Four short links: 29 Apr 2009

4chan, urban redesign, 3D printing, and search in Python

1. Moot Wins, Time Inc. Loses -- summary of how the 4chan group Anonymous rigged the voting in Time's 100 Most Influential poll to not just put their man at the top, but also spell an in-joke with the initial letters of the first 21 people. Time tried weakly to prevent the vote-rigging, and ReCAPTCHA gave the Internet scalliwags their biggest setback, but check out how they automated as much as possible so that human effort was targeted most effectively. It's the same mindset that build Google's project management, ops, and dev systems. Notice how they tried to game ReCAPTCHA, a collective intelligence app whose users train the system to read OCRed words, by essentially outvoting genuine users so that every word was read as "penis". Collective intelligence should never be the only security/discovery/etc. feature because such apps are often vulnerable to coordinated action.
2. The old mint in downtown SF painted by 7 perfectly mapped HD projectors -- looks absolutely spectacular. I love the combination of permanent and fleeting, architecture and infotexture. (via BoingBoing)
3. 3-D Printing Hits Rock-bottom Prices With Homemade Ceramics Mix (Science Daily) -- University of Washington researchers invent, and give away, a new 3D printer supply mix that costs under a dollar a pound (versus current commercial mixes of $30-50/pound).
4. Haystack and Whoosh Notes (Richard Crowley) -- notes on installing the search framework Haystack and the search back-end Whoosh, both pure Python. It's a quick get-up-and-go so you can add quite sophisticated search to your Django apps. (via Simon Willison)

Reinventing the Book in the Age of the Web

There's a lot of excitement about ebooks these days, and rightly so. While Amazon doesn't release sales figures for the Kindle, there's no question that it represents a turning point in the public perception of ebook devices. And of course, there's Stanza, an open ebook platform for the iPhone, which has been downloaded more than a million times (and now has been bought by Amazon.)

But simply putting books onto electronic devices is only the beginning. As I've said for years, that's a lot like pointing a camera at a stage play, and calling it a movie. Yes, that's pretty much what they did in many early movies, but eventually, the tools of production and consumption actually changed the format of what was produced and consumed. Camera angles, pacing, editing techniques, lighting, location shooting, special effects: all these innovations make the movies (and television) of today very different from the earliest movies. YouTube is pushing the envelope even further. Why should books be any different? (Aside: Bruce Sterling just published an amazing rant on this topic - how the context of pulp magazines shaped the content of early science-fiction.)

In our work at O'Reilly as authors and publishers, we've long been interested in exploring how the online medium changes the presentation, narrative and structure of the book, not just its price or format.

A sample from my latest experiment, The Twitter Book, can be seen below.

Now, you might ask, how is a book authored in powerpoint a web publishing experiment? It boggles the mind!

The web has changed the nature of how we read and learn. Most books still use the old model of a sustained narrative as their organizational principle. Here, we've used a web-like model of standalone pages, each of which can be read alone (or at most in a group of two or three), to impart key points, highlight interesting techniques or the best applications for a given task. Because the basics are so easy, there's no need to repeat them, as so many technical books do. Instead, we can rely on the reader to provide (much of) the implicit narrative framework, and jump right to points that they might not have thought about.

Perhaps the biggest driver, though, was the need for speed. We couldn't imagine writing a book about twitter that wouldn't be immediately out of date, because there are so many new applications appearing daily, and the zeitgeist of twitter best practices is evolving equally quickly. So we needed a format that would be really easy to update. (Again, modular structure helps, since new pages can be inserted without any need to reflow the entire document.) We plan to update The Twitter Book with each new printing.

The idea to write the book in powerpoint came to me while I was thinking about how quickly I write a new talk: I generally use pictures as visual bullets, to remind me about the order of my main points; I know what I want to talk about when I see each picture. And pictures are a memorable, entertaining way to tell a story. All I needed to do, I realized, was to write down some notes equivalent to what I'd be saying if I were giving this as a talk. (And in fact, I will be using portions of the book as the basis for my talk later today at the Inbound Marketing Summit, and a few weeks later at the Twitter Boot Camp.)

