Diablog

Yet as data centers increasingly become the nerve centers of business and society - even the storehouses of our fleeting cultural memory (that dancing cockatoo on YouTube!) - the demand for bigger and better ones increases: there is a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources. All of which is bringing a new level of attention, and challenges, to a once rather hidden phenomenon. Call it the architecture of search: the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery, humming away 24/7, 365 days a year - often built on, say, a former bean field - that lie behind your Internet queries.

NYTimes.com

"The fat years of the printed word are over," says John Sutherland, the academic and author of several books on the history of publishing. "Even if books get dirt cheap, readers simply don't have the time or motive to invest in them. The old cultivated readership is not as solid as it was. The safe library sale doesn't exist any more. There's been a loss of authority in the serious book."

A former bookseller who is now a freelance literary publicist says: "There are plenty of good books going missing. Books that take five years to write. Publishers used to put them at the front of their catalogues. Nowadays the print runs are tiny for these books, about 2,000. Publishers say they can print more copies, but if they're printing 2,000 of something they're not going to get behind it. Because of publishers' falling profit margins, production values have gone down on some of these books. You're seeing paper that's turning yellow before it gets out of the shop. You've got publishers and literary agents blaming the bookshops and vice versa. You've got people going to literary festivals who'll pay £10 for a ticket to an author event but won't pay £20 for a history book."

Is it the end for quality non-fiction? | Books | The Guardian

The acclaimed 18-minute talks available free on the TED website will now be accessible beyond the English-speaking world, through the TED Open Translation Project (www.ted.com/translation), which launches today, generously sponsored by Nokia.

A year in the making, the project offers video subtitles, time-coded transcripts and the ability for volunteers worldwide to translate any talk into any language. The project launches with 300 translations in 40 languages; more than 200 volunteer translators have already contributed.

Download the Open Translation Project press release as a PDF >>

TED Blog: TED's Open Translation Project brings subtitles in 40 languages to TED.com

The Web by definition changes and updates constantly throughout the day. Because of its ability to operate in real-time, it offers an opportunity for news publishers to publish on changing and evolving stories as they happen. Web addresses (known as URLs -- uniform resource locators such as http://www.google.com) were designed to refer to unique pieces of content, and those URLs were intended to persist over time. Today, in online news, publishers frequently publish several articles on the same topic, sometimes with identical or closely related content, each at their own URL. The result is parallel Web pages that compete against each other in terms of authority, and in terms of placement in links and search results. Consider instead how the authoritativeness of news articles might grow if an evolving story were published under a permanent, single URL as a living, changing, updating entity. We see this practice today in Wikipedia's entries and in the topic pages at NYTimes.com. The result is a single authoritative page with a consistent reference point that gains clout and a following of users over time.

Google: We're good for journalism | Digital Media - CNET News

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has an ambitious plan to reduce the cost of education in California. He intends for the state to develop digital open source textbooks for high school math and science classes. The books will be available for free and will be used at public schools across the state.

Previous efforts to build open source textbooks for California by various independent organizations have largely been unsuccessful. One such attempt was made by an organization called the California Open Source Textbook Project (COSTP) in 2002, which aimed to produce a digital K-12 history textbook under an open license in collaboration with the Wikibooks project. COSTP claimed that it could help California save over $200 million per year. The program never gained traction and failed to produce a complete textbook.

There is already plenty of textbook-ready material available on the Internet in the public domain or under open licenses, but the real challenge is compiling and editing it so that it will meet the state's exacting standards. California is known for having the most demanding textbook evaluation practices in the country, with publishers forced to go to extreme lengths to meet state requirements. The arduous review process is forcing some publishing companies to stop selling books in the state and is also a factor that has contributed significantly to the rising cost of K-12 textbooks in California.

California open source digital textbook plan faces barriers - Ars Technica

The real Twitter revolution may prove to be much more everyday. When I stop for a latte at Peet's Coffee on the way to the interview, the manager tells me that he plans to start sending out tweets to let regular customers know when a table is open. He isn't alone. A Manhattan bakery twitters when warm cookies come out of the oven. "It's those small stories that really inspire us," says Mr. Stone. "Those are the things that transform people's lives."

