Subscribe to our Newsletters
O'Reilly on YouTube
O'Reilly on Twitter
O'Reilly on Facebook
News Feed
Tags > news
Four short links: 9 November 2009 - Moth Mind Readers, Shiny UI Futures, Usable Newspapers, Hardware Testing
By Nat TorkingtonNovember 9, 2009
New Microsoft Interface Technology -- videos from Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) on the MS Campus Tour talking about the future of UI using a sexy glass prototype that features tablet PC, gesture, speech recognition, and even eye tracking. Lustable. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
What feature do you use most on your mobile phone?
By Rich TretolaNovember 3, 2009
With all of this talk lately about the Flash Player coming to mobile, I thought I would ask a very simple question. What feature do you use most on your mobile phone? Please take part in this poll.
Flash on Devices
October 6, 2009
Inside RIA's Rich Tretola reports on a treasure trove of links. Flash Professional CS5 will enable you to build applications for iPhone and iPod touch using ActionScript 3. These applications can be delivered to iPhone and iPod touch users through the Apple App Store.
New Poll: What's your operating system?
September 22, 2009
I went and did a little digging around and found that the stats below are about the average of what I was seeing. This particular sample was snagged from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp. However, I have a feeling that our audience will have...
Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don’t Need It
By Joshua-Michéle RossSeptember 16, 2009
Speculation about the demise of the news business and advice about what they should do about it is everywhere. It makes for great, self-congratulatory sport but it won’t help the news industry. Why? Because the news industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution...
New Poll: The Best of RIA 2009 - Semi Finals
September 3, 2009
After over 7500 votes, we have our top 10 for this week's semi finals to pick the Best of RIA 2009. The top 3 from this group will be discussed at Garth Braithwaite's Adobe MAX session titled "InsideRIA's Secrets of the Best Rich Internet Apps of 2009 (So Far)" and the overall winner will be chosen by the live audience.
Four short links: 21 August 2009 - Moody Twitter, Future Geohistory, News Sucks, Whyless in Wonderland
August 21, 2009
TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious). What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published; between 1066 and 1086 more than half of Dunwich’s taxable farmland had washed away. Major storms in 1287, 1328, 1347, and 1740 swallowed up more land. By 1844, only 237 people lived in Dunwich. Today, less than half as many reside there in a handful of ruins on dry land. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
Four short links: 18 August 2009 - iPhone App Backstory, Cookie Resurrection, The Entrepreneuralism Lickmus test, and An Interesting Database
August 18, 2009
The Making of the NPR News iPhone App -- interesting behind-the-scenes look, with sketches and all. Station streams, however, presented a larger challenge. To begin with, NPR didn't have direct stream links for any of its stations, so we built a Web spider that identified and captured more than 300 iPhone-compatible station streams. After that first pass, we worked with our station representatives to manually test each stream. In the process they found enough new streams to double our database. All of these streams are delivered to the app from NPR's Station Finder API. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Four short links: 10 August 2009 - Propaganda, Computer Science, Web Science, CS History
August 10, 2009
The Propaganda Newspapers -- The London Evening Standard reports that London councils are increasingly providing their own newspapers, masquerading as mass-market popular appeal newspapers but without anything critical of the council that produces it. This is an evolutionary dead-end for reinventing newspapers, and is why the non-profit/trust structure works so well. This and more in today's Four Short Links.
Google Maps - Now With Perspective!
July 31, 2009
No, this isn't my new perspective on using the Google Maps API. In fact, it's much more exciting. Google recently released a new addition to the Maps API for Flash, including 3D perspective, and a new control set that is reminiscent of the controls in Google Earth! Straight from Google: "With a perspective map, the map is projected on a viewport (the screen) using a virtual point of reference in front of the screen (the camera). These three components (the map, the viewport and the camera) form a perspective on the viewport which gives the illusion of depth perception to the map."
