Blogs

Four short links: 15 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 15, 2012

Namebench (Google Code) -- hunts down the fastest DNS servers for your computer to use. (via Nelson Minar) Primer on Macroeconomics (Jig) -- reading suggestions for introductions to macroeconomics suitable to understand the financial crisis and proposed solutions. (via Tim O'Reilly) Smarter Cameras Plumb Composition -- A new type of smarter camera can take a picture but also assess...

What the data can tell us about dating and other social congregation

By Andy Oram
February 15, 2012

As people go online, they leave a trail of data that could never be captured before.

Why data visualization matters

By Julie Steele
February 15, 2012

Effective data visualizations go beyond aesthetics; they also allow organizations to make quick and correct decisions from massive amounts of information.

Book marketing is broken. Big data can fix it

By Jenn Webb
February 15, 2012

Peter Collingridge, cofounder of Enhanced Editions, says big data can be eye opening for publishers. In this interview, Collingridge talks about the role of real-time data and analytics in publishing and about a new market intelligence service for books.

On Employers, Portfolios, Commitment, and Cake

By Josh Nutzman
February 14, 2012

Commitment is hard, whether it involves choosing a cake for your wedding or choosing which IT candidate to hire. Josh explains why tasting cake is better than reading about it and how OST can help you bring your metaphorical IT cake - your portfolio - to job interviews and show your stuff!

About the Emerging Battles Over Textbooks: Options from Apple to Open Initiatives

By Andy Oram
February 14, 2012

Two dramatically opposed announcements from Apple and the state of California put the textbook publishing industry on notice recently that it could be facing rapid disruption. But open textbooks can't be created and altered as easily as open source software.

A global pulse of big data, applied for good

By Alex Howard
February 14, 2012

The United Nations Global Pulse initiative is an effort to harness the power of big data and analytics to better understanding how the world is changing. The video embedded below explains more about what UN Global Pulse is trying to achieve:

The bond between data and journalism grows stronger

By Alex Howard
February 14, 2012

This interview with Liliana Bounegru, project coordinator of Data Driven Journalism at the European Journalism Centre, offers more insight into why the importance of data journalism continues to grow in the age of big data.

Four short links: 14 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 14, 2012

Why I Hate The STOCK Act (Clay Johnson) -- an attempt to reform insider trading within government, but because Congress exempts itself from substantial penalties then it has little effect where it's needed most. We won't see change on the issues that matter to us (copyright, due process for Internet takedowns, privacy, etc.) while the lawmakers are distracted by...

There's Plan A, and then there's the plan that will become your business

By Mac Slocum
February 13, 2012

Drawing from the Lean Startup and other methods, "Running Lean" helps entrepreneurs transform flawed Plan A ideas into viable companies. "Running Lean" author Ash Maurya explains the basics in this interview.

Apple's iTV and the implications of what Steve said

By Mark Sigal
February 13, 2012

Mark Sigal challenges the conventional wisdom about the rumored "iTV" and offers a much different prediction about an Apple-television marriage.

How to create a visualization

By Pete Warden
February 13, 2012

Creating a visualization requires more than just data and imagery. Pete Warden outlines the process and actions that drove his new Facebook visualization project.

Open innovation works in the public sector, say federal CTOs

By Alex Howard
February 13, 2012

Speaking at a recent forum in Washington, federal CTO Aneesh Chopra said that the open innovation approach that can be seen across industry, from social networking to pharmaceuticals to manufacturing, has proven to be effective in the public sector. CTOs from HHS and the VA offered more case studies in success.

Four short links: 13 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 13, 2012

Rise of the Independents (Bryce Roberts) -- companies that don't take VC money and instead choose to grow organically: indies. +1 for having a word for this. The Performance Golden Rule (Steve Souders) -- 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend. Check out his graphs showing where load times come from for various popular sites....

Joaquín Almunia gets it: "Owners of ... standard essential patents are conferred a power .. that they cannot be allowed to misuse. "

By Rick Jelliffe
February 12, 2012

I think Almunia's speech does not go far enough: it still sees standardization as an escape hatch that a company that finds itself in a market dominating position can use when challenged.

Preview of HIMSS 2012

By Brian Ahier
February 10, 2012

Brian Ahier says we're at a pivotal moment for healthcare and health IT. Many of the core issues that will shape these domains in the years to come will be discussed at the upcoming Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference.