Williams and Stone: The Twitter Revolution - WSJ.com

Geocities was the most successful of the “build your own website” companies of the mid-90s (there were others, like Angelfire). Before there were blogs, there were Geocities pages, which were sort of like blogs except without the software to manage your content. Geocities pages were easy to build and really difficult to maintain. As a result, Geocities was populated fast — and nearly as quickly became a vast wasteland of abandoned digital real estate. It must have looked good on paper to the bizdev people at Yahoo in 1999, though, because they paid an astonishing $2.87 billion (in bubble-inflated Yahoo stock) for the ramshackle enterprise.

A decade later, Yahoo’s current management — facing tough times and after many rounds of layoffs — has decided to shut Geocities down. I don’t think there are too many people who will cry for this relic of a bygone era.

Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard - Blog Archive - MySpace and Geocities - separated at birth

Mark Penn posts a follow-up to his column below. (4:33 p.m.)

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Paid bloggers fit just about every definition of a microtrend: Their ranks have grown dramatically over the years, blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That's almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click -- whether on their site or someone else's.

America's Newest Profession: Blogging – Mark Penn, WSJ.com - WSJ.com

This report is based on the findings of the Post-Election survey, a daily tracking survey on Americans' use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between November 20 to December 4, 2008, among a sample of 2,254 adults, 18 and older. For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling and other random effects is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. For results based Internet users (n=1,591), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

Pew Internet & American Life Project

Microsoft has announced that it will soon euthanize Encarta, the onetime encyclopedia-of-the-future that has lost much of its luster in the last decade. But the company really didn’t have much choice in the matter: For all intents and purposes, Wikipedia had fatally shivved Encarta some time ago.

And Microsoft admits that. In recent years, “the category of traditional encyclopedias and reference material has changed,” the company said in a statement on the shutdown. “People today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past.” So there’s really only one question left to be answered: Should Encarta be mourned?

Wired Campus: Microsoft's Encarta, Rendered Obsolete by Wikipedia, Will Shut Down - Chronicle.com

Three truths:

1. Google is a middleman made of software. It's a very, very large middleman made of software. Think of what Goliath or the Cyclops or Godzilla would look like if they were made of software. That's Google.
2. The middleman acts in the middleman's interest.
3. 3. The broader the span of the middleman's control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman's power and the lesser the power of the suppliers.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr

This week, President Barack Obama gave the Queen of England an iPod preloaded with 40 tracks from Broadway shows. Did doing so violate the copyright law?

Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the answer might be yes.

Had Obama given the Queen a physical CD, he clearly would have been on solid legal ground thanks to the "first sale" doctrine, which allows people to resell or give away merchandise they've purchased. But, Lohmann writes, "because digital technology is involved here, suddenly it's a legal quagmire

MediaPost Publications IPod: Gift "Fit For A Queen" Might Violate Copyright Law 04/06/2009

At Schibsted, an Oslo-based publisher, online activities, including newspapers, classified advertising sites and other activities, deliver about a quarter of the company’s revenue, and the vast majority of its profit.

The star performer online is VG Nett, a Web site loosely affiliated with Verdens Gang, a tabloid newspaper. VG Nett has a profit margin of more than 30 percent and rivals Google as the most popular Web site in Norway.

While VG Nett, like most other newspaper Web sites, generates the majority of its revenue from advertising, it is starting to raise money from users. That is something that U.S. newspapers are trying to do as well, as it becomes clear that online advertising alone will not cover their costs.

About 150,000 people pay up to 599 kroner, or nearly $90, a year to take part in a weight-loss club run by the site. VG Nett recently started another paying service, live streams of Norwegian soccer matches, at up to 780 kroner a year. And a social network connected with VG Nett charges users for profile upgrades.

In Europe, Possible Survival Lessons for U.S. Papers - NYTimes.com

A team at Edith Cowan University is looking for a way out for multimedia data to be stored in barcodes and retrieved with a mobile phone camera snapshot, allowing software such as ringtones to be “downloaded” from mediums like magazines. They have named it the Mobile Multi-Colour Composite (MMCC) 2D-Barcode, the media reported.

Lead scientist Dr Alfred Tan said, "The MMCC is a colour 2D barcode designed for storing high capacity data on printed media and displays, tailor made for camera mobile phone applications.