Of course, having the amazing Sarah Milstein as a co-author really helped. She immediately grasped the concept, and because she knows just about everything there is to know about the twitter app ecosystem, tools, and techniques, she actually provided much of the meat of the book. This allowed me to spend time on giving my perspectives on points that particularly matter to me, or that demonstrate my approach to twitter.

But even there, we saw real benefit in the format of the book. As wikipedia has demonstrated, collaboration is easiest when documents are constructed using a modular architecture. It's hard to coordinate a complex narrative (even single authors sometimes lose track of their plot details); much easier to work on things in standalone units that share a common, "interoperable" format.

I first explored this modular approach to the book in Unix Power Tools, a book I wrote in 1993 with the explicit goal of emulating the hypertext style of the web in a print book. The book consists of a thousand inter-linked articles. In the print book, the "hyperlinks" were in the form of cross references to individually numbered articles. In online versions such as the one at Safari books online, the cross references are expressed as real hyperlinks.

Similarly, our "Cookbook" series of technical books (whose format was originated by Nat Torkington in 1998 with the first edition of the Perl Cookbook), effectively creates a database of answers to common problems.

In 2003, Dale Dougherty and Rael Dornfest developed the Hacks series, another approach to books as collections of loosely-related pages. The Hacks books provide a collection of tips, tricks, and documentation on the problem-solving approaches of cutting edge users.

Of course, modularity isn't the only thing that publishers can learn from new media. The web itself, full of links to sources, opposing or supporting points of view, multimedia, and reader commentary, provides countless lessons about how books need to change when they move online. Crowdsourcing likewise.

But I like to remind publishers that they are experts in both linking and in crowdsourcing. After all, any substantial non-fiction work is a masterwork of curated links. It's just that when we turn to ebooks, we haven't realized that we need to turn footnotes and bibliographies into live links. And how many publishers write their own books? Instead, publishers for years have built effective business processes to discover and promote the talents of those they discover in the wider world! (Reminder: Bloomsbury didn't write Harry Potter; it was the work of a welfare mom.) But again, we've failed to update these processes for the 21st century. How do we use the net to find new talent, and once we find it, help to amplify it?

I don't exempt O'Reilly from that criticism. While we've done many pioneering projects, we haven't fully lived up to our own vision of the ebook of the future. For example, Safari Books Online, our online library, recognizes that the reference work of the future is far larger than a single book. But we've done a poor job of updating the works in that library to be more "web like" in the way I've just outlined. It is still primarily a collection of books online. (We're adding video, more web content, and working to update books to be more link-rich, but we're not as far along as I'd like.)

Take a look at any ebook, and ask yourself how it could be richer, more accessible, more powerful, if it approached the job it was trying to do with fresh eyes, and a fresh approach.

Many of the products that result won't look like books at all. After all, Google Earth is the new Rand McNally, Wikipedia is the new Brittanica, Google itself is the new competitor to many reference works, YouTube is becoming a vehicle for just-in-time learning, and World of Warcraft is the new immersive fantasy novel. What job do publishers do? And how can new media help us do it better?

Jack Dangermond Interview 1 of 3: Web Mapping

Jack Dangermond is the founder and CEO of ESRI. ESRI's software is used by every level of government around the world. You can see ESRI's influence in online mapping tools from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and FortiusOne. I had the opportunity to interview him over the phone on April 20, 2009. In this portion of the interview we discuss the history of GIS and online mapping.

Jack will be speaking at Where 2.0 on May 20th in San Jose. You can use whr09rdr for 20% off at registration.

Brady Forrest: So ESRI is known for creating large enterprise GIS applications. And then a couple of years ago, maps came into the hand of just about anybody through Google Maps. One question -- I asked people for questions for you, and I think my favorite one was: Do you think that the explosion of web-based mapping has just filled the world with ugly and poorly designed maps?