Four short links: 10 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 10, 2012

Monki Gras 2012 (Stephen Walli) -- nice roundup of highlights of the Redmonk conference in London. Sample talk: Why Most UX is Shite. Frozen -- flow-based programming, intent is to build the toolbox of small pieces loosely joined by ZeroMQ for big data programming. Arctext.js -- jQuery plugin for curving text on web pages. (via Javascript Weekly) Hi, My...

Jury to Eolas: Nobody owns the interactive web

By Alex Howard
February 10, 2012

A Texas jury has struck down a company's claim to ownership of the interactive web. Eolas, which has been suing technology companies for more than a decade, now faces the prospect of losing the patents.

Commerce Weekly: Facebook finds a mobile commerce partner

By David Sims
February 10, 2012

Bango will run Facebook's mCommerce platform, Google Wallet hacked, and PayPal pilots shopping walls. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

Visualization of the Week: Chasing storm chasers

By Audrey Watters
February 10, 2012

This week's visualization comes from Tim Dye, who has mapped the routes of storm chasers alongside the weather patterns they pursue.

Developer Week in Review: A pause to consider patents

By James Turner
February 10, 2012

We take a look at two major events that rocked the technology intellectual property wars, centered on a courtroom in Texas and a standards body a continent away.

Publishing News: B&N boycott becomes booksellers' cold war against Amazon

By Jenn Webb
February 10, 2012

Booksellers continue to pile on in response to Amazon Publishing's deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Also, publishers have a card to play against Amazon and cognitive friction makes for a better reading experience.

O'Reilly Radar Show 2/10/12: The 5 trends that will shape the data world

By Mac Slocum
February 10, 2012

Strata chair Edd Dumbill discusses the five trends that will drive the near-term future of data science and big data. Also, Kevin Kelly offers a long-view perspective on the freemium model and digital rights management.

O'Reilly ebooks now optimized for Kindle Fire

By Adam Witwer
February 9, 2012

If your O'Reilly ebook bundle includes a Mobi file, you can now download a KF8-compliant file. These updated files take advantage of the Kindle Fire's functionality.

Strata Week: Your personal automated data scientist

By Audrey Watters
February 9, 2012

Wolfram|Alpha launches a pro version of its computational knowledge engine, guidelines emerge for protecting the data of people in crisis, and researchers cast doubt on dating sites' matchmaking algorithms.

It's time for a unified ebook format and the end of DRM

By Joe Wikert
February 9, 2012

The music industry has shown that you need to offer consumers a universal format and content without rights restrictions. So when will publishers pay attention?

Now available: Best of TOC 2012 anthology

By Mac Slocum
February 9, 2012

"Best of TOC 2012" explores the ideas that are shaping the content world, including: the adaptation of publishing, digital's legal issues, new tech and tools, and thoughts from the edge of publishing.

Four short links: 9 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 9, 2012

Weave -- web-based visualization platform designed to enable visualization of any available data by anyone for any purpose. GPL and MPL-licensed. (via Flowing Data) Flotr2 -- MIT-licensed Javascript library for drawing HTML5 charts and graphs. It is a branch of flotr which removes the Prototype dependency and includes many improvements. (via Javascript Weekly) What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About...

Tip for B&N: Don't just follow Amazon

By Joe Wikert
February 8, 2012

Amazon is the clear market leader, but that doesn't mean everyone else should throw in the towel. In this podcast, Joseph Esposito, president of Portable CEO consulting, discusses the current publishing market and how B&N can best compete.

The NoSQL movement

By Mike Loukides
February 8, 2012

A relational database is no longer the default choice. Mike Loukides charts the rise of the NoSQL movement and explains how to choose the right database for your application.

Four short links: 8 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 8, 2012

Mavuno -- an open source, modular, scalable text mining toolkit built upon Hadoop. (Apache-licensed) Cow Clicker -- Wired profile of Cowclicker creator Ian Bogost. I was impressed by Cow Clickers [...] have turned what was intended to be a vapid experience into a source of camaraderie and creativity. People create communities around social activities, even when they are antisocial....

Four short links: 7 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 7, 2012

Integrated Content Editor (GitHub) -- a track changes implementation, built in javascript, for anything that is contenteditable on the web, written by the NY Times team and open sourced. Data Tables -- featureful jQuery plugin for tables of data. (via Javascript Weekly) Creating a Developer Community (Slideshare) -- treat the problem like a channel conversion funnel: turn visitors into...