"Using the MMCC, the user can retrieve digital content to their camera mobile phone directly from the barcode by capturing an image of the barcode and decoding it on their mobile."

Now, barcodes to store videos- Computing-Personal Tech-Indiatimes - Infotech

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Goodbye Google | stopdesign

On Tuesday, Seattle's oldest newspaper, the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer, will crank out its last printed edition. The P-I, as it's known, has a daily print circulation above 125,000 and nearly a half million Sunday readers. That makes it by far the largest newspaper to date to shut down its newsprint operations and become an Internet-only publication.

The reason is simple: The paper lost US$14 million last year, and print newspaper revenues are almost universally shrinking even more at a rapid rate. The newspaper had already outsourced print operations to its crosstown rival, the Seattle Times.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer abandons print to publish online

Yochai Benkler: The newspaper's decline does not portend anything resembling the end of democracy. Here's why.

Like other information goods, the production model of news is shifting from an industrial model--be it the monopoly city paper, IBM in its monopoly heyday, or Microsoft, or Britannica--to a networked model that integrates a wider range of practices into the production system: market and nonmarket, large scale and small, for profit and nonprofit, organized and individual. We already see the early elements of how news reporting and opinion will be provided in the networked public sphere. Its primary elements will be:

1. Surviving elements of the old system, changed. These include papers like The New York Times, which see a much larger readership of their online platform, supported by a slowly improving level of targeted advertising to its new, larger audiences, and international sources like the BBC or Al Jazeera, some of which at least depend on state funding.

2. Small-scale commercial media. These types of organizations will be are able to operate at much lower cost than small papers of the past while maintaining high journalistic professionalism.

3. New, volunteer-driven party presses. While motivation sources may be mysterious to economists when they think about Wikipedia or the Linux kernel, there is nothing mysterious about what drives the contributors to the newly emerging party presses.

4. Newly effective nonprofits. The best example of this is The Sunlight Foundation, which supports both new laws that require government data to be put online, and the development of web-based platforms that allow people to look at these data and explore government actions that are relevant to them.

5. Individuals in networks. Less prominent than the large collaboration platforms like Daily Kos, individuals play an important role in this new information ecosystem.

CORRESPONDENCE: A New Era of Corruption?

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won't break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Clay Shirky

Speaking at a House of Lords event on the 20th anniversary of the invention of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee said that deep packet inspection was the electronic equivalent of opening people's mail.

"This is very important to me, as what is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium," Berners-Lee said on Wednesday. "Clearly we must not interfere with the internet, and we must not snoop on the internet. If we snoop on clicks and data, we can find out a lot more information about people than if we listen to their conversations."

Deep packet inspection involves examining both the data and the header of an information packet as it passes a 'black box' on a network, in order to reveal the content of the communication. Targeted advertising services, such as Phorm in the UK, use deep packet inspection to monitor anonymised user behaviour and to target adverts at those users. In addition, UK government initiatives such as the Intercept Modernisation Programme have proposed using deep packet inspection to perform mass surveillance of the web comunications of the entire UK population.

Berners-Lee says no to internet 'snooping' - ZDNet.co.uk

24/7 Wall St. has created a list of the 10 major daily papers that are most likely to fold or shutter their print operations and only publish online. The properties were chosen on the basis of the financial strength of their parent companies, the amount of direct competition they face in their markets and industry information on how much money they are losing. Based on this analysis, it's possible that 8 of the nation's 50 largest daily newspapers could cease publication in the next 18 months. (Read "The Race for a Better Read.")

1. The Philadelphia Daily News. The smaller of the two papers owned by Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, which recently filed for bankruptcy.

2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has filed for Chapter 11. The paper may not make money this year, even without the costs of debt coverage. The company said it made $26 million last year, about half of what it made in 2007.

3. The Miami Herald, which has a daily circulation of about 220,000. It is owned by McClatchy, a publicly traded company that could be the next chain to file for Chapter 11.

4. The Detroit News is one of two daily papers in the big U.S. city badly hit by the economic downturn.

5. The Boston Globe is, based on several accounts, losing $1 million a week. One investment bank recently said the paper is worth only $20 million.