How NPR is Embracing Open Source and Open APIs - Daniel Jacobson Will Talk About the NPR Open API at OSCON
July 17, 2009
News providers, like most content providers, are interested in having their content seen by as many people as possible. But unlike many news organizations, whose primary concern may be monetizing their content, National Public Radio is interested in turning it into a resource for people to use in new and novel ways as well. Daniel Jacobson is in charge making that content available to developers and end users in a wide variety of formats, and has been doing so using an Open API that NPR developed specifically for that purpose. Daniel will talk about how the project is going at OSCON next week, here's a preview of what he'll be talking about.
Silverlight 3 Launch
July 15, 2009
One year and ten months is how long it's taken Microsoft to release their third version of Silverlight. From the beginning, Silverlight has been media and consumer focused. Projects such as the NBC Olympics, Wimbledon, the NCAA March Madness basketball video player have defined what Silverlight is. What isn't as well known is that Silverlight is quickly becoming a viable option for RIA development.
Content is a Service Business
By Andrew SavikasJuly 13, 2009
What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.
Walking the Censorship Tightrope with Google's Marissa Mayer
June 16, 2009
Google sometimes finds itself at an difficult crossroad of wanting to make as much information available to as many people as possible, while still trying to obey the laws of the countries they operate in. I recently had a chance to talk to Marissa Mayer, who started at Google as their first female engineer, and has now risen to the ranks of vice president in charge of some of Google's most critical product areas, such as search, maps and Chrome. We talked about some of Google's future product directions, and also about how Google makes the decision as to when information has to be withheld from the users. Marissa will be delivering a keynote address at the O'Reilly Velocity Conference next week.
Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O'Reilly Titles Included)
May 18, 2009
The document-sharing site Scribd has launched a new "Scribd Store" selling view and download access to documents and books. As part of the launch, there are now more than 650 O'Reilly ebooks now available for preview and sale in the Scribd store, and all include DRM-free PDF downloads with purchase. (Scribd will soon be adding EPUB as a format, and we'll make that available as soon as possible.)
Announcing InsideRIA Conference
By Rich TretolaMay 18, 2009
Yep, you heard correctly in association with the 360Conferences guys, InsideRIA is having its first conference August 23-24, 2009 in San Jose, CA at the eBay facilities. This 2-day event will into the nitty gritty of developing for the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. Sunday will be hands-on workshops to get you familiar with a few of the RIA platforms. Monday will be a full day of sessions with 3 distinct tracks: Development, Design/User Experience and Business Development. All 3 tracks will be aimed at the RIA platform in general.
An Open Letter To Newspaper Publishers
By Brian McConnellMay 8, 2009
Dear Publisher, With so many people predicting your imminent death, you're probably wishing the Grim Reaper would just stop by and get it over with. The good news is that when everyone in the technology business or the financial press is making the same prediction, it's wrong. Certainly you've made some bad decisions along the way, borrowing too much, buying that Taj Majal when maybe staying put was a smarter move. But just like that messy divorce, that's all "water under the bridge" as they say, so what do you do now?
Tim O'Reilly - Why Twitter Matters for News
May 7, 2009
Twitter has been used for a lot of different purposes, and one has been to report breaking news. But there's been some criticism of how Twitter deals with news, such as the Swine Flu outbreak. With that in mind, O'Reilly Week in Review talked to Tim O'Reilly himself, co-author of the new Twitter Book, about the role of Twitter in...
There's a newspaper in my iPhone
April 20, 2009
As the "death of the newspaper" gets continuing coverage (mostly on television), new apps bring the New York Times, USA Today, and now The Wall Street Journal, to your iPhone. I have to ask: why do these apps look so much alike? is there a hidden danger that they might be confused with each other? Looking for an alternative to apps provided by these long-lived journalistic institutions, I decided to download the USA Today iPhone app to see if they did things any differently. While I wouldn't want to see the Times or the Journal mimicking USA Today's look-and-feel, they could learn a thing or two from some of the advanced techniques that USA Today employed.
