only way ever to get reliable, bottom-line interchange (enough fidelity that no semantics are lost, with graceful degradation) is by restricting feature use.

Maker Faire Austin is Coming this Fall

Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly event that celebrates the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset. It's for creative, resourceful people of all ages and backgrounds who like to tinker and love to make things. Happening October 18th and 19th at the Travis County Event Center and Fairground. Tickets for sale now at: makerfairetickets.com

Where Camp PDX 2008

For the past two years the geo community has hosted WhereCamp right after Where 2.0 to discuss the events of the conference. Now it looks like WhereCamp is going regional! Portland will be hosting their own geo-oriented unconference called WhereCamp PDX from 10/18-19. As they describe it: An unconference is a conference planned by the participants, we all convene...

Auckland University Bioengineering Institute

I am an industry advisor to the Auckland University Bioengineering Institute and got a tour on Tuesday. It was inspirational! They sprawl over several floors of a tall concrete building in Auckland, expanding from their cramped one-floor presence. Everywhere you look there are people with soldering irons, laptops, and batteries working on devices that sit between hardware and biology. I've...

PICNIC Network 2008

The week of September 22nd I am going to be flying across the Atlantic for the third PICNIC Network. Ever since i heard about the conference last fall I've wanted to attend. My friends' stories last year focused on the many RFID-enabled art pieces. As discussed in this interview these were developed by Mediamatic, a digital art lab. Last...

Portable Contacts API Starts to Get Real

This evening Joseph and John of Plaxo and I have been hosting a hackathon at Six Apart for the Portable Contacts API (video about PorC). The Portable Contacts API is designed "to make it easier for developers to give their users a secure way to access the address books and friends lists they have built up all over the...

Avoiding the Normal Histogram

This is a photograph of Bodie Mercantile, the old general store in the ghost town of Bodie. In creating this image, I wanted to be very sure that I exposed the scene in such a way that it looked like night. In other words, if you open an exposure up enough, no matter how dim the lighting is, you risk...

News Roundup: Sony Reader Arrives in UK, Google Scanning Newspaper Archives, Blanket Copyright Licenses vs Fair Use

UK Reaction to Sony Reader Release Sara Lloyd discusses the impact of the Sony Reader's recent release in the United Kingdom: Anecdotally, Waterstones store staff report a great deal of...

DSRL: A new standard that can remove the English-fluency tax on XML

We live in an age of standard schemas. It is supposed to be a good thing when the whole world can get behind a common standard. However, one of the selling points of XML is how beneficial it is for people to be able have documents with comprehensible tags rather than obscure codes. Chinese element names for Chinese people, for example ... Can you see the contradiction?

Jeremy Allison From Samba Talks About Mentors

In a previous post I mentioned how mentors have played in an important role in my life in both learning to code, and learning about life. One of my mentors, and one of the most underrated, unhyped Python gurus around, Shannon -jj Behrens sent me this blog post by Jeremy Allison, from the Samba team, about how he learned to program.

Plan A, Plan B, Plan C, Plan D, the CONSEGI Declaration, and the Brazilian suppression

I think that underneath the IT bigwigs' comments is the ghost of Plan A: an avoidance of responsibility by procurement or policy makers by invoking the authority of ISO as the reason why a standard should be adopted as a strategy to disentangle from Microsoft and go open source. However, since that was a dodgy proposition to start with (i.e. the invocation, not the disentangling), withdrawing it actually withdraws nothing.

Fun Facts for Better People Pictures

The majority of famous painters “illuminated” their subjects from above and to the left. For whatever reason, we seem to like that kind of lighting. Here are three of my pictures that illustrate that lighting technique. Hey, if it works for famous painters and if it works for me, it will work for you! In very low light and at night, your eyes have an ISO of about 800. Mid-range digital SLRs have a high ISO setting of 1600, and high-end SLRs have high ISO settings of 1600, 3200 and even 6400! So in effect, a camera can see better at night that you can - so don’t stop taking pictures when the light gets low and when the sun goes down.

Portable Audio Recorder Noise Tests

We've reviewed ten handheld WAV recorders so far, and one of the most common questions we get is "How good are the mic preamps?" You can get a good idea of each recorder's sound quality from our audio examples, but here's a site with detailed lab-coat tests.

