Ignite Show: Andrew Hyde on The Posting Economy

Andrew Hyde runs Ignite Boulder and works for Techstars. In this week's episode he shares his thoughts at Ignite ATL about the rapid economic shifts that can be caused by user-generated content. Andrew calls this the Posting Economy.

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The Emerging Twitter List Arms Race

I use Twitter a lot, but I was not among the very first to see the new Lists feature. I can now, though. And what I find much more interesting than actually using the feature myself is the fact that I woke up this morning to find that I was on dozens of other people's lists. (In fact, while I was writing this, I turned up on four more!)

Even though the irony is that Twitter introduced lists about a year after I stopped wanting such a feature, I do think there is some value in having other people put me on their lists. Braggadocio. Oh yes, braggadocio. I'm talking about the incredible hubris that comes from knowing I'm on Ezra Butler's list of people he'd take a rubber bullet for, the chutzpah of telling everyone that luminary Tim O'Reilly's list of Government 2.0 people includes me among its few members, and the extra swagger in my step that comes from the radiant energy of being on professor Jay Rosen's list of the best mindcasters he knows. I always knew I was awesome, but now I can prove it.

I'm joking a bit, of course. But when getting retweeted has been boiled down to a science ("Adding 'please' increases retweets by 12.3%!"), every maven is in search of a social media metric that shows who has "authority." Being on someone's Twitter list is a difficult thing to game because it's about organic usefulness to a community. I recently read Gary Vaynerchuk's inspiring book Crush It, and to me, Twitter lists have the potential to be a metric that measures how generous you are to the communities you're a member of.

So forget about counting your number of followers, or how many retweets you get, or the many "Follow Friday" mentions you land - Those metrics have been blown out for a long time now. The new high fidelity for my vanity is the Twitter list.

Four short links: 30 October 2009

Three Minute Theses, Google Wave RPGs, Public Metadata, and The Finitely-Zoomable Natural World

1. The3is In Three -- PhD students must explain their thesis topic in three minutes and one Powerpoint slide. Winner had written on the last words of Shakespearean characters as they met unlikely ends. No video alas, but what a great idea for an Ignite! (via sciblogs)
2. Google Wave: We Came, We Saw, We Played D&D (ArsTechnica) -- gamers using Wave to play RPGs. This can't be the killer app, however, because it is not pornographic. (via BoingBoing)
3. Metadata is Public Record (ArsTechnica) -- Arizone State Supreme Court rules that metadata on the public record is itself in the public record. The test case was a cop who suspected his performance reports had been created when he asked for them and then backdated. His employer had argued the inode info wasn't part of the public record, even though his report was. Sanity prevailed. (via glynmoody on Twitter)
4. Cell Size and Scale -- sweet zoomable interface to show the different relationships in size between everything from Times Regular 12pt to a Carbon atom (via salt, E. coli, hemoglobin, etc.). (via Tom Carden on Delicious)

Participatory Sensing - An Interview with Deborah Estrin

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While the iPhone doesn’t ship nearly as much as its humbler brethren - the iPhone opened up many minds about the potential of phones to do a whole lot more than talk. In that regard it is a peek into the future.

The iPhone is a rich portable computer with onboard sensors. Specifically, it is a location-aware (GPS), motion-aware (accelerometer), directionally-aware (digital compass) visually aware (camera being used to scan QA codes or serve as visual input), sonically aware (microphone and speakers), always-connected (wireless or 3Gs) handheld computer. Every operative word in that sentence is deeply meaningful and rich with possibilities we have just begun to explore. The iPhone does a whole lot more than display information. It is an environmental sensor. Its value lies just as much in sensing information as it does in displaying information.

While the iPhone has the richest set of onboard sensors even basic feature phones are allowing for some remarkable innovation (see my interview with April Allderdice of MicroEnergy Credits) This is an enormous leap forward when our devices are not only connected but context-aware. It is a core theme behind Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle’s “Web Squared” definition that see concepts of Web 2.0 moving into the world.