Ignite Show: Monica Guzman on Being an Awesome News Commenter
April 16, 2009
This week's Ignite Show features Seattle PI reporter Monica Guzman. She's spent most of her career writing for online properties and she's been able to watch learn what makes for a good conversation around a news item. As someone who also spends a lot of time publishing content online I can appreciate Monica's thoughts on good commenters and hearing some of what she deals with makes me very appreciative of our readers and how you add to the conversations on our site.
Will People Learn OOP and AS3 from Video? If it's Colin Moock? We'll See
March 25, 2009
This month, O'Reilly and Adobe Developer Library are releasing the 13+-hour-long Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript Weekend, a two-part video series of some heft and ambition, the outcome (or logical extension, actually) of a longer, larger process. The back story may be of interest to some.
O'Reilly Week in Review for March 16th, 2009
March 19, 2009
This week's roundup include discussion of the Sun/IBM rumors, the future of newspapers, Microsoft and Science Commons teaming up, and the weekly podcast quiz....
Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable"
By Tim O'ReillyMarch 16, 2009
Sometimes Clay Shirky astounds us by articulating something we've never thought of, and sometimes he astounds us by telling us something many have thought, but never so clearly and so compellingly. But always, he astounds. Into the first category falls the claim that he made in his keynote at the last Web 2.0 Expo that "the critical technology of the 20th century...was the sitcom." Who would have thought that so penetrating an analysis could hinge on such a preposterous assertion! (If you haven't already done so, read the transcript or watch the video.)
How to Save Journalism? Get Rid of the Newspapers
February 24, 2009
I've recently been following a superb series by Michelle McLellan on the Ideas that get in the way of saving journalism. In this series of blogs, she does a superb job of raising some very uncomfortable questions for newspapers, most importantly, whether they are in fact so wedded to the idea of the newspaper that they've lost sight of the journalism.
Safari Books Online Goes Mobile
By Allen NorenFebruary 9, 2009
Like much of the publishing world, I'm eager to hear about Amazon's latest version of the Kindle. But that's not the only news today. I'm sitting here at TOC and talking to John Chodacki from Safari Books Online and, with a smile on his face, he's showing me beta version of m.safaribooksonline.com. The smile is well deserved. It looks great, it's fast, and I love the stripped-down navigation and lack of clutter.
Can the Internet Prevent War?
December 10, 2008
In his Nobel lecture Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio posited that the Internet might have prevented the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Second World War. In this post, I offer a counterargument: the decade we all just lived through demonstrated the power of the Internet as a platform for propaganda. If anything Hitler would have seen the Internet as the ultimate propaganda tool.
Why Are Newspapers Dying?
December 9, 2008
While newspapers are likely on their way to the recycle bin, editorial journalism isn't. We are moving to an era where journalistic integrity and personal prestige of the individual journalist is becoming more important than the prestige of the newspaper or other media that the journalist writes for. Journalism is becoming decentralized, and there are many indications that this is, just perhaps, a good thing.
Knight Foundation Scholarship: Bringing Developers to the Newsroom
December 7, 2008
Rich Gordon, Associate Professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, discusses the Knight Foundation Scholarship for working developers to attend a one-year Master's program in Journalism. Gordon discusses the current trends in news and technology, and how developers will play an important role in the continued evolution of "news".
What's the Appeal of the iPhone to Developers?
By chromaticOctober 13, 2008
Raven Zachary and Bill Dudney are co-chairs of the one-day iPhone Live conference in San Jose. O'Reilly News recently talked to them to answer the questions "What's interesting about the iPhone to developers?" and "What hints does the iPhone give to Apple's future plans?"
Validators: Asking for donations to pay for the news
By Andy OramAugust 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.
Terry Childs: San Francisco's Imprisoned FiberWAN Administrator
By Timothy M. O'BrienJuly 19, 2008
Is Terry Childs a Maniacal Hacker-Terrorist or a Capable and Dedicated System Administrator. While the mainstream media paints a colorful picture of villain and vice, Paul Venezia of infoworld uncovers a different story. What if this is just the case of job termination gone wrong.
1 to 31 of 31
