via Scott Rafer’s Blog : Gilt Groupe, Groupon, and avoiding SEO.

- Meet Marty Cooper – the inventor of the mobile phone

via BBC News.

via NSFW: I Admit It, The iPad Is A Kindle Killer. I Just Wish It Weren’t Going To Kill Reading Too.

Edward Tufte, Appointee for Member, Recovery Independent Advisory Panel

Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Statistics, and Computer Science at Yale University. He wrote, designed, and self-published The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations, and Beautiful Evidence, which have received 40 awards for content and design. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Society for Technical Communication, and the American Statistical Association. He received his PhD in political Science from Yale University and BS and MS in statistics from Stanford University.

via Ask E.T.: Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment.

My thinking has changed recently, as Google’s moves with Buzz have surfaced, and Apple’s moves to control sexual imagery in the the app store, as they embark on an ugly and dishonest campaign against Flash. Patents are nothing new. Last year, Google patented some very basic technology we created in the first wave of RSS apps. Another company was granted a patent on podcasting. It goes on all the time. What is different is that tech companies are taking a more active interest in the content that flows over their networks, and are doing less to protect their users. Sometimes they’re the ones attacking users. Just like other industries.

Think about how you’re treated by airlines. By insurance companies. If you have to go to a hospital. That’s the kind of relationship you have with Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. Sooner or later there will be a massive oil spill or a massive network-wide security breach. Expect these companies to be every bit as bad as the ones in other industries. Probably worse because they’ve come so far without much oversight or scrutiny. Recently Google was given permission to trade energy. Who are these companies? We have no idea.

via Big change in the tech world. (Scripting News).

Speaking at an event hosted by digital agency Albion, Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of The Guardian, outlined his vision of the role that journalists and newspapers will play in an internet-led future, and took another sideswipe at Murdoch’s “dubious” business model.

He said it was important for publishers to change their mindset from an “us versus them” approach, to place the focus on involvement instead of authority.

The editor-in-chief was also vociferous about the “open” model of the internet and the philosophy of “do what you do best and link to the rest”.

“If you are open, that means you want to be part of the way the web works rather than simply on the web,” he said.

“I think that leads you to think about the whole democratisation of the web, the whole way it works as a series of links and how all information on the web is now linked to all other information.”

He acknowledged that recognition of others work “goes against the instincts of journalists” but said it results in “better journalism”.

But Rusbridger warned it would be impossible for publishers to embrace these developments if content is withdrawn and placed behind paywalls.

He said: “If you believe the most important thing is to try and get direct return for your content and put a universal paywall around everything then you necessarily take yourself out of those first two roles…

“That’s why I think it is a dubious business model and just completely antithetical to the way everything is going, not just journalism.

Highlighting a discrepancy already within Murdoch’s portfolio, Rusbridger contrasted the democratic, inclusive approach of Harper Collins’ social networking site Bookarmy, with that of plans to restrict content of The Times.

“It seems to me when you look at those two models, you know which is going to win. It’s going to be the open one,” he said.

via Murdoch’s paywalls are ‘antithetical to everything’ claims Guardian’s Rusbridger – advertising news – Campaign.

Google commoditized social networking using Buzz to undermine this launch.”

Paraphrased from Jason Calacanis TWiST #41

Next thing we are going to see is better content creation tools on mobile devices.

Last week I got to see Ira Glass address the journalism students at UNC.  His format was similar to a This American Life Episode but was centered around storytelling and how that process has grown and the conventions that the TAL staff uses to engage the listener.  Ira was awesome, and he even talked about his early reporting and how bad he was when he started. I guess there is some hope for me after all.

The La Times has a great profile on Mr Glass.

Ira Glass, storyteller – latimes.com.

As an example, he said, Microsoft is working to juice the performance of its Virtual Earth mapping service using so-called “edge technologies” – a combination of Akamai-like CDN (content delivery network) tools and actual code that runs at the edge of the network. “We’re looking at a mixture of approaches and trying to solve problems for specific applications and types of applications,” he said.

At which point, Gill piped up to explain – in his matter-of-fact monotone – why Microsoft’s philosophy is fundamentally flawed. He pointed his audience to a blog post where an online real estate outfit called Redfin says it recently ditched Microsoft Virtual Earth for Google Maps. Yes, Redfin believes that Google gives better performance.

“Our approach is a little more absolute than [Microsoft's],” Gill said. “Not only does getting to the end user have to be fast, but the back-end has to be extremely fast too…[We are] virtualizing the entire fabric so you get maximum utilization and speed on a global basis as opposed to local fixes – putting one service in a data center, for example, in Denver.

“You want to figure out how you want to distribute that across the entire system so you get it as horizontal as needed, which is essentially the definition of cloud computing.”

via Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it • The Register.