Leaders from across the big data world will converge in Santa Clara,
California this week for the Strata Conference. While
the event is sold out, you can stay in the loop with the live
stream and the Online Access
pass. We'll also post video interviews throughout the week on the
O'Reilly YouTube
channel
As the Egyptian government throttles information flow and citizens fight to maintain access to communications, we are seeing the contours of a struggle that will shape political and policy changes.
As HTML5 matures, the overlap between the new standard and Flash becomes a point of examination (or contention, depending on your perspective). In this interview, Adobe technical evangelist and Web 2.0 Expo speaker Duane Nickull says the real issue isn't which option is better, but rather how developers are best served.
The Troubled History of Google.org (NY Times) -- it's hard to measure "good", which is one reason it's difficult to know who's doing good in philanthropy. Couple that with a product-first measurement mindset, rather than customer-first, and it's no wonder Google.org struggled. The reported management flapping is gravy. (via Tim O'Reilly on Twitter)
Andrew Mason at Startup School -- So the Internet came along, and the Internet should solve all the problems of organizing people and changing collective action. But the problem is, all we've done is we've taken the old world tactics that we used offline and ported online. We haven't really changed the way we think about things. So, for example, here is a protest against the Iraq war that people held in Second Life. [laughter] I call these tactics the tactics of inconveniencing yourself, because all these things, signing a petition or going to a protest, they're all like mini versions of lighting yourself on fire. [laughter] They're saying, I will sacrifice a small part of my life to show you how much I care, and that just feels so futile and not very exciting to get to be part of. And the weird thing is if the tactic you're using is inconveniencing yourself, all the Internet does is make it easier to sign petitions, so by making it easier to inconvenience yourself, you're making your effort more and more meaningless, right. So, if it only takes one click to write a letter to your congressman, then it takes an order of magnitude more letters for them to actually care. Pay attention, would-be government influencers.
Why is Medicine Often Not Evidence-Based (Ben Goldacre) -- If we assume, fairly generously, that you'll be 80% successful at each step in this chain - which really is pretty generous - then with 7 steps, you'll only manage to follow the evidence in practice 21% of the time (0.8^7=0.21). Healthcare needs interaction designers, not just programmers.
"Best iPad Apps" author Pete Meyers examines the iPad's impact on app development, entertainment, and content creation. Plus: He reveals three app rating patterns — C-spread, L-spread and The Claw — and what each means.
BBC Web Cuts Show Wider Disconnect (The Guardian) -- I forget that most people still think of the web as a secondary add-on to the traditional way of doing things rather than as the new way. Interesting article which brings home the point in the context of the BBC, but you can tell the same story in almost any business.
40p Off a Latte (Chris Heathcote) -- One of the bits I enjoyed the most was unpacking the old ubiquitous computing cliche of your phone vibrating with a coupon off a latte when walking past a Starbucks. This whole presentation is brilliant. I'm still zinging off how data can displace actions in time and space: what you buy today on Amazon will trigger a recommendation later for someone else.
Long-Form Reporting Finds Commercial Hope in E-Books -- ProPublica and New York Times have launched long-form reporting in Kindle Singles, Amazon's format for 5k-30k word pieces. On Thursday, he told me his job involved asking the question, “How do you monetize the content when it is not news anymore?” Repackaging and updating the paper’s coverage of specific topics is a common answer.
We recently faced the type of big data challenge we expect to become increasingly common: scaling up the performance of a machine learning classifier for a large set of unstructured data. In this post, we explain how a set-oriented approach led to huge performance gains.
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