Blogs

Can Social Media Save Broadcast Television?

So far I've talked about how I actually use Social Media, and next week I fully intend to continue with that. But right now I'm really hyped about how several ideas in my life are converging right now, so I...

Google Buzz re-invents Gmail

Social networks get all the attention, but email remains an important information console for many. That's why the introduction of Google Buzz is so noteworthy. It adds the power of asymmetric following to Gmail's interface.

The Importance of The User Experience (UX) - Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software

The importance of the user experience (UX) is now at the forefront of technology trends and applications. Users not only expect it; they now demand it, and businesses often grapple to achieve better UX for their software. The "UX factor" can certainly make (or break) any software's viability and appeal -- whether it's for a Web, mobile or desktop experience.

Ignite, Syndicated Events, and Social Media Marketing

As we approach Global Ignite Week, a collection of Ignite events around the world during the first week of March, I can't help but think about the future of conferences, one of O'Reilly's major businesses. Here are some of the things we're learning from Ignite. People love the rapid-fire format. Steven Levy once said that Foo Camp is the wiki...

Four short links: 9 February 2010

Track DC -- informative drill-down report from Washington DC government about the different departments. (via Sunlight Labs blog) Errors in Scientific Software -- a 1994 study of scientific software that found inconsistent interfaces (1 in 7 for Fortran, 1 in 37 for C) and poor use of arithmetic such that significant figures declined from 6sf in the data to...

Flickr Photos In Google Street View

Google Maps has added more user photos to its Street View (above). Now the Yahoo-owned Flickr is joining the Google-owned Panoramio and Picasa photo sites as a supplier of alternative street views. GeoBloggers reported it earlier today and also noted that the photos are available in the Panoramio 3D view (below). This is significant for two reasons: 1) Flickr...

When SOEs encourage a responsibility-avoiding fantasy...

From The Economist an article dealing with general fragmentation of technology in financial firms, and the issue of people needing to use ad hoc desktop applications comes up: a manager says 'The big task of management is to manage down the number of spreadsheets'.

The Watering Hole: Grow Up, People...

Given the sophomoric reactions a lot of reviewers have had to the iPad's name, we decided to bring in some experts.

Four Steps to Gov 2.0: A Guide for Agencies

What Does the World Look Like When the Work of Government is Driven by the People? Gov 2.0 has a lot of definitions, but in observing the exciting breadth of projects currently being built, it feels a little like the Blind Men and the Elephant, where everyone defines it based on their first hand experience, but not from a holistic...

Super Bowl in the Digital Age

Technology is playing a critical role in sports, both improving the experience and extending the life of any particular event. Fans can connect with their favorite teams through their online communities; they can play digital games as their favorite players and participate in Fantasy Football leagues with people from around the globe. All of which serve to increase the interest and affinity viewers have for the game, creating ties to players, organizations and the league that fuel multibillion dollar apparel and merchandising industries.

RIA Radio Episode 7: Joshua Davis, Branden Hall [HYPE]

Joshua Davis and Branden Hall joined us to talk about their latest ActionScript Library/Framework/Ideas called HYPE. We were also joined by Liz Fredrick, Kevin Schmidt, Zach Stepek, and Leif Wells. Listen to this week's podcast (m4a or mp3). You...

Staying Competitive in a Tough Job Market - Which O'Reilly books have helped you?

With so many people searching for jobs, it's important to stay up on the newest technologies, or constantly improve in the areas you're already involved in. At O'Reilly, we publish books that help you zoom in on the details of specific programs and languages, so you can stay competitive in your field. Leave a comment with the name of an O'Reilly book that will make you more marketable for a chance to win three ebooks of your choice.

Feedback and analysis: the missing ingredients in local's recipe

There's plenty of enthusiasm for local / hyperlocal projects, but the sweepstakes has yet to be won. So many of these local efforts rely on traditional information delivery through news articles or databases. That material has use, no doubt. Yet few projects take the extra step and put that data into context.

Effects and Animation - Hello! Flex 4

This excerpt is from Chapter 4 (Spark containers, view states, effects, and styling) of Hello! Flex 4, by Peter Armstrong. This excerpt is published with permission. Session 18 - Effects and Animation - Hello! Flex 4 In this workshop...

QOW: iPad; What's your take?

Now that we have already had the Flash on the iPad discussion, let's take a different look in discussing the iPad. (Please don't start the Flash iPad flame war again) Will you buy one and if so why? Would...

Four short links: 8 February 2010

Kindle Development Kit APIs -- Amazon will release a Kindle SDK. These are the API docs. (via obra on Twitter) rePublish -- all-Javascript ebook reader. (via kellan on Twitter) Peer Review: What's it Good For? (Cameron Neylon) -- harsh and honest review of peer review with some important questions for the future of science. But there is perhaps an...

