Blogs

Apple iTunes gifts users with a privacy hole

The Apple iTunes gift function comes with a privacy issue: whoever is making the gift can see if the recipient already owns a song, video or app. The mechanism illustrates why privacy needs to be baked into electronic commerce from the beginning.

The future of search: What it is and what we hope to do

Search seemed to be the most mature part of the Internet, but factors like social media and realtime updates are now shaping search in unexpected ways. This new section -- a collaboration between Radar and Bing -- will explore what lies ahead in the search world.

Four short links: 18 February 2011

DSPL: DataSet Publishing Language (Google Code) -- a representation language for the data and metadata of datasets. Datasets described in this format can be processed by Google and visualized in the Google Public Data Explorer. XML metadata on CSV, geo-enabled, with linkable data. (via Michal Migurski on Delicious) Why is Evidence So Hard for Politicians -- Ben Goldacre nails...

An era in which to curate skills: report from Tools of Change conference

Three days of intensive discussion about the current state of publishing wrapped up last night in New York City. Research and sales, authoring and curation, are all still important skills.

An era in which to curate skills: report from Tools of Change conference

Three days of intensive discussion about the current state of publishing wrapped up last night in New York City. Research and sales, authoring and curation, are all still important skills.

Broadband availability and speed visualized in new government map

The new National Broadband Map is one of the largest implementations of open source and open data in government to date.

Margaret Atwood on solar flares and author needs

At TOC 2011, Margaret Atwood reminded publishers that as they blithely move into digital they'd be wise to remember authors. Plus: Why you might want to invest in a lead-lined safe.

ePayments Week: Does Apple deserve a bigger bite?

Apple's plan to charge publishers 30% of in-app subscriptions was undercut by Google's 10% One Pass program the next day. But is Apple's service worth a premium? Plus: Giant companies mull a mobile payment standard and Bling Nation shifts its website to Facebook.

"We need tools that can help people have their ideas faster"

Ph.D. student Aditi Muralidharan aims to make life easier for researchers and scientists with WordSeer, a text analysis tool that examines and visualizes language use patterns.

Developer Week in Review

Tired of everyone making "Terminator" or "Matrix" references to Watson's domination of its pitiful human rivals? Well, we go old school with our media references, as we look at Nokia's fickleness, new toys for geeks, and Google's campaign for pretty data.

The tricky mix of payment, identity and trust

Report excerpt: Online payment providers need to be sure you are who you say you are, but that's just the beginning. Is it possible to lead an active social life online and still have control over your online identity?

2010 State of the Computer Book Market, Post 3 - The Publishers

In this third installment, (see Post 1 and Post 2; Post 4 & 5 to come soon), we will look at how publishers fared in 2010, as compared to 2009. The chart below shows our dashboard view of the large publishers' results for 2010. The most notable piece of information is that Wiley continues to hold the leading spot as the largest publisher (with 32% market share of units sold), while Pearson and O'Reilly both lost 1%, which is picked up by Cengage and McGraw Hill. (We'll look at revenue share later in the analysis.) 2009 Pub Share 2010 Pub Share You may not recognize the names of all the top publishers, because they are actually conglomerates of many smaller publishing imprints that they've acquired, created or distributed over the years. The imprints are the familiar consumer-facing brands. For instance, when you purchase a book from Peachpit or Sams, you typically see Peachpit or Sams on the spine, not Pearson, even though Pearson owns both companies. However, all the imprints that make up O'Reilly's "publisher view" are part of a distribution partnership and are not owned by O'Reilly.

Four short links: 17 February 2011

The True Cost of Publishing on the Kindle -- an article, apparently by a horrified negotiator with Amazon, revealing that magazine and newspaper publishers pay the WhisperNet delivery costs of their editions. That's not Amazon overhead, it comes out of the publisher's royalty slice. (via Hacker News) Fonts in Use -- examples of sweet typography and the fonts that...

Abbreviating Lightroom

Lightroom by its nature helps us be more efficient when working with our images. There are numerous features to speed us along the way when cataloging and processing. Presets, templates, keyword suggestions and so on, cut little bits of time off the tasks at hand. This makes our imaging life a little easier. However, let's not forget that Lightroom doesn't exist in an Operating System vacuum. There are many applications we can leverage to make Lightroom that much more efficient and powerful. We already know this. After all, we can round trip more complicated editing tasks to Photoshop. Many excellent plugins can be installed to fine tune our editing. So let's take a look at another way to enhance our Lightroom efficiency - text replacement utilities.

Google Public Data Explorer goes public

Making data visualizations just got a bit easier as Google has added Public Data Explorer to its suite of free data tools.