Jack Dangermond: That's an interesting and compelling question. I think what the consumer mapping sort of technologies have done is provided geo-awareness to everybody. And they've done it principally by building a standardized basemap for the planet. And Google has been, obviously, the leader in this. But also, Microsoft is making a lot of contributions in the same space. And that allows me to navigate and understand a kind of electronic map or image so I can sort of see things. And that's pretty powerful actually for just spatial awareness and georeferencing people's minds about what's going on at different locations. In the last couple of years, I've seen a lot of VGI or volunteer geographic information added to it, little dots on maps. And that allows people to participate in these websites and share their knowledge in some kind of a collaborative space. And that's emerging quite nicely.

But my field is really in geographic information systems. And while we do have a lot of large users, like you said, the history on it has been a little different. It started basically as a university and, I guess, frontier area where people were playing around with computerized mapping for doing spatial analysis. And it started really on mainframes and then went to minicomputers and workstations. And where it really found its way was on the PC. So my judgment is that there's at least a few million users that are in the business of creating maps or creating spatial analysis and then using them for real applications like sighting or like environmental analysis or healthcare studies or land use planning, that sort of thing. The explosion that happened on the web was sort of with the invention of putting maps on the web for many people to look at. And the big popular ones were way back in the time of -- I say way back, but it's in the time of MapQuest when they became really popular, that notion of navigating and seeing. The actual basemaps of Google and Microsoft are less about creating new authored maps than they are about visualizing stuff on top of the basemap. GIS actually has a little bit of an interesting culture because there's lots of people that make really crazy maps in GIS on their desktop or now increasingly on the web. They mix colors wrong. They do color palettes incorrectly. They mix symbologies incorrectly. And in the mashup, it's just exemplified. If that's what you're thinking about the web is just exemplified people making crazy stories and mixing relationships, yeah, probably right. There's bad cartography out there.

What I'm interested in is that a few people who are really talented and special can build templates for cartography that other people can use. I like to think of it as sharing geographic knowledge. So in the early years, people shared geographic data. You know, my layer and your layer and they could combine them and so on. What I'm seeing now is the ability to share a cartographic template. Like here's a wonderful color ramp that you use for demographic data. Or here's a standardized template for how you display cartography to create a basemap or a utility template or, you know, like that.

(continue reading)

Forge.mil Update and DISA Hacks Public Domain

On Monday DISA's forge.mil got another mention on Slashdot. Not really new news, but I think it has been getting press again because of the related news that DISA is also open sourcing its Corporate Management Information System (CMIS). CMIS is a suite of HR and related projects and DISA signed an agreement with OSSI to open source them.

I had been meaning to touch base with Rob Vietmeyer at DISA anyway and the Slashdot mention (plus a subtle kick from Sara Winge) got me off the dime. We are working on a project that we want to share across DoD and since Rob is the force behind forge.mil, I had been meaning to ask him about its uptake. I thought I'd share his answers here.

Since forge.mil was launched it has grown to about 1400 registered users and approximately 10% of them are active on any given day. There are approximately 70 active projects right now in a variety of categories. There are system utilities, geospatial systems, a control system for UAV's, an embedded engine control module, command and control system components, some SOA piece-parts for Net Enabled Command and Control (NECC) and Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES), and sundry others. Project-related traffic (commits, downloads, etc.) is growing and there is a backlog of new projects being on-boarded (including at least one really high profile system that is looking to get broad participation).

What interested me about that list was that the code ranges across domains and from small niche items to components of large scale programs.

At this point most of the code seems to be licensed as "DoD Community Source" and a few projects are under Apache and BSD style licenses. DoD Community Source basically means that the code is "unlimited rights" or "government purpose license rights" under the Defense Federal Acquisition Rules (DFARS). While not "open source" in the OSI sense of the term, hosting code licensed this way on forge.mil should make collaboration across DoD the default rather than the exception. Basically these aren't copyright-based licenses but are designed to operate as though they are in practice - the goal is to do open source-like development within the DoD garden walls.