6. The San Francisco Chronicle. Parent company Hearst has already set a deadline for shuttering the paper if it cannot make tremendous cost cuts.

7. The Chicago Sun-Times is the smaller of two newspapers in the city.

8. The New York Daily News is one of several large papers fighting for circulation and advertising in the New York City area.

9. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is another big daily that competes with a larger paper in a neighboring market — in this case, Dallas.

10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is in one of the economically weakest markets in the country.

The 10 Major Newspapers That Will Either Fold or Go Digital Next - TIME

Netbooks could drive production of even crazily cheaper, lighter-weight computers. "If everything you're doing is online, then the netbook becomes a screen with a radio chip. So why do you need a motherboard?" OLPC designer Mary Lou Jepsen says. "Especially if you want the batteries to last. Why not just make it a screen and a really cheap $2 to $5 radio chip?" The cloud is also probably going to get powerful in ways that now seem like fantasy. AMD is working on an experimental 3-D graphics server farm that would run high-end videogames, squirting a stream out to portable devices so you could play even the most outrageously lush games without a fancy onboard processor. Patrick Moorehead, AMD's vice president of marketing, recalls that in 2007 gamers had to buy special powerful desktop machines loaded with RAM and $600 graphics cards to play Crysis: "Now imagine you've got servers running Crysis and streaming it to an iPhone or a netbook, sending just the vectors that let you navigate the game."

Because this is the future of hardware. For a few users who need a high-performance device, PC makers will offer ever-more-blisteringly fast, water-cooled boxes with screens the size of your living room—at $2,000 a pop. For everyone else—lawyers looking for something to do on the train, women desperate for something that fits in their handbag—netbooks will dominate. It's the rise of the very small machines.

The Netbook Effect: How Cheap Little Laptops Hit the Big Time

The Guardian newspaper in the UK has today launched its open API which will carry all the content the newspaper produces in print and online. That’s over a million articles which go back to 1999. The “Open Platform” will allow allow partners to reuse Guardian.co.uk content and data for free, in a clear move to try and make the The Guardian an all pervasive part of the Web.

In contrast with many newspaper groups, The Guardian is effectively letting control of its content go in order to maximise its reach - and therefore the number of eyeballs that see its brand/content - across the Web. It helps that the paper is owned and run by a charitable trust which does not have shareholders who would normally have a heart attack at such a move. The payback is that apps developers are going to end up building an ad network for The Guardian as a result.

The Guardian launches open API for all content - but they still control the ads

Streaming music sites with freely accessible content are being used by a growing number of listeners as a substitute for buying music

Five years ago, New York-based graphic designer Gitamba Saila-Ngita spent around $100 a month buying CDs and digital downloads to fill his iPod. Now, he spends less than $10 each month on tunes. The reason? He gets almost all of his music from services like Imeem and Last.fm (CBS) where he can listen to pretty much anything over the Web for free or at minimal cost. "And I absolutely listen to more music than I used to," says the 23-year-old. "I pretty much have music playing all the time. It's because I can access so much of it, however I want."

The music industry has a new Internet problem. A decade ago, the major record labels began to worry about online piracy, in which people illegally swapped music over peer-to-peer networks like Napster and later LimeWire. Partly in response to the piracy threat and partly due to sliding CD sales, music companies began to experiment with licensing their records to new online services.

The Music Industry's New Internet Problem - BusinessWeek

In the current issue, Joss Whedon, the George Lucas of television, reveals why working on his triumphant return to the small screen, Dollhouse, has convinced him to abandon TV for good. His alternative medium: Web serials. He began making the sci-fi musical Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (which stars Neil Patrick Harris) during the writers' strike, streamed a few episodes online for free, and struck it big when they went onsale at iTunes. Here Whedon discusses his early foray into Web shows and reveals his plans for the near future. Plus, check out five must-watch Web series — several of which are Whedon-approved.

rollingstone.com

Tom Watson MP, minister for digital engagement, said open source software would be on a level playing field with proprietary software such as Windows.

Open source software will be adopted "when it delivers best value for money", the government said.

It added that public services should where possible avoid being "locked into proprietary software".

BBC NEWS | Technology | UK government backs open source