Featured Post: Twitter is missing a fundamental law of innovation: you can't tell people where (or how) to innovate, and where not to. Innovation just doesn't work that way.
In the latest Publishing News: Merchandising will not save publishing, but Margaret Atwood made T-shirts anyway; Facebook's comment plugin reduces comments, but maybe for the better; piracy isn't just about price; and Lonely Planet moved beyond the book..
In this interview, Facebook global brand experience manager Paul Adams says social design is to web developers as electricity is to appliance engineers. It's an essential element that must be baked in rather than bolted on.
Titles and Promotions (Ben Horowitz) -- Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible. The hierarchy should have Presidents, Chiefs, and Senior Executive Vice Presidents. If it makes people feel better, let them feel better. Titles cost nothing. Better yet, when competing for new employees with other companies, using Andreessen’s method you can always outbid the competition in at least one dimension.
Android's Linux Copyrights Issue -- Google copied 2.5 megabytes of code from more than 700 Linux kernel header files with a homemade program that drops source code comments and some other elements, and daringly claims (in a notice at the start of each generated file) that the extracted material constitutes "no copyrightable information"
errbit -- open source self-hosted error catcher, an open source alternative to HopToad. (via Glen Barnes)
Drizzle: From What If to What Has (Brian Aker) -- fantastic retrospective of lessons learned in the shipping of Drizzle. We have fixed all the warnings in Drizzle. This is something that isn't sexy work, and the only way it is justified is because cleaning up warnings fixes bugs. If you are starting a new code base let me implore upon on you the necessity of doing this from the beginning. They sweat the dull stuff that matters, not just the shiny sexy featureitis.
Gus Balbontin, director of transformation at Lonely Planet, says the secret to success may lie in throwing tradition to the wind and creating digital content first.
The speakers at the recent Webstock conference in New Zealand gravitated toward many of the same themes. Taken together, these themes create a framework for building the next generation of services, applications and devices.
The Open Data Manual -- a HOWTO for organisations wanting to open up data. This report discusses legal, social and technical aspects of open data. The manual can be used by anyone but is especially designed for those seeking to open up data. It discusses the why, what and how of open data — why to go open, what open is, and the how to ‘open’ data.
MDP -- Modular Toolkit for Data-Processing. Open source Python toolkit embodying a pile of machine learning and signal processing algorithms. (via Joshua Schachter)
Media Piracy in Emerging Economies -- SSRC report. The study finds no systematic links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free. (via BoingBoing)
The Fragility of Free (Ben Brooks) -- The fragility of free is a catchy term that describes what happens when the free money runs out. Or—perhaps more accurately—when the investors/founders/venture capitalists run out of cash, or patience, or both. Because at some point Twitter and all other companies have to make the move from 'charity' to 'business'—or, put another way, they have to make the move from spending tons of money to making slightly more money than they spend. It's at this moment that we begin to see the fragilities of the free system. Things that never had ads, get ads—things that were free, now cost a monthly fee. We have all seen it before with hundreds of services—many of which are no longer around. (via Marco Arment)
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