The source that is licensed under Apache / BSD style licenses is in fact licensed copyrighted material, but at this moment it is still difficult for non-DoD community members to participate because of forge.mil access limitations. DISA is looking into ways to mirror these open source materials to sourceforge instances outside of the DoD garden walls and to extend community participation across those boundaries as well. I think mirroring the code will be a lot easier than figuring out how to do boundary-spanning community.

Projects wanting to be hosted on forge.mil go through a "project adjudication" process that screens out the people just looking for a repository but who don't understand open (or, understand it but don't want it). Projects that don't want to provide open access to other DoD participants have been turned away.

I think there is something interesting hidden in plain view in that CMIS news as well.

One of the oddities of code written by government employees is that the government doesn't create copyright. In an ironic twist, this means that the government can't directly release code under open source licenses, since those licenses rely on copyright law to enforce their terms.

CMIS was written by government employees so DISA and OSSI had to figure out a hack to license it under a copyright-based license. Under the terms of their agreement DISA is releasing the code to OSSI under public domain, then OSSI is re-releasing a "derivative work" under OSL/ASL licenses.

I understand what DISA / OSSI is doing here but I wonder how much they've changed the code to make the "derivative" distinction. It's probably moot though because, assuming community forms around the stuff, it shouldn't take too long before a chain of real derivations is in place that would make the OSL/ASL license terms defensible.

Ignite Seattle (and elsewhere) Tomorrow, 4/29

Ignite Seattle 6 is tomorrow, Wednesday 4/29, at the King Cat Theatre. Ignite Seattle is free. We've got a great line-up of speakers. Here's the evening's schedule:
7PM - Doors Open
7:30 PM - Paper Tower Contest Begins - Build the tallest tower you can out of just 5 sheets of paper and tape (See Details)
8:30 - First Set of Talks

• Hillel Cooperman (@hillel) - The Secret Underground World of Lego
• Dawn Rutherford (@dawnoftheread) - Public Library Hacking
• Roy Leban (@royleban) - Worst Case User Experience: Alzheimer's
• Shelly Farnham (@ShellyShelly) Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers
• Dominic Muren (@dmuren) - Humblefacturing a Sustainable Electronic Future
• Jen Zug (@jenzug) - The Sanity Hacks of a Stay At Home Mom
• Ken Beegle (@kbeegle) - Decoding Sticks and Waves
• Maya Bisineer (@thinkmaya) - Geek Girl - A life Story
• Scott Berkun (Scottberkun.com)- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk

• Scotto Moore (Scotto.org)- Intangible Method
• Secret Guest Speaker from Ignite Portland
• Mike Tykka - The Invention of the Wheel
• Jason Preston (@Jasonp107) - Goodbye Tolstoy: How to say anything in 140 characters or less
• Chris DiBona (@cdibona) - The Coolness of Telemedicine
• Ron Burk - The Psychology of Incompetence
• Katherine Hernandez (@ipodtouchgirl) - The Mac Spy
• Jamie Gower JamieGower.com) - I Am %0.0002 Cyborg
• Beth Goza (@bethgo) - Knitting in Code