This concept of “humans as sensors” was the subject of the Web 2.0 Summit panel led by Radar’s Brady Forrest last week. I caught up with panelist Deborah Estrin before to discuss her UCLA group’s work on participatory sensing. Deborah is building multiple applications to express the value of the phone as a sensing device; from large group projects to collect data on an area (such as www.whatsinvasive.com) to personal applications that blend GPS and accelerometer to constantly map your location in time and space then overlay valuable information upon it such as air quality and so on. In the case of air quality - this data might help inform your decisions about where you go jogging or take your baby for that morning stroll.

Navigating the Future: Take Me to Bob

Google has just announced a free turn-by-turn navigation app for Android 2.0 in the US (Radar post). Google Maps Navigation relies on Google's own mapping for routing you. As with many navigation devices you can search Business Listings. However, they are also including data not traditionally available to navigators. In the promo video Google demonstrates that you can ask to be taken to "The King Tut exhibit". GMN will determine that it's in Golden Gate Park and route you. This is "because it is connected to the internet it is using all of the latest information on the internet."

This is huge. To be able to request implicit destinations based off of realtime information is something that has never been available before. What new queries will be available to us because of this? Google has a lot of data. How much of it can be assigned a location? Lots. There are millions of KML files out on the internet. Here are some of the useful queries

"Take me to Bob Smith" - If Bob is your friend on Latitude then Google Maps Navigation can take you to him. If Bob moves then GMN could even re-route you. I wonder if they will enable the chase scenario.

"Drop me off in time for the #48 bus" - Google knows the public transit schedule. So not only can it drop you off at the nearest stop, it could drop you off at the stop that will ensure the shortest multi-modal trip.

"Show me homes under 500K in Capitol Hill" - Via Google Base, Google has real estate information (it has had neighborhood data for quite sometime).

"Take me to my next appointment" - If you use Google Calendar and you accurately fill out the location field then this is a snap.

"Take me to the nearest Winter Coat Sale" - Using Adsense for Google Maps, GMN can easily lead you to local sales.

"Take me to the bar my friends go to the most" - Using Social Graph API and the new, experimental Social Search to tap into Foursquare, GMN can determine where you friends go, aggregate their destinations and lead you to their favorite watering hole.

"Take me to the largest event" - Using a combination of Latitude and its new access to the Twitter Firehose (which will soon include location - Radar post), Google can determine where people are.

"Take me on a tour of the top 10 historical sites here" - Using Wikipedia Google can determine what the sites are and where you should be taken. Alternately, Google could take you on user-generated tour.

"Take me to the most picturesque place near here" - Several years ago Google bought Panoramio, a location-based photo site. Google can determine which place nearby has had the most photos of it taken.

"Take me on a tour of the site from Around the World in 80 Days" - Google already geoparses many of the books it scans (just see this map). This routing is quite possible.

"Take me to the EPA's protected sites" - Government data is becoming more available. This is just one possible governmental query. You could also ask to go on a tour of TARP fund recipients or Democratic donors.

Obviously not all of them will be enabled, but I bet that within a year some of them will be. What other scenarios can or should they implement?

Four short links: 29 October 2009

Learning Programming, Functional Javascript, Controlling Firefox, Kicking Ass (with SSDs)

1. Julie Learns to Program -- blog from our own Julie Steele as she learns her first programming language. The point is: it’s in me. I wasn’t sure that is was, and now I know—it is. And what, exactly, is “it”? It is the bug. It is the combination of native curiosity and stubbornness that made me play around with the code and take some wild guesses instead of running straight to Google (or choosing to stay within the bounds of the exercise). That might sound like a small thing, but I know it is not. I was determined to make the program do what I wanted it to do, I came up with a few guesses as to how to do that, and I kept trying different things until I succeeded (and then I felt thrilled). As much as I have to learn, I know now that I really am hooked. And that I’ll get there.
2. underscore.js -- new Javascript library of functional programming primitives (map, each, inject, etc.). (via Simon Willison)
3. WWW::Mechanize::Firefox -- Perl module to control Firefox, using the same interface as the WWW::Mechanize web robot module. (via straup on Delicious)
4. Anatomy of SSDs -- teeth-rattlingly technical Linux Magazine article explaining the different types of SSDs (Solid State Disks--imagine a hard drive made of rapid-access Flash memory). Artur Bergman told me that installing an SSD drive in his MacBook Pro gave the greatest performance increase of any computer upgrade he'd performed since he went from no computer to one.