TOC Recommended Reading

Digital Newspapers and Digital History (Adam Hodgkin, Exact Editions) A Kindle for books, a Plastic Logic napkin for newspapers, and no doubt an iMag reader of some kind for...

[TOC Directory] Recent Additions

18 new listings have been added to the TOC Directory in the last week, including: Digital Media Initiatives Impelsys Winston & Strawn Iofy Endeca Visit the TOC Directory to...

Pre-order iPod: The Missing Manual, 7th Edition print book/electronic bundle & save 35%

Now that Apple's rocked--the new iPods and iTunes 8 look amazing -- we're ready to roll. Author J.D. Biersdorfer is burning the midnight oil to get the latest edition of "iPod: The Missing Manual" ready. Read on to get some terrific hot tips for using your new iPod and to learn how to pre-order iPod: The Missing Manual and save.

You are a Natural Born (Visual) Storyteller - live webcast by Nancy Duarte

We live in the most innovative time in history. That, coupled with pressure from a global economy, means our corporate stories need to be told well and resonate deeply. In this free, live webcast, presented by Nancy Duarte, author of slide:ology, you'll learn how to step away from your traditional content development process, fold in compelling stories and deliver presentations in your own uniquely human way. Find out more.

Practical Photography Advice You Can Take Anywhere

The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSi/450D Companion is not a typical camera guide. Rather than just showing you what all the buttons do, this unique book teaches you how to use various Digital Rebel features to make great photographs. Through easy-to-follow lessons, this book gives you a complete class on digital photography, tailored specifically for people who use this camera.

Finding Linux Systems Where They Never Were Found Before

Up until very recently every system, desktop and laptop, in their catalog ran Windows and sported a Windows logo in the ad. While the majority still do a half a dozen laptops, all low-end netbooks, are sold with Linux preinstalled and the Tux logo is prominently featured in some of the ads.

Do people exist?

My problem, if it is a problem, is that I don't basically don't believe in the existence of institutions and corporations, only of people...

Born Digital: A review for the moment

Born Digital postulates a watershed between those born on or before 1980 and those born after. Although the book is advertised as a guide to the latter for those born earlier, I suspect that the marketing became unmoored from the authorship. That's because the book's arguments culminate in the message that its lessons need to be learned by "digital natives" most of all, and that they are the ones best positioned to alleviate the social dislocations caused by digital media and the Internet.

Ignite NYC II: Energy, Cupcakes, and Alley vs. Valley

On the night before the Web 2.0 Expo NY Ignite is coming back to NYC! On September 15th we will have 10 Ignite speakers who each get just five minutes on stage. Bre Pettis, the co-creator of Ignite will be hosting a cupcake decorating contest. Ignite is going to be at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street) where...

Open Trace and Yammer Shine

I'm at Techcrunch50 this week (and will be here for most of the conference). The Enterprise group of startups showed yesterday. It was an interesting cluster of startups to include in At first glance I would have included only one in the traditional Enterprise. When I think of Enterprise in the Web 2.0 space I usually narrow my classification...

VirtualBox 2.0 Update OK for Windows, Not So Good for Linux

Sun VirtualBox 2.0 was released on Sept. 4, 2008. I tried this free Open Source cross-platform virtualization hypervisor on an iMac running OS X Leopard. Microsoft Windows virtualization looks somewhat improved. But, running Fedora 9 Linux resulted in problems that I did not see with VirtualBox 1.6.2 a few months ago.

Still Looking for the Perfect Mac Twitter Client

Little more than four months ago I signed up for Twitter. While I am still not able to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes this webservice so appealing, I have since used it regularly to keep up-to-date with what some of my friends are up to, learn about 'net-related news that lies beyond my own radar, and find the odd gem of wisdom as inspiration. As much as I like Twitter per se, I am still a bit disappointed by the Twitter clients that are available for the Mac.

Join the TOC Online Community

If you've been to the TOC Web site lately, you might have noticed the link up top labeled "Community." We recently did a quiet launch of a social networking...

What Does Esquire's E Ink Cover Mean for Print Publishing?

My take: Print's future hinges on content, not technology. What do you think?

iPhone Forensics 101 Webcast with Jonathan Zdziarski

In this free, live webcast, iPhone hacker and data forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski guides you through the steps used by law enforcement agencies to bypass the iPhone 3G's passcode lock by creating a custom firmware bundle. The webcast airs Thursday,...