Four short links: 28 Apr 2009

Flickr maps, museums and the web, scientific Google charts, and big data

1. Flickr Users' Traces Make Accidental Maps -- David Crandall and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analysed the data attached to 35 million photographs uploaded to the Flickr website to create accurate global and city maps and identify popular snapping sites. (via straup on delicious)
2. MW 2009 Wrapup (Powerhouse Museum) -- summary of the Museums and the Web conference from Seb Chan, one of the bright sparks. Why do I care about cultural institutions getting their web mojo happening? Because they have volumes of metadata, images, and text that I can only dream of. Interesting tidbit: to build their API (now in private beta), the Victoria and Albert had to scrape their own online catalog. Proprietary systems are a plague in every industry.
3. Visualization of the Phosphoproteomic Data from AfCS with the Google Motion Chart Gadget -- definitely wins the award for "paper whose title contains words I never thought I'd see together in the pages of Nature" (see also "Safe and efficient use of the Internet" published in the British Dental Journal). Interesting because mass availability of nifty visualization gadgets brings insight of big data closer to everyone: first the geeks, then the scientists, then businesses, then the schools, then everyone can do it and it's no longer interesting.
4. Designing for Big Data (Jeff Veen) -- video of Jeff's talk from the Web 2.0 Expo about the challenges of designing for the presentation or manipulation of big data sets. He was project lead for Measure Map, which became Google Analytics.

How Big Data Impacts Analytics

Research for our just published report on Big Data management technologies, included conversations with teams who are at the forefront of analyzing massive data sets. We were particularly impressed with the work being produced by Linkedin's analytics team. [We have more details on Linkedin's analytics team, in an article in the upcoming issue of Release 2.0.]

At the second Social Web Foo camp, I had a chance to visit with Linkedin's Chief Scientist DJ Patil. As a mathematician specializing in dynamical systems and chaos theory, DJ began his career as a weather forecaster working for the Federal government. Years later, he ended up in an analytics role at Ebay where his prior experience with massive data sets came in handy. In the short video below, DJ shares his observations on how analytics has changed in recent years, especially as Big Data increasingly becomes common. Companies are casting a wider net, and are hiring scientists from fields not traditionally known as fertile recruiting grounds for data intelligence teams.

DJ also talks about his personal journey from mathematics to e-commerce and social networks. Among his previous stints, DJ worked with the DOD and used "... social network analysis to identify terrorists."

Other short videos from Social Web Foo camp:

Trying to Track Swine Flu Across Cities in Realtime

John Geraci is a guest blogger and heads up the DIY City movement. He will be speaking about DIY City at Where 2.0 in San Jose on 5/20.

Since early last friday, when I got a tip about swine flu in Mexico City from a health researcher, the team that does SickCity has been working to make the system something that can (or could) detect swine flu outbreaks in cities around the world.

It hasn't been easy.

SickCity is the "realtime disease detection for your city", created by people at DIYcity. The service, launched last month, works by monitoring Twitter for local mentions of various terms that mean "I'm getting sick" and plotting those to location. Up until Friday, SickCity seemed to work reasonably well for the very rough beta tool that it is. It showed incidences of people reporting they had flu, or chicken pox, or other illnesses, broken down by city. You could look at a graph of the past 30 days for your city and see days when mentions of certain diseases and symptoms were higher or when they were lower. You could sometimes see trends. No one claimed that SickCity was ready for prime time, but those working on it felt that there was a very worthwhile idea in it that with a bit of refinement would be of huge value to communities.

On Friday, all of that got turned upside down.

Going to SickCity's Mexico City page early in the day, I saw a sudden, several-hundred percent increase in mentions of flu. The problem was, not a single one of them was about actually having the flu - all were about the gigantic swine flu media event that was just beginning. Our disease detection tool had turned into a media event detection tool overnight.

Since then, we've been in a constant struggle to filter out the media effect from the data. The problem is, as the story grows and changes, the terms we have to filter for keep growing and changing. On Saturday we made a series of changes to the filters and search terms, and thought we were fine. By Sunday, those had become totally insufficient in the face of the growing Twitter storm surrounding swine flu (70 more results in the time it took me to write that sentence). We made more changes Sunday. Today, those additional filters seemed puny and insufficient. People are now calling swine flu "piggy flu", "pork flu", "bacon flu", "wine flu". They're talking about Obama having flu. They're talking about bird flu. The list of tweeting topics grows at an exponential rate. The topic of swine flu is incredibly viral.

So how do you get down below this huge cloud of noise, to the relatively tiny (but very important) signal down beneath? There are probably several thousand tweets happening right now about the idea of flu for every one that is about actually having the flu. The number of people actually coming down with flu right now in fact seems very low (let's hope it stays that way).