Online Where 2.0: iPhone Sensors for Developers

Online Conference Happening December 3, 2009

It's difficult to make it to every conference and yet there are always new developments, technologies and issues during the off times. So we are trying something new. a series of Online Conferences that will happen through out the year. We just had a successful one on eBooks for our Tools of Change conference and now we are launching one for Where 2.0. On December 3rd please join me, Brian Jepson and 5 other speakers as we discuss and explore iPhone sensors at the first ever Online Where 2.0 on December 3rd.

Brian and I will introduce the conference and then turn the microphone over to:
Alasdair Allan, the author of our upcoming Learning iPhone Programming book - The iPhone, like a lot of high-end smart phones these days, comes with a number of sensors: camera, accelerometer, GPS, proximity, magnetometer (digital compass). The first half of this session will cover the parameters and functions for each sensor. The second half will be a live coding of an accelerometer-based app.

Alasdair will be followed by four app developers who will each focus on the sensors they used in their respective apps. They will cover their tools, their process and their mistakes.
Andreas Alfare of Mobilizy - Wikitude (iTunes link) is an augmented reality app that allows you to layer virtual content over a real world view. Andreas will explain how they take advantage of the compass and camera in their app.

Ian Peters-Campbell of Loopt -Loopt is a well-know and very popular location-based social networking app. Ian will discuss their use of the GPS, how they compensate for location flakiness and Mapkit.

Martin Roth of RJDJ - RJDJ (iTunes link) uses microphone to create a soundscape. Martin will cover their use of the audio input and onboard audio processing.

Leon Palm of MagicSolver - SudokuMagic (iTunes link)is a Sudoku app that uses the camera to import paper sudoku boards. Leon will discuss the assumptions, tools, and trade-offs made in their computer vision app.

Each session will be half prepared content and half Q&A time. We will be using to Google Moderator to field questions. The cost is $149 and it will run from 9:00AM -12:45PM PST. All attendees will get 25% off for Where 2.0 2010.

Google's Ed Parsons wonders if the Online Where 2.0 might be the future of conferences. As he says "If you can’t bring the people to a conference, bring the conference to the people…" We're trying something new. Let us know what you think.

Google Shrinks Another Market With Free Turn-By-Turn Navigation

Google has announced a free turn-by-turn navigation system for Android 2.0 phones such as the Droid. Google Maps Navigation is only available in the US right now. Google's release of a navigation is huge, but not unexpected blow to Tomtom (owner of former US mapping data partner Tele Atlas (Radar post)), Nokia (owner of mapping data provider NAVTEQ), Garmin and other personal navigation devices (PNDs). That it is free will fundamentally change the industry (and sell a lot of Android 2.0 phones in the process). Assuming that Google Maps Navigation makes it onto the iPhone and Blackberry platforms it will become a race to the bottom for navigation apps in their respective app stores.

Google Maps Navigation has many impressive features aside from being free. As snipped from the main page:

• Search in plain English (watch video). No need to know the address. You can type a business name or even a kind of a business, just like you would on Google.
• Search by voice (watch video). Speak your destination instead of typing (English only): "Navigate to the de Young Museum in San Francisco".
• Traffic view (watch video). An on-screen indicator glows green, yellow, or red based on the current traffic conditions along your route. A single touch toggles a traffic view which shows the traffic ahead of you.
• Search along route (watch video). Search for any kind of business along your route, or turn on popular layers such as gas stations, restaurants, or parking.
• Satellite view (watch video). View your route overlaid on 3D satellite views with Google's high-resolution aerial imagery.
• Street View (watch video). Visualize turns overlaid on Google's Street View imagery. Navigation automatically switches to Street View as you approach your destination.
• Car dock mode (watch video). For certain devices, placing your phone in a car dock activates a special mode that makes it easy to use your device at arm's length.

The satellite view looks very sexy in this screenshot. Another advantage to this app is that Google is also making use of its business listings and (presumably) its web crawl data. In the video above MIchael is able to get directions to "the museum with the King Tut exhibit".

The use of streetview to show what turns will look like and how to find your final destination is also a real advantage. The app will sometimes know which side of the street your destination is.