PC World review of OST, and my response

For this blog, I'd like to share with you a recent PC World review of OST by Sharon Machlis, who completed Inroduction to PHP, Perl Programming 1: Introduction to Perl, and PHP/SQL 1: Introduction to Database Programming in 2010 and early 2011. Here is what she has to say, and my response to her:

Book^2 Camp opens the lines of communication

Book^2 Camp attendees were impressed with the open-forum setting that brought together people from all areas of publishing — authors, publishers, distributors, programmers, and many others.

Health 2.0 / MAKE Developer Challenge happening this weekend in Boston

The Health 2.0 / MAKE Developer Challenge is happening this weekend, Feb 19th, in Boston. If you haven't signed up already, register now, because it's filling up fast.

Mind-blowing, world-changing technology by the numbers

This is a golden age of technology. Almost anyone with modest technology such as an internet connection or a mobile phone can have an impact on the world. This video is just a small slice of the staggering numbers and impact of technology that we witness today.

Want to succeed in online content? Get small, be open, go free

Formation Media CEO Sam Jones discusses his recipe for online content success: It has to be free, it has to be widely available, and publishers must operate at a web-appropriate scale.

Four short links: 16 February 2011

Interactive Treemap for the Budget (NY Times) -- why don't government departments produce and release these automatically? (via Flowing Data) Hold Conversations Not Meetings (HBR) -- that sentence perfectly captures the heart of Foo Camp. (via Hacker News) Kiwi Foo 2011 Book Recommendations -- we held a "which books are you reading, or would recommend?" session and this is...

Accessibility and HTML5 highlight TOC day 1

TOC recap: Publishers were very interested in the HTML5 workshop, and the publishing standards took a broad stroke look at the changing scene, including accessibility issues.

Indexing the social signal

Search engines used to leisurely index static results, but the rise of social media and real-time updates has changed the game. In this interview, Altimeter Group founder Charlene Li looks at how search will have to adapt to this new environment.

Why the Droid line caught on

Preston Gralla, author of "Droid 2: The Missing Manual" and "Droid X: The Missing Manual," discusses the disconnect between consumer concerns (does it work?) and tech world worries (is Android too fragmented?).

Four short links: 15 February 2011

White House Will Propose New Digital Copyright Laws (CNet) -- If the Internet were truly empowering citizenry and bringing us this new dawn of digital democracy, the people who run it would be able to stop the oppressive grind of the pro-copyright machinery. There's no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based...

Four short links: 15 February 2011

White House Will Propose New Digital Copyright Laws (CNet) -- If the Internet were truly empowering citizenry and bringing us this new dawn of digital democracy, the people who run it would be able to stop the oppressive grind of the pro-copyright machinery. There's no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based...

Four short links: 15 February 2011

White House Will Propose New Digital Copyright Laws (CNet) -- If the Internet were truly empowering citizenry and bringing us this new dawn of digital democracy, the people who run it would be able to stop the oppressive grind of the pro-copyright machinery. There's no detail about what the proposed law would include, except that it will be based...

Don't forget the readers

There are all sorts of statistics and tech reviews related to digital publishing, but what do readers think? Bethanne Patrick, book critic and owner of Book Maven Media, brings us up to speed on how consumers are responding to the digital shift.

Pre-TOC Book2Camp Experience

Highlights of the Book2Camp and Margaret Atwood

Trend to watch: Formal relationships between governments and hackers

Over the next year, cyber security expert Jeffrey Carr expects to see governments enlist civilians in organized cyber militias — and some countries will do this in plan and public view.

2010 State of the Computer Book Market, Post 2 - The Categories

In this second installment (the first post can be found here), we look at computer book sales in specific technology categories. Remember that we've organized the data into six "Category Families"—Systems and Programming, Web Design and Development, Business Applications, Digital Media Applications, Consumer Operating Systems and Devices, and Computer Topics. Within each of these Families are category group, super-category, category, and atomic category, in a five-level hierarchy. For example, Systems and Programming includes the category groups programming languages, databases, software engineering, general programming, security, and so on. In the rest of this post, we will contrast final quarter of 2010 with 2009 as well as the whole year of 2009 with 2010. As a refresher, here is a new treemap of the Category Families, with their sub-areas for the final quarters of 2010 compared to 2009. This treemap shows a mix of red, green, and black, which basically reflects the fluctuating market. There is very little bright green (which represents fast growth). But again, remember that this is comparing the last quarter of 2010 with the last quarter of 2009. The two biggest and brightest green areas are Android Programming and Android Consumer both of which grew from tiny specks of boxes in 2008 to fairly sizeable areas in 2010.