Tracking other terms related to flu seems more promising - the term "fever" seems like a good one to look for, and once you get rid of the tweets mentioning spring fever, cabin fever and Doctor Johnny Fever, you've got a pretty good data set to use. But how representative of the flu population is that term?

Maybe tracking actual flu tweets in this situation isn't really possible?

Still, the payoff in terms of value to communities and health organizations is huge if the developers can get something that can be demonstrated to work. As a public health researcher following SickCity told me, realtime outbreak detection is currently terrible at best. To improve on what's there, you just have to give people a reliable signal that *something* is happening in a city. You don't need to have exact numbers. You don't even need to know whether what's happening is actually flu, or food poisoning, or plague, really - the health officials can figure that out for themselves pretty quickly with all of the other tools at their disposal, once they know to be on the lookout. You just need to be able to reliably say "there is a sickness event happening right now in this city", and that's enough. You just need a canary in the coal mine.

So the developers behind SickCity, volunteers from DIYcity (mainly Paul Watson and Dan Greenblatt at this time, plus a few others) keep working on making it that. And right now they're working round the clock. (It's a public project - if you want to pitch in, by all means do so - you can get more info here.).

Even if SickCity fails to detect swine flu in cities around the world, it will have become a much more robust tool in the process of failing. If it doesn't succeed in catching this pandemic, maybe it will be better prepared to catch the next one?

Your brain really is forgetting... a LOT

I'm currently reading Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life by Dr. Sandra Aamodt and Dr. Sam Wang. The enormity of the title notwithstanding, I'm enjoying the book, and ran across this rather amazing quotation:

There is good evidence that we "erase" and "rewrite" our memories every time we call them, suggesting that if it were ever possible to erase specific content, playing it back first might be an essential component.

This is a staggering statement. Consider the implications: when you recall a memory, you are capable of - and prone to - rewriting that memory in some form. I find this particularly fascinating in terms of teaching in a spiral method, something I continue to find effective and even critical in highly technical topics.

Take memory management in any programming language. It's simply foolish to unload the truck on an unsuspecting learner, dumping out everything there is to know about memory management at one time, in one place, with little or no functional motivation. The better approach is to incrementally teach the topic, adding additional resolution, detail, and expansion only when new functionality is needed or additional understanding is required. In this way, you're catering to the learner: each piece of information you're unpacking is motivated by a need in that learner. This results in greater internalization of the information, and less information is categorized as "I don't really need this. I'll dump this."

But with the quote by Aamodt and Wang, there's another component at work here: earlier memories are potentially being rewritten as new learning takes place. This is intuitive, even: consider how often we mix up events that are very similar, but not the same. Have you eaten at Chuy's 10 times in the last month (I'm about there)? If so, I'd suspect you'll have a hard time distinguishing at which instance in 10 a certain conversation happened, especially without other mitigating details (a really close friend attended only one meal, or something particularly disastrous happened at another). Is it possible that the brain is trying to shove these similar events into one giant event, because we're recalling an earlier (similar) event, replaying it, and rewriting it with the new one?

What this seems to suggest -- and I grant that there's a lot of theorizing and speculation happening, but what else is Radar good for if not some provocative thought -- is that we must be extremely careful with context. When you recall an earlier mental model of something, and then augment that model, you may be rewriting the earlier model. In other words, you're not just adding to an in-place model, but in fact replacing an earlier model with a newer, expanded one. So what are you doing to ensure the foundational models stay intact? Are you repeating the earlier model, and adding resolution? Or are you just writing about the "new stuff" without regard for the existing material?

I think most textbooks and technical books continue to heap on, assuming that pre-existing models remain in place. Foundational concepts never die, these books would assert (if not implicitly, then by the manner in which they teach). But perhaps those concepts do die! Perhaps this is why you may be adept at releasing memory or allocating memory, but would flail about helplessly at explaining what's really going on. Is it possible that your original mental model has been overwritten, or even functionally replaced?