Power Tweeting--Sarah Milstein's Twitter Tips

Recently on the New York Tmes' Shifting Careers blog Sarah Milstein shared her Twitter know how. What's near the top of her tip list? "Show respect," writes Millstein. "Another way to share ideas -- and your respect for other people in your field -- is to "retweet" something interesting somebody else has Twittered. Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Media (for which I'm co-writing a research report on Twitter), does this frequently and to great effect. Simply start your message with "Retweeting@username" and then paste in the original message (the @ symbol is the Twitter convention for responding or referring to other users). Read on for more info and a chance to win an O'Reilly book.

Seeking Ubiquity

The command line is perhaps the most fundamental of all user interfaces - at a terminal, a prompt character appears that you can type in a command with zero or more arguments, then press the Return key to evaluate that command. As an interface it has some serious limitations - there are typically few indications about what specifically can be typed into that interface, or the action that will ensue once you do enter the line, but for programmers in particular, the command line is also the foundation on which every other user interface ultimately rests.

Vector Linux Partners With SQI To Provide Support Infrastructure

SQI is providing and hosting their Incident Manager software, a ticketing system specifically for paid support customers, as well as a blowledge base available to all Vector Linux users. In addition to providing the software for the knowledge base they are assisting with content creation. The new Vector Linux website which was unveiled in July is also hosted by SQI.

Simplifying your Firefox life with Chrome

The big secret about the Google Chrome browser is that it's faster in some tests, slower than other. But guess what? As I wrote in my first review, few of us are going to notice any difference. The best part...

Supertruct: Crowdsource the Future

Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the "survival horizon" for Homo sapiens - the human race - from "indefinite" to 23 years. - SEPTEMBER 22, 2019 This is the premise for Jane McGonigal's newest game, Superstruct. The game's goal is to crowdsource forecasting for the Institute For The...

Ignite Boston 4, This Thursday

Ignite Boston 4 is this Thursday at the Hooley House in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston from 6:00 pm until ~10:00.

An Interview with toonlet.com's Craig Schwartz

Portland-based toonlet.com is dedicated to making cartoon-creation easy. Launched in December 2007, 10,000 toons have been created so far, with just shy of 2 million comic views around the world. As a test of toonlet’s system, I logged on recently to make a quick sample. In all of 10 minutes, I had created an account and busted out my first toon. Easy, peasy. Back in July I got a chance to sit down with toonlet co-founder and CEO Craig Schwartz to chat about where the idea behind toonlet came from and what he’s learned from the experience.

Maintaining a Web Community is as Hard as Building One

Notoriety tools provide one way to keep a Web community vibrant and engaged.

MAKE: Technology on Your Time--Volume 15

DIY music! Explore the euphonic delights of homemade music in MAKE, Volume 15, the Musical Instrument issue. From handheld synthesizers, to laser harps, to autonomous robot composers, MAKE 15 will fill your world with sweet sounds made by you, even if you've never learned to play an instrument. MAKE Magazine unites, inspires and informs a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages. Learn more.

Learn how to bypass the iPhone 3G's Passcode - iPhone Forensics 101 Webcast

In this free, live webcast, iPhone hacker and data forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski guides you through the steps used by law enforcement agencies to bypass the iPhone 3G's passcode lock by creating a custom firmware bundle. The presentation is aimed towards law enforcement and anyone else who has a need to access the not-so-readily available data on an iPhone. To find out more or register for the event, read more.

The Education of Gary Edwards

One of the more interesting characters in the recent standards battles has been Gary Edwards: he was a member of the original ODF TC in 2002 which oversaw the creation of ODF 1.0 in 2005, but gradually became more concerned about large vendor dominance of the ODF TC frustrating what he saw as critical improvements in the area of interoperability.

Twitter Epigrams and Repartee

I recently encountered the following zinger on twitter: @jayrosen_nyu: Scoble is like a guest at a hotel for one, where a huge staff is trying to anticipate his every need. And he's angry. Shades of noted wits from the past! As when Dorothy Parker, asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence, said "You can lead a whore...

I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren't Dead)

Trent Reznor says "Steal my music" as he recognizes the future of the music business is him monetizing his talent through touring. The rock star made from highly leveraged disc sales is dead.