O'Reilly News & Commentary

What happens when an old law is updated for the digital age? - Attorney Dana Newman discusses a proposed update to the '80s-era Video Privacy Protection Act.

By Jenn Webb
December 21, 2011

The '80s-era Video Privacy Protection Act had the unintended consequence of inhibiting consensual sharing of video viewing habits. Attorney Dana Newman weighs in on updated legislation.

Four short links: 4 August 2011 - Personal Video, Open Source Sensors, Bad Science No Biscuit, and Playing the Odds

By Nat Torkington
August 4, 2011

Skate Through NYC With A GoPro -- this is the first I've seen of the GoPro cameras, which are two dimensions of clever. First, it's video instrumentation for activities where we haven't had this before. Second, it's clever specialization of the Flip-style solid-state recording videocameras. (via Infovore) Pulse Sensor -- open source heart rate sensor project on Kickstarter. DIY...

Developer Week in Review: The unglamorous life of video game developers - To live and die making "L.A. Noire," unsensible censors, and the top 25 ways to get PWNED

By James Turner
July 7, 2011

The folks who make video games sound the alarm bells on working conditions, governments try to break the Internet, and MITRE unveils 2011's most dangerous software errors.

Four short links: 30 June 2011 - Buying a Micro, Education Entrepreneurship, Faceted Search, Vector-Graphics Scripting

By Nat Torkington
June 30, 2011

Electric Dreams - The 1980s 'The Micro Home Computer Of 1982' (YouTube) -- from a reality show where a gadget-using family are forced to relive 30 years of technology invention, one year each day. This clip is where they're forced to choose a microcomputer from the rush of early hobbyist machines in the 80s: Spectrum, Dragon-32, etc. (via Skud)...

Disastrous implications of new Apple patent for blocking cellphone video

By Tim O'Reilly
June 16, 2011

Apple has patented new technology to disable cellphone video based on external signals from public venues. Now imagine if that same technology were deployed by repressive regimes.

Checking in on HTML5 video - YouTube's Greg Schechter on HTML5's place in the video world.

By Jenn Webb
June 3, 2011

HTML5 video still needs work, but YouTube's Greg Schechter says it's heading in a good direction. In this interview, Schechter explains how HTML5 video introduces new architectural needs and new opportunities.

Four short links: 24 May 2011 - Kindle List, Insider Knowledge, Google News Archive Archived, and Work Week in Video

By Nat Torkington
May 24, 2011

Delivereads -- genius idea, a mailing list for Kindles. Yes, if you can send email then you can be a Kindle publisher. (via Sacha Judd) Abnormal Returns From the Common Stock Investments of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives -- We measure abnormal returns for more than 16,000 common stock transactions made by approximately 300 House delegates from...

Four short links: 11 May 2011 - API Explorer, Random Sampling, Open Cultural Collections, and Video Lectures

By Nat Torkington
May 11, 2011

webshell -- command-line tool for debugging/exploring APIs, open sourced (Apache v2) and written in node.js. (via Sean Coates) sample -- command-line filter for random sampling of input. Useful when you've got heaps of data and want to run your algorithms on a random sample of it. (via Scott Vokes) Yale Offers Open Access To PD Materials in Collections --...

Four short links: 8 April 2011 - Varnish Guide, Fields Revealed, Dev Leaderboard, and Map Documentary

By Nat Torkington
April 8, 2011

A Practical Guide to Varnish -- Varnish is the http accelerator used by the discerning devops. Ferrofluid Sculptures (New Scientist) -- hypnotic video of an iron-based fluid that is moulded by magnetic fields, which I include for no good reason than it is pretty pretty science. (via Courtney Johnston) Twisted Highscores List -- clever leaderboard for tickets, reviews, commits,...

Pride and prejudice and book trailers - How Quirk Books puts book trailers to use and measures their success.

By Jenn Webb
April 7, 2011

The literati may despise them, but book trailers can be effective marketing tools when done right. Brett Cohen, vice president of Quirk Books, discusses the production and tracking efforts behind his company's trailers.

Four short links: 6 April 2011 - Timelines, Hardware Pilgrimage, Ubiquitous Play Computing, Eye-Tracking

By Nat Torkington
April 6, 2011

Timeline Setter -- ProPublica-released open source tool for building timelines from spreadsheets of event data. See their post for more information. (via Laurel Ruma) Return to Shenzhen Part 1 -- Nate from SparkFun makes a trip to component capital of the world. It's like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for geeks. a special market that dealt exclusively with bulk...

Granicus opens government with streaming video - Granicus has built a sustainable business by helping governments get their video online.

By Alex Howard
February 2, 2011

Over the past decade -- and long before "open government" was a popular topic -- Granicus built a sustainable business as a cloud-based platform for streaming government video.

Four short links: 21 January 2011 - Sensor Trojan, node.js IDE, Quantified Conference, and P2P Streaming

By Nat Torkington
January 21, 2011

Proof-of-Concept Android Trojan Captures Spoken Credit-Card Numbers -- Soundminer sits in the background and waits for a call to be placed [...] the application listens out for the user entering credit card information or a PIN and silently records the information, performing the necessary analysis to turn it from a sound recording into a number. Very clever use of...

