O'Reilly News & Commentary

Four short links: 6 November 2009 - Barcode Scanning, Downloadable Community Book, Gov Hack Day, Android Kludges

By Nat Torkington
November 6, 2009

Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier

By Andy Oram
September 24, 2009

Essays by Brian McConnell of World Wide Lexicon and Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices describe the technical and cultural sides of developing communities of volunteer translators.

World Wide Lexicon Toolbar changes the reading experience for the other 99% of web pages

By Andy Oram
August 26, 2009

World Wide Lexicon Toolbar meets my criterion for a piece of critical infrastructure: after two days with it I can't get along without it, and I plan to avoid any browser that doesn't have it installed.

Community Leadership Summit thrills over 200 attendees

By Andy Oram
July 20, 2009

An unconference such as the Community Leadership Summit 2009 feels like one of those long, lingering meals you can enjoy with friends in a fine European restaurant, full of lively conversation. Or an intense experience like an arts festival, which perhaps suggests why one participant at the end of the Community Leadership Summit suggested it be held in conjunction with South by Southwest instead of the O'Reilly Open Source convention.

Art of Community: First chapter of upcoming book available for download

By Andy Oram
July 16, 2009

I was a fervent activist in several communities long before I started working with with Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon on his book The Art of Community: Building the New Age of Participation. We've just released the first chapter of this book (as HTML on the O'Reilly site and a PDF on the, artofcommunityonline.org, companion site Jono created).

Jono Bacon on the Value of Good Communities - We need to build good relationships across all of open source.

By James Turner
July 9, 2009

Ubuntu has enjoyed fantastic success over the past few years, becoming one of the dominant Linux distributions, and the distribution of choice for netbooks. Jono Bacon's job is to make sure that that success continues, by keeping the huge Ubuntu developer community happy and productive. We caught up with Jono in advance of his appearance at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, and he was more than happy to talk about the efforts underway to not only improve the Ubuntu community, but also bring together other communities, such as Gnome and KDE, to help them work better together. Jono officially works for Canonical, a company founded by South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth for the promotion of Ubuntu and other free software projects.

Four roles for publishers: staying relevant when you are no longer a gatekeeper

By Andy Oram
June 18, 2009

In many areas of publishing, there are enormous resources of free online material and innumerable forums where individuals can quickly and conveniently post their own observations. Since we are no longer gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.

Programming Contests, Community, and Business

By Simon St. Laurent
June 11, 2009

Attending the TopCoder Open, the final in-person rounds of an intense programming competition, in support of the TopCoder Cookbook, showed me possibilities that go way beyond programming or books into business models and community I came expecting to see a competition, but found a much more inclusive (and compelling) business model which builds and applies an international community of dedicated developers.

Ignite Sebastopol on June 10th

By Mary Rotman
June 8, 2009

Ignite is finally coming to Sebastopol, the hometown of O'Reilly Media! Join us June 10th at the Hopmonk Tavern for a night of contests, presentations, and overall fun.

Assemble Your Tribe in Prezi @ SAP Inside Track

By Mark Finnern
May 28, 2009

I haven't posted here in a long time. Hope this one is helpful to you. I want to introduce you to a new way of visualizing your thoughts for a presentation. Andre Heller once called his life falling through dreams....

Challenges from a book sprint: the great things about ignorance and disorder

By Andy Oram
March 24, 2009

I tried to write a conventional computer manual in two days, and the experience has made me reconsider the conventions of computer manuals. The computer field is still in the kindergarten stage of exploring serious questions of how people learn, questions at the center of psychology and pedagogy for many decades. Even those disciplines don't quite get it, because they're fumbling with the instant messaging culture that gives us so many more tools today for learning together.

From Open Source Software to Open Culture: Three Misunderstandings

By Andy Oram
March 23, 2009

The original practice and promise of open source software is unique. The software experience cannot be ported whole-hog into other areas such as sharing songs or organizing public forums. It's worth looking at what goes into creating open source software, and what unique traits of software make the open source process work well there.

Is Dreamweaver being beaten by Drupal?

By Kurt Cagle
March 8, 2009

In 1997, I was at the Macromedia User's Conference to give a talk on creating "intelligent" agents within Macromedia Director. At this particular conference, Macromedia announced a new product called Dreamweaver, an HTML editing application that exercised a profound effect upon the web development community.