This comes shortly after Google announced that it was going to be using its own mapping data in the US. This data has been derived from its own streetview trucks, satellite imagery and, increasingly, its users. Google now owns or has created almost every layer of its geostack in the US (it uses third-party satellite imagery). It's expected that they will roll out their own data across the globe. The question is hat will they do with this data? Will they continue to make it available only by their own services or will they actually release the data publicly for commercial and/or non-commercial use? Regardless of Google's ultimate decision it just became a tough day for all navigation companies out there.

Safari Books Online 6.0: A Cloud Library as an alternate model for ebooks

There has been a lot of attention paid to ebooks lately, and for good reason. Electronic books are portable, searchable, and more affordable than print books. The web has accustomed readers to having the latest information at their fingertips; we all ask why books should be any less available "on demand."

Amazon’s Kindle has received the most mainstream attention (with new entries like Barnes & Noble's Nook making dedicated ebook readers into the latest competitive horse-race), but ebooks are taking off even faster on the iPhone and other smart phones. Ebooks are one of the most popular classes of iPhone application. Recent releases of O'Reilly ebooks as iPhone applications have even outsold the same books in print. Direct sales of the ebook bundles we offer from oreilly.com (PDF, epub, or mobi files) also exceed our direct sales of print books from the site.

Yet our most popular ebook offering by far is often not even thought of as an ebook. Safari Books Online is an online book and video subscription service, launched in partnership with the Pearson Technology Group in 2001. It contains more than 10,000 technical and business books and videos from more than 40 publishers. It has more than 15 million users (including the number of concurrent seats available through libraries and universities); it is now the second largest reseller of O’Reilly books, exceeded only by Amazon.com, and its revenue dwarfs our sales of downloadable ebooks. It's also the most affordable of our ebook offerings for those who are regular consumers of technical content. The average Safari Books Online subscriber uses at least seven books a month, and many use dozens (or even more), yet the monthly price (depending on the subscription plan) ranges from little more than the price of a single downloadable ebook to no greater than that of two or three.

Here’s the rub: most people thinking about ebooks are focused on creating an electronic recreation of print books, complete with downloadable files and devices that look and feel like books. This is a bit like pointing a camera at a stage play and concluding that was the essence of filmmaking!

At O’Reilly, we’ve tried to focus not on the form of the book but on the job that it does for our customers. It teaches, it informs, it entertains. How might electronic publishing help us to advance those aims? How might we create a more effective tool that would help our customers get their job done?

It was by asking ourselves those questions that we realized the advantages of an online library available by subscription. One of the best things about online technical books is the ability to search the full text of a book. How much better would it be to be able to search across thousands of books? Safari Books Online was our answer.

And it just got better. Safari Books Online 6.0, released yesterday, brings a new level of ease of use. It’s a complete, bottom-to-top revamping of the original service. The old UI was, to say the least, getting long in the tooth.

The new UI is slicker and faster, with the kind of drag-and-drop goodness that people expect from a modern web application. In addition, we’ve added some long-requested features, including:

Improved Interactivity -- With 6.0 you can make inline notes, in the actual text you are reading. You can dog-ear or bookmark specific pages. You can highlight text and associate it with notes. When you are done you can print those pages with both your highlights and notes on them. You can scroll non-stop through the pages of a book without any page refresh, or scan a block of pages in thumbnail view to spot the page you are looking for.

Personalized Folders - Rather than having thousands of books and videos organized by us in a single technology topic taxonomy, you can now put together your own organization, grouping books in the categories most useful to you. You can restrict searches to only the books you’ve chosen, and can search within the results of a saved search.

Collaboration - Even better, if you’re a corporate subscriber, you can share your categorization with other members of your company or workgroup. Not only can team members share folders, they can share book reviews, notes and highlights.

Smart Folders - New books, videos and articles are being added to Safari Books Online all the time. Searches saved as "smart folders" make it easy to keep up with the latest content in your area of interest. We have also improved our search user interface to allow you to search inside the book or in other books without leaving the page you are reading. Switch pages only when you find what you want.