Shoot Video Tutorials Like A Pro

By Jesse Freeman
January 17, 2011

In this post I will highlight a my setup and what you should consider buying to make professional looking video tutorials.

Chrome's lack of support for H.264 is meaningless for the open web

By RJ Owen
January 14, 2011

Yesterday Google announced that future versions of its Chrome browser would not support the H.264 video codec. This codec is seen by many as the only viable alternative to Flash, and support for it in browsers as the default implementation for the <video> tag was thought to be the future of the web. Google's decision to drop H.264 in favor of WebM yesterday has left many feeling upset, decrying the decision as bad for the open web and a sign that Flash Player will not actually die in the near future, but live on. Yet Google's decision is ultimately unimportant to the open web. There is one simple reason for this: Firefox doesn't support H.264 either.

Four short links: 11 January 2011 - Microsoft and the Web, URL Library, Optimism, and NoSQL Instruction

By Nat Torkington
January 11, 2011

Dive Into 2010 (Mark Pilgrim) -- Mark wrote a hugely popular guide to HTML5 which was available online and published by O'Reilly. 6% of visitors used some version of Internet Explorer. That is not a typo. The site works fine in Internet Explorer — the site practices what it preaches, and the live examples use a variety of fallbacks...

Four short links: 7 January 2011 - User Experience, Big Data Case Study, DimDim Acquired, Secret to the Web

By Nat Torkington
January 7, 2011

Users Can Self-Report Problems -- users self-report 50% of the problems that professional usability testing uncovers, and they find problems that usability testers don't. (The other way to look at this is: self-reporting only finds half the actual problems in a site) The Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox (PDF) -- challenges faced by Gmail Priority Inbox and how they...

House.Resource.Org - Hundreds of high-res videos from House Oversight Committee hearings will be available on a new website.

By Carl Malamud
January 5, 2011

Broadcast-quality video from the hearings of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform becomes available on the Internet.

Four short links: 31 December 2010 - Statistics, Tech Writing, Shared Spaces, and Delicious Exodus

By Nat Torkington
December 31, 2010

The Joy of Stats -- Hans Rosling's BBC documentary on statistics, available to watch online. Best Tech Writing of 2010 -- I need a mass "add these to Instapaper" button. (via Hacker News) Google Shared Spaces: Why We Made It (Pamela Fox) -- came out of what people were trying to do with Google Wave. The Great Delicious Exodus...

Video pick: A real-time translating app - Word Lens translates printed text from Spanish to English and vice versa.

By Mac Slocum
December 17, 2010

It looks like the future of augmented reality has already arrived. Word Lens is an iPhone app that uses the built-in camera to translate Spanish text to English and vice versa. See it in action.

Video pick: The inevitable merging of Kinect and "Minority Report" - Kinect + open drivers + MIT = the future of UI.

By Mac Slocum
December 10, 2010

A marriage of Kinect and the creativity of MIT has led to this: The first baby steps toward "Minority Report"-inspired interfaces.

Never Give a Client Three Choices

By Spencer Critchley
November 24, 2010

In most design fields it's conventional wisdom that you should give a client three versions or "comps" of an idea, so they can choose their favorite, or maybe combine what they like best about two or all three of them....

Ebooks and the threat from "internal constituencies" - Lessons from adjacent media companies can inform publishers' ebook strategies.

By Roger Magoulas
November 2, 2010

Will internal constituencies bias how publishers value print book and ebook business models? Roger Magoulas examines that question and looks at the complementary relationship between print and electronic forms.

Four short links: 27 September 2010 - Google Acquisitions, Good Ideas, Data Taxonomy, and Jukebox Firmware

By Nat Torkington
September 27, 2010

Google Acquisition Spending Spree (Venturebeat) -- Google is now on track to acquire a new company every two weeks this year. (via azaaza on Twitter) Where Good Ideas Come From (YouTube) -- this perfectly describes Foo. A Taxonomy of Data Science -- great first post on a new blog by data practitioners. Rockbox -- open source (GPL) firmware for...

Four short links: 30 August 2010 - H.264 Patents, Pakistan Flood Crowdsourcing, YouTube to MP3, Bloom Filter Tips

By Nat Torkington
August 30, 2010

Free as in Smokescreen (Mike Shaver) -- H.264, one of the ways video can be delivered in HTML5, is covered by patents. This prevents Mozilla from shipping an H.264 player, which fragments web video. The MPEG LA group who manage the patents for H.264 did a great piece of PR bullshit, saying "this will be permanently royalty-free to consumers"....

Four short links: 23 July 2010 - Reputation Systems, Faceted Search Tutorial, Video Utility, and Chinese Slang

By Nat Torkington
July 23, 2010

5 Reputation Missteps (and how to avoid them) (YouTube) -- a Google Tech Talk from one of the authors of the O'Reilly-published Building Web Reputation Systems. Solr on EC2 Tutorial -- the tutorial shows how to index Wikipedia with Solr. (via Matt Biddulph) clive -- a command line utility for extracting (or downloading) videos from Youtube and other video...

YouTube: Flash will play a critical role in video distribution

By Andrew