Reading for January 24, 2011

I’m supposed to be posting these weekly, but the book writing keeps getting in the way. I guess that’s better than the other way around.

• Why Google and Demand Media Are Headed for a Showdown - Interesting play out here since DM is headed to an IPO soon. They’re in a quiet period and can’t respond. This would be a good way for a 3rd party to damage the IPO to their own ends.
• Is Law School a Losing Game? - I hear this more and more. I wouldn’t advise my kids to go to law school even though I think that learning legal thinking would be fun.
• Kindle Comes To The Mac App Store, Already No. 5 Free App - Mac apps are just regular applications with some special files in the resource fork. I was worried at first that they’d break the consistency of application installs and management.
• A Matter of Life and Death: How important is economics? - “Although it may not be possible to say definitively, Mises’s and other market economists’ abstract theories probably laid the intellectual foundation of the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions in the 1980s that, again, significantly improved well-being…”
• Bump Raises $16 Million Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz - I don’t get this. I’ve never had anyone mention Bump to me. Not a phenomenon as far as I know.
• Words with Friends - “I don’t mind paying but [Apple] made it about paying. Uck.”
• Google Code Blog: Google URL Shortener gets an API - I wish we didn’t need shorteners in the first place. Think of all the links that are going to wink out in the future when Bit.ly or someone else goes under and takes their database with them.
• Location-tagged events in elmcity hubs - I love the practical exploration that Jon’s doing in the Elm City project. The semantic Web needs this kind of work as much as it does a careful study of ontologies. Maybe more.
• VLC for iOS vanishes 2 months after eruption of GPL dispute - Interesting read about how the GPL licensing terms are incompatible with Apple’s app store. It’s not clear they could be compatible with any commercial app marketplace. There’s a showdown coming if app marketplaces really take off.
• Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan - This surprises me.
• Facebook will NOT end on March 15th. Hoax news story spreads like wildfire - I hadn’t heard this from anyone—usually a few technically unsophistacted friends will ask about things like this.
• The New New Telco - “All just in time for a generation who cannot remember a time before the web, a time before the mobile phone. All just in time for a generation for whom ‘rent’ means more than ‘buy’, for whom ‘share’ means more than ‘own’.”
• Price and adoption timeline of gadgets - Just look at faxes and land line phones (corded or not)
• HTML to lose the version number - Now we’ll be saying “new, new HTML” instead
• What did Google do? - Schmidt’s geeky sense of humor was not grokked by media. (When he set off a tempest in the news teapot saying we should all be able to change our names at age 21 and start over with youthful indiscretions left behind us, he was joking, folks. Really, he was.) Page is even less show-bizzy.
• 24 Gigabytes of Memory Ought to be Enough for Anybody - That’s a lot of memory…until its not.
• Utah Teen Creates Most Popular Free iPhone App - This is Steve Nay’s (my CS462 TA’s) little brother Robert. My kids love the game.
• The Quora For X - This kind of shorthand is what a lot of people look for in describing their ideas. Describing the “next thing” is hard.
• Death in the Corn: Part II of III - Amazing descriptions of battles from the inside out. I love reading Michael Yon.
• Bureaucrats Keep Us Safe? - “The homeless people fed by the Herrings are not made safer by the ruling, nor are they suddenly less susceptible to food-borne illness. But it will be more difficult for them to find a meal, and when they do, most likely the food will be inferior to what they had. All in the name of safety.”
• Google search and search engine spam - The first salvo in the “Google vs Demand Media” wars?

Posted by Phil Windley on January 24, 2011 8:01 AM