As you can see, many of these features take advantage of the online medium in ways that aren’t possible with standalone ebooks. To be sure, there are times you want your own offline copy, and in Safari Books Online, you can indeed download books or chapters for offline use. But especially given the rise of the smartphone as an access device, the times when we are truly "offline" are becoming few and far between. The vision with which we started Safari, that of always-on access to a library of technical content, not just to individual ebooks, is now within reach. Safari Books Online can be used on a desktop or laptop computer or in the browser on a mobile phone. Everything is always in sync because your library is in the cloud.

An ebook cloud works the same way the web itself works. It provides ubiquitous access and shared experience.

Lessons Learned from the development of Safari Books Online

As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we’ve learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O’Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in a Nutshell for Hypercard, back in 1987!) With that, a few reflections on lessons learned:

(continue reading)

iPhone Killers, Blackberries and Chicken Parts

There is an unfortunate tendency to confuse delivering a bunch of 'chicken parts' with producing an actual living, breathing chicken.

MG Siegler, over at TechCrunch, has written an excellent article that shines a light on the cycle from hype to disappointment that goes with being dubbed an 'iPhone Killer.'

BlackBerry Storm, Palm Pre, the G2, and now Droid have all been touted as contenders to the mobile computing crown, yet the iPhone continues to kick butt.

No less, Apple has levered its market leadership position with iPhone (and the iPod Touch) to create a halo effect on the rest of its business, generating bottom line results that are industry-defining (see analysis of Apple's Q4 results HERE).

Meanwhile, conventional wisdom, shaped by the history of Apple vs Microsoft during the PC Wars, tells us that Android is 'destined' to be bigger than the iPhone worldwide.

And to be clear, would-be iPhone slayers are indeed establishing strategic positions that have the potential to become compelling and differentiated within the mobile market. Examples include:

• Android: We are more open than Apple;


• RIM: We are more enterprise-ready;


• Palm Pre: We are more web-native;


• Android, RIM, Nokia, et al: We are a heterogeneous device platform.

(continue reading)

Twitter Users Most Followed by the Web 2.0 Summit Crowd

I took the set of users^† who posted tweets containing the hashtag #w2s and determined who those users followed. Unlike the list of the most followed users in all of Twitter, the list isn't dominated by celebrities. (A few coders landed in the top 50.) Regular Radar readers will be familiar with many of the users listed below: over 20 of the top 50 are based in the SF Bay Area. Of the over 700 users I identified, a third follow Tim:

(†) Data for this post was pulled on 10/27/2009. Using the Twitter search API, I was able to identify 1,500 relevant tweets and over 700 unique users responsible for those tweets. Given that I likely omitted earlier tweets, the results are at best an approximation of the true top 50 list.

Four short links: 28 October 2009

Great Mail Feature, Speed Talks, Virtualisation History, Science Literacy

1. GMail Labs: Got The Wrong Bob? -- When's the last time you got an email from a stranger asking, "Are you sure you meant to send this to me?" and promptly realized that you didn't? Looks at the clusters of CCs you send and, if you normally send to Bob X but are trying to send it to Bob Y, asks you "did you mean Bob X?". This might be the best thing to happen to email since webmail and full-text search--it's ridiculous how little innovation is happening in email given how widely and heavily it is used.
2. Speedgeeks LA at Shopzilla -- eight talks about making websites faster. Latency Improvements for PicasaWeb - Gavin Doughtie (Google) - Great tips from a web guru about what makes PicasaWeb fast. Watch for when the slides to more talks become available.
3. 10 Years of Virtual Machine Performance Semi-Demystified -- fascinating history of virtualisation from someone who worked for VMware. Since 2005, VMware and Xen have gradually reduced the performance overheads of virtualization, aided by the Moore’s law doubling in transistor count, which inexorably shrinks overheads over time. AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI - 2007) and Intel’s Extended Page Tables (EPT - 2009) substantially improved performance for a class of recalcitrant workloads by offloading the mapping of machine-level pages to Guest OS “physical” memory pages, from software to silicon. In the case of operations that stress the MMU—like an Apache compile with lots of short lived processes and intensive memory access—performance doubled with RVI/EPT. (Xen showed similar challenges prior to RVI/EPT on compilation benchmarks.)
4. Pew Research Science Quiz -- To test your knowledge of scientific concepts and recent scientific findings and events, we invite you to take this 12-question science knowledge quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with the 1,005 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions.

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