Google Book Settlement Round 2

The US government filed its Statement of Interest regarding the revised Google settlement yesterday with the District Court in New York. While the statement was signed by an attorney from the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department, several agencies including the Copyright Office reportedly contributed to it. As you may recall, the judge has only 2 choices: he can approve...

What is the difference between a Taxonomy and an Ontology? - OWL Knowledge

Q. What is the difference between a Taxonomy and an Ontology? A. Not much.

Three quarters of a million patent applications outstanding! - A golden age of invention!

What a wonderful age we live in! An age where almost a quarter of a million non-obvious ideas without prior art are invented every year.

O'Reilly School Curriculum: It's not always about what new

Working at O'Reilly you can't help but get drawn into lots of discussions about new and emerging technology that may or may not go big time. R, Junos, Tokyo Cabinet, Big Data--our internal email lists are a litany of chatter...

XPath needs virtual axes - Making XPath more XPathy?

XPath is a family of small query languages for XML: they have a simple data model and syntactically were based on directory paths: so to find the attribute id of the parent of a chapter element which has a title...

Mixed Consolidated Workloads and the Sun Oracle Database Machine

This blog takes a quick look at the capabilities in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 that can enable database consolidation to take place on the Sun Oracle Database Machine.

Four short links: 5 February 2010

The Public Domain Manifesto -- eloquent argument in favour of the public domain. (via BoingBoing) Clear Climate Code -- project to write and maintain software for climate science, with an emphasis on clarity and correctness. What a wonderful way for coders who aren't scientists to contribute to open and better science. (via the interesting OKFN blog) Don't Hash Secrets...

The Watering Hole: Shameless Commerce Division

If you've been dying to get Pearl, Ruby, Pye, Phil, Bonita, or any of the other Watering Hole characters on a t-shirt, mug, notecard, or messenger bag, your wait is over. Check out the new Watering Hole store, and wear the strip with pride.

One hundred eighty degrees of freedom: signs of how open platforms are spreading

Visualize open networks--and remember how far we've already come from the days before flat-rate long distance phone calls (much less app stores for cell phones).

The Watering Hole - Forget the Women, Mars Needs Tow Trucks!

Next time, JPL should make sure to get the towing package with their rover insurance.

Apple vs. Adobe vs. Content Creators

Publishers may have gotten ahead of themselves when they rolled out pre-iPad tablet demos. At least one relied on Adobe Air, which the iPad won't support. And the ongoing spat between Apple and Adobe could soon influence publishers' decision making.

Educational RIA StrataLogica Combines Quality Map Content with Useful Interface

Despite formal education’s best efforts I still find geography enjoyable which is probably why I’ve spent way too much playing with Google Earth. Nystrom a Herff Jones company has recently released StrataLogica to harness this and combine it with their...

Four short links: 4 February 2010

Google Ad Preferences -- my defaults look reasonable and tailored to my interest. Creepy but kinda cool: I guess that if I have to have ads, they should be ones I'm not going to hate. (via rabble on Twitter) Android and the Linux Kernel -- the Android kernel is forked from the standard Linux kernel, and a Linux kernel...

An SOE comedy of errors - PortableApps as a guerilla SOE

After yesterday's blog on SOEs (The problem with Standard Operating Environments), a friend told me about 'her' adventures, working at a multinational manufacturing company. She is a technical sales engineer, so her job involves very large drawings, and she is...

Why is Simple Soooo Not Simple?

A simple upgrade is ANYTHING but simple! The upgrade packet had been sitting on my desk for the last couple weeks and I decided it was time to commit. Little did I know what I was committing to! Like many a blind date, where you hold out hope for Mr. Right, but open the door to a guy wearing too tight pants and smelling slightly of dirty socks, I found myself facing a situation frought with mind-numbing discourse and disapointment.

What Facebook's HipHop means for developers and businesses

Facebook claims to have reduced CPU usage by 50 percent with its HipHop for PHP project, and now it's releasing the code as open source. O'Reilly author and PHP expert Kevin Tatroe digs into HipHop's applications beyond Facebook.

PARC Forums Now Streamed Live

If you're not familiar with the PARC Forum, then be glad you happened to read this post. Most people know PARC as the place that famously turned Steve Jobs on to graphical user interfaces in the 1970s. You may not...

How to Compete with Apple, Adobe or Amazon

When a company like Apple launches that sexy new product (iPad), one can be reactive (Amazon) or be caught flat-footed (Adobe). It's easy to look at today's market situation and say who's winning or losing. The more interesting conversation is to determine what someone can do to compete or take advantage of this changed topography.