It's an interesting thought. Context becomes critical, not just as a reminder of pre-existing material, but actually to ensure that pre-existing material is not lost altogether.

C'mon teachers, you must have thoughts on this... let's hear them.

Four short links: 27 Apr 2009

Data centers, open research, Jeopardy!, and tombstones

1. Google Server and Data Center Details -- Greg Linden reports on a Efficient Data Center Summit. Google uses single volt power and on-board uninterruptible power supply to raise efficiency at the motherboard from the norm of 65-85% to 99.99%. There is a picture of the board on slide 17. (and this is a 2005 board). Greg has left Microsoft as Live Labs is dissolved.
2. The Economics of Open Access Publishing -- set of papers on the free distribution of research. Pointed to by the RePEc blog. RePEc is Research Papers in Economics, a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 67 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc material is freely available. (via Paul Reynolds)
3. Computer Program to Take On Jeopardy! (NY Times) -- move over Turing Test, IBM's working on the Trebek Test: a computer program to compete against human “Jeopardy!” contestants. If the program beats the humans, the field of artificial intelligence will have made a leap forward. Really? The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed. Oh, ok. So it's more complex than inverting the hash table of questions and answers. (via ericries on Twitter)
4. The Value of Minimal Data (Powerhouse Museum) -- if you have the ability for passionate users to contribute their knowledge, they can turn "minimal" data into a delicious four course data feast with a vintage port to sip during the dessert course. (via sebchan on Twitter)

Four short links: 24 Apr 2009

Data, fonts, transparency, and exceptions:

1. Performance Comparison: Key/Value Stores for Language Model Counts (Brendan O'Connor) -- sort-of benchmarking for the various distributed key-value stores. One of the first efforts to systematically investigate in such a way that there can be informed comment on value and quality of the alternatives. (via mattb's delicious stream)
2. Typographica's Favourite Fonts of 2008 -- what it says. (via waxy)
3. Transparency is Bunk (Aaron Swartz) -- So government transparency sites end up having three possible effects. The vast majority of them simply promote these official cover stories, misleading the public about what’s really going on. The unusually cutting ones simply make plain the mindnumbing universality of waste and corruption, and thus promote apathy. And on very rare occasions you have a “success”: an extreme case is located through your work, brought to justice, and then everyone goes home thinking the problem has been solved, as the real corruption continues on as before.
4. To Except is Human, To Handle Is Divine (Marco Tabini) -- this is a great piece on how to write code that deals with exceptional circumstances. Sample headings: Errors as Opportunities and Break Before You Fix

Locavore's Open Data

Buster McLeod is taking an "open data" policy towards his latest project, Locavore the iPhone app, by revealing the first month's stats. Locavore is a great app that helps you eat locally by showing you what produce is in season near you and what farmer's markets you can buy it at. It's a well-designed app that I look forward to using this Spring and Summer. (Disclaimer: I am proud to call Buster a friend of mine)

Since launching on 3/17 he's had 5,681 sales for almost $12,000 in revenue (as of 4/21) -- that's about $5,000 for Apple. Locavore recieved a lot of press, but as you can see above it was getting featured on the homepage of the iTunes store that really made the app. On Locavore's most profitable day it had almost 1,000 downloads and reached #65 on the top raking chart.

Buster intends to add Facebook Connect in a future version. He shares some thoughts on usage data in the rest of his post.

So what can be learned from this other than get featured by the App Store team? It's hard to guess what exact process they use, but it seems very likely that they look for an app that is unique, useful, well-designed and well-priced. Locavore was the first of its kind for the app store. It's priced at $2.99, breaking it out of the bargain basement $.99 apps, but keeping it within impulse purchase ("Yes, I'll eat healthier with this and $2.99 isn't that much to spend to eat healthier"). In short if you want to be featured build something Apple can highlight proudly and I'm sure it doesn't hurt make some money from.

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