OLPC, many networks at Winter Camp

By Andy Oram
March 6, 2009

Today we discussed our goals and FLOSS Manuals' unique Book sprint way of creating documentation. We're holding one in Boston on March 21-22, under the auspices of the Free Software Foundation, and we can use volunteers who would like to teach GUI users how to be effective with the Bash command line.

Ignite Show Episode 3: Rob Gruhl on Buying a New Car

By Mary Rotman
March 4, 2009

This week's Ignite Show features Rob Gruhl. Rob loves to buy cars, but more than that he loves to bargain for cars. He shares his secrets today. This talk was filmed at Ignite Seattle III.

Ignite Launches Weekly Video Series Highlighting the Best of Geek Culture

By Mary Rotman
February 20, 2009

Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of five-minute speed presentations on topics ranging from "The Best Way to Buy a Car" to "Hacking Chocolate" to "Transhuman Technology Trends." Imagine that you're on stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, doing a five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you're ready or not. What would you do? What would you say? Could you stand the pressure? Every week, find out how some of the smartest minds on the planet dealt with this situation as your host, Brady Forrest, highlights a different talk from Ignites around the world.

Wanting to Ignite Your City?

By Mary Rotman
January 23, 2009

You may have noticed Ignite events springing up around the world recently--maybe you've even had one in your town! Regardless of where you live, chances are there either has been or will be one in your area soon. From Denver and Boston to Helsinki, Bangalore, and Paris, Ignite events are "igniting" every community.

Design patterns for public activism

By Andy Oram
December 30, 2008

Programmers know the impact that design patterns have had on designing and coding. Could patterns have just as strong an impact on people taking action in their communities? That's the thrust of the patterns published at the Public Sphere Project. The most fleshed-out patters are now published in the book Liberating Voices! A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution by the initiator of the project, Douglas Schuler.

Education of software project members: New API posted

By Andy Oram
December 7, 2008

Over the past month I've made a few significant updates to my API for educating software project members.

Online Communities: The Tribalization of Business

By Joshua-Michele Ross
November 13, 2008

Recently I spoke with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs about the role of online communities in the enterprise. Francois has been evangelizing the learning gained from his recent study “The Tribalization of Business” (see here for the Slideshare presentation). The interview is broken into three parts. Francois is a great storyteller, bringing case studies in to support nearly every point....

Open Source, Community and Audiobooks: Q&A with LibriVox Founder Hugh McGuire

By Mac Slocum
November 6, 2008

LibriVox is a volunteer effort with a big goal: record audiobook editions for every title in the public domain. In this Q&A, LibriVox founder Hugh McGuire discusses the project's beginnings, the organic development of the LibriVox community, and the distinctions (or lack thereof) between "professional" and "amateur" efforts.

Do Publisher Brands Still Have Relevance?

By Peter Brantley
October 3, 2008

Kate Eltham espies HarperStudio, asking whether they should have a separate Web portal/site, or just operate with a blog. She wonders: can a publisher drive a brand these days?...

Validators: Asking for donations to pay for the news

By Andy Oram
August 29, 2008

The New York times has a short article on community-funded journalism, in which the public pays a journalist in advance to cover a topic. I'm blogging this because, in the first place, it suggests a way technical information could be developed, and in the second place I anticipated the idea a year ago in my short story Validators.

Proposed API for tools to help educate computer users online

By Andy Oram
August 14, 2008

For several years I have recommended improvements to the tools that software projects use to answer technical questions and provide documentation, such as wikis and mailing lists. My latest contribution is a draft of an API that could be implemented in tools such as IDEs and content management systems.

Drupal as Open Architecture

By Kurt Cagle
August 5, 2008

I have a confession to make - after close to a decade covering XML, I have something of a new love ... and the name of that love is Drupal. Drupal's become one of those interesting hobbies that is rapidly becoming both a profession and a passion. It wasn't supposed to happen this way ... by rights, I should be deeply in the world of Ruby on Rails right now, or learning the latest deep programming secrets of Python, but somewhere along the line I realized one of those ugly little fundamental truths that good programmers should never actually learn - that at some point, recreating the wheel yet again begins to lose its luster, and, indeed, become rather ... well ... dull.

Open Source convention wrap-up (2008)

By Andy Oram
July 25, 2008

The computer industry is certainly not recession-proof, but the Open Source convention that's just wrapping up had more attendees than last year (we were up to about 2000), and discussions about starting businesses based on open source seemed to take place everywhere. And I don't mean just free software: open source concepts apply to hardware, creative content, and other materials. Big topics included virtualization and the next stage of virtualization: cloud computing. Perhaps those are the practitioner's solution to multicores.

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