Four short links: 14 February 2011

Stephen Elop is a Flight Risk (Silicon Beat) -- a foresight-filled 2008 article that doesn't make Nokia's new CEO look good. A reminder to boards and CEOs that option vesting schedules matter. (via Hacker News) CHDK -- Canon Hack Development Kit gives point-and-shoot Canon digital camera new features like RAW images, motion detection, a USB remote, full control over...

The Watering Hole - Foursquare and Twenty Years Ago

I've been battling out mayorship of the building I work at with a co-worker for weeks now. Do you think I can get the UN involved before it escalates to bloodshed?

Go-To-Meeting Government

DealBook in the New York Times offers a portrait of Gary Gensler who is chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. I was inspired by Gensler's story. He moved from Wall Street to Washington to go into public service while raising three girls as a single father. His quest to "overhaul the murky $600 trillion derivatives market" is meeting with...

The Locker Project: data for the people

Three data efforts -- the open source Locker Project, the TeleHash protocol, and commercial support from Singly -- look to help people get more value from their personal data.

Publishing News: Week in Review

In this week's edition of Publishing News: The American Chemical Society's slick mobile app gets recognized, Bloomsbury ditched its territory structure, and HP took aim at Apple with its TouchPad tablet and publisher-friendly subscription policies.

Parsing open source at the State Department

Public officials, technologists and citizens will discuss open source's role in government and society at the Tech@State conference, being held today in Washington, D.C.

Four short links: 11 February 2012

Phantom of the Flopera (YouTube) -- Bach's Tocata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) as performed by floppy drives. Creative intimacy with one's tools is a sign of mastery. (via Andy Baio) Save Entire BBC Archive (Ben Goldacre) -- I pointed earlier to the questionable BBC closure of scores of websites in the name of cost-cutting. It's a...

2010 State of the Computer Book Market, Post 1 - Overall Market

As you can see, the computer market is down about 4% from last year. It should be noted that the computer book market makes up only about 1% of total unit sales in bookstores and online retailers. If you would like to see the performance of the major categories, this table shows percentage growth. I find it interesting that the Humor category is one of the largest-growing in an otherwise depressed market. The other growth area is Children's Non-Fiction Education/Reference -- and I certainly wonder why this category in particular is experiencing such strong growth.

Let the tablet wars begin

HP is squaring up against Apple with its new TouchPad tablet and new subscription terms with Time Inc.

ePayments Week: How to steal coffee from your friends

The stakes may be low, but the weaknesses in Starbucks' mobile app highlight the trade-offs between security and convenience. Also, Visa buys a virtual goods platform and Nokia won't go quietly.

3 mobile payment products hint at the future

Report excerpt: Like flying cars and helpful robots, payment through the phone has been an oft-promised / never-delivered innovation. But early trials suggest mobile payment may finally be at hand.

What investors are looking for in publishing companies

Ryan McNally, co-founder of Catalyst Investors, discusses the opportunities for publishing startups and investors (here's a tip: you're in good shape if tablets and multimedia are priorities).

Big Data: An opportunity in search of a metaphor

Big data is a massive opportunity, but the language used to describe it ("goldrush," "data deluge, "firehose," etc.) reveals we're still searching for its identity.

Four short links: 10 February 2011

Instapaper's API -- Marco Arment wanted to prevent people building their own front-ends using the API and thus removing his (advertising) revenue source. He could offer a cripped API, but people scrape to work around that. He could tithe the apps people build on top of his API, but that's hard work to set up and run. His solution:...

Bloomsbury eyes worldwide rights

Attorney and literary agent Dana Newman says Bloomsbury's move to worldwide rights is just the beginning.

Developer Week in Review

The way things are going, next year's Google I/O will sell out before it opens for registration and Oracle will have managed to alienate every open source developer alive.

The impact of IT decisions on organizational culture

While I believe we recognize the limiting qualities of IT decisions, I'd suggest we've insufficiently studied the degree to which those decisions in aggregate can have a large influence on organizational culture.

Four short links: 9 February 2011

isotope -- dazzling Javascript library. Designs, Lessons, and Advice from Building Large Distributed Systems (Slideshare) -- in the words of Matt Webb, through whom I found it, There's a lovely collection of numbers from Jeff Dean at Google, about how long common computer processor and network operations take. [...] What makes this more human is this comparison, which reveals...

"Copy, paste, map"

IssueMap.org, a new project from the FCC and FortiusOne, aims to convert open data into knowledge and insight.