Unstructured data is worth the effort when you've got the right tools

By Suzanne Axtell
February 7, 2012

Alyona Medelyan and Anna Divoli are inventing tools to help companies contend with vast quantities of fuzzy data. They discuss their work and what lies ahead for big data in this interview.

Small Massachusetts HIT conference returns to big issues in health care

By Andy Oram
February 6, 2012

The real reason hospitals haven't joined health information exchanges, and other reports from the Massachusetts Heath Data Consortium's annual conference.

Business-government ties complicate cyber security

By Howard Wen
February 6, 2012

Is an attack on a U.S. business' network an attack on the U.S. itself? "Inside Cyber Warfare" author Jeffrey Carr discusses the intermingling of corporate and government interests in this interview.

Four short links: 6 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 6, 2012

Jirafe -- open source e-commerce analytics for Magento platform. iModela -- a $1000 3D milling machine. (via BoingBoing) It's Too Late to Save The Common Web (Robert Scoble) -- paraphrased: "Four years ago, I told you all that Google and Facebook were evil. You did nothing, which is why I must now use Google and Facebook." His list of...

Strata Newsletter: February 2, 2012

By O'Reilly Radar
February 3, 2012

Highlights from the 2/2/12 edition of the Strata newsletter include: Thoughts on the evolution of software usability and why unstructured data is worth the effort.

Visualization of the Week: Mapping Mexico's drug war

By Audrey Watters
February 3, 2012

This week's visualization comes from Diego Valle-Jones, who has created a powerful interactive map of the drug-related homicides in Mexico since 2004.

Publishing News: B&N closes doors on Amazon Publishing

By Jenn Webb
February 3, 2012

Barnes & Noble ramped up its battle with Amazon this week by shutting it out of its stores. Elsewhere, Goodreads broke up with Amazon's data API and Jonathan Franzen declared ebooks will be the downfall of civilization.

Makers and hackers: The Where Conference is looking for you

By Brady Forrest
February 3, 2012

The 2012 Where Conference is looking for makers, hackers, developers and do-it-yourselfers who are working in the geolocation and mapping spaces.

Four short links: 3 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 3, 2012

Page Speed (Google Code) -- an open-source project started at Google to help developers optimize their web pages by applying web performance best practices. Page Speed started as an open-source browser extension, and is now deployed in third-party products such as Webpagetest.org, Show Slow and Google Webmaster Tools. What Commons Do We Wish For? (John Battelle) -- trying to...

Tools of Change for Publishing Newsletter: February 1, 2012

By Joe Wikert
February 2, 2012

Highlights from the 2/1/12 edition of the TOC newsletter include: TOC chairs Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert on what to watch for at the upcoming Tools of Change for Publishing Conference.

Developer Week in Review: Brother, can you spare $100 billion?

By James Turner
February 2, 2012

If you haven't heard that Facebook is going public, I hope you live under a comfortable rock. While you wait for the IPO, brush up your Lua if you run a wiki, just don't leave any empty files lying around.

Strata Week: The Megaupload seizure and user data

By Audrey Watters
February 2, 2012

In this week's data news, Megaupload users face data deletion, Bloomberg opens its market data interface and Pentaho changes its licensing for Kettle.

Commerce Weekly: The return of iPhone NFC rumors

By David Sims
February 2, 2012

When will Apple bring mobile commerce to the iOS masses? Also, PayPal studies consumer behavior at the cash register and Square collects for candidates. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)

What is Apache Hadoop?

By Edd Dumbill
February 2, 2012

Apache Hadoop has been the driving force behind the growth of the big data industry. But what does it do, and why do you need all its strangely-named friends, such as Oozie, Zookeeper and Flume?

Four short links: 2 February 2012

By Nat Torkington
February 2, 2012

Beautiful Buttons for Bootstrap -- cute little button creator, with sliders for hue, saturation, and "puffiness". CMU iPad Course -- iTunes U has the video lectures for a CMU intro to iPad programming. Inspiring Matter -- the conference aims to bring together designers, scientists, artists and humanities people working with materials research and innovation to talk about how they...

Why Hadoop caught on

By Audrey Watters
February 1, 2012

Doug Cutting discusses Hadoop's current and near-term role, and the factors that made it a central part of data processing.

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