Four short links: 3 February 2010

Bad Census Data for The Last Decade (Freakonomics blog) -- the "representative sample" of statistics data that the Census Bureau releases has apparently been flawed. It's been used in thousands of studies, and the Census Bureau has refused to correct it. Modern Telephone Fraud -- it's actually an old fraud updated: an insecure digital PBX used to route expensive...

The problem with Standard Operating Environments - Actually, how do you know your SOE is up to scratch and anywhere near optimal for the users?

The technical challenge becomes, how can we have an SOE today that will allows us to adopt an alternative SOE in a couple of years time? In economic terms, there is an opportunity cost in adopting any particular SOE: the cost of not being able to move to an alternative technology in the future. The emphasis on a standards-based procurement and SOE policy seems key in this. But so does a larger vision that factors in the opportunity costs of not being able to take advantage of objective architectural and technical advances (some of which may turn out to be fads too!), and does not just use license fees and help-desk costs as the bottom line.

The Watering Hole - Spawn of the Dead

Sure, getting killed 150 times in 15 minutes is realistic game play...

AIR 2.0 Beta 2 released

Today Adobe announced the release of the AIR 2.0 beta 2 on Adobe Labs, capping off a successful period of production and demo apps in built in beta 1. Some of the new features include enhanced control over printers, support for TLS/SSL sockets, and increased text input handling.

Forget Google, social search is all about mobile

A new research report from social answering service Aardvark finds that social search is more popular with mobile users. It begs the question: will the mix of social search and mobile apps catalyze search's next evolution?

Why It's a Big Deal That the iPad is No Big Deal

Kindle-killer? Maybe. Larger version of the iPhone? No, not really. Revolutionary game-changer? Are you kidding? Well, it's February 2, Groundhog Day, and this morning Cupertino Carl popped his head out of the ground and saw his shadow—which means another six...

Getting Ready for Macworld Expo & Conference 2010

With Macworld Expo & Conference 2010 mere days away, it is about time to stop worrying over what it means that Apple has pulled out of the show; to put aside the discussions about how revolutionary the iPad really is; and, instead, to focus on what will be happening at Moscone Center in San Francisco next week.

Four short links: 2 February 2010

Phones That Touch Us (TEDxBerlin) -- excellent short (<5m) talk about ways that mobile phones can be designed to convey information in new ways. (via RussB on Twitter) Code City -- an integrated environment for software analysis, in which software systems are visualized as interactive, navigable 3D cities. The classes are represented as buildings in the city, while the...

The "Process Approach" Capture Model And Notation - Retrospective: From the 1990s into the 2000s

In the early part of the 1990s there were two basic approaches for building large information systems.

CSDL: Conceptual Schema Definition Language - The nail in the coffin for W3C XML Schemas?

The target of CSDL is modeling the Entity Data Model (an entity-relationship (ER) model.) It shows that a smaller targeted schema language can be much more satisfactory than the unconstrained kitchen-sink approach that claimed the XSD effort.

Rethinking Open Data

In the last year I've been involved in two open data projects, Open New Zealand and data.govt.nz. I believe in learning from experience and I've seen some signs recently that other projects might benefit from my experience, so this post is a recap of what I've learned. It's the byproduct of a summer reflection on my last nine months working...

The iPad is real-life social

The iPad is real-life social in a way that a phone and a laptop just aren't. It will find fans not only in a family setting, but in a creative setting where collaboration and comment is in person

Interview With Elad Elrom

About Elad Elrom Elad Elrom is a technical writer, technical lead, and senior Flash engineer. As a technical writer, Elad wrote books covering Flash technologies. He maintains an active blog and has spoken at several conferences regarding the Flash...

Can open source guide a moon mission?

The Open Luna Foundation has a $500 million plan to build a moon outpost, and it's going to rely on open source to make it happen. Question is: does the distributed nature of open source lend itself to complex, mission-critical ideas? Take a look at key elements of the Open Luna project and share your thoughts.

Photo Gallery Mate Framework, With Photo Caching

I have been developing Adobe Flex-based RIA applications for nearly three years. My prominent need has been for capable RIA photo galleries. I observed over time that most Flex-based example photo galleries resourced photos—either locally or remotely—from photo files stashed...

Four short links: 1 February 2010

Chartdroid -- an open source charting library for Android. China Bugs and Burgles Britain -- The gifts — cameras and memory sticks — have been found to contain electronic Trojan bugs which provide the Chinese with remote access to users’ computers. Beware geeks bearing gifts. Bespin -- sexy HTML5 "code-in-the-cloud" IDE from Mozilla Labs. If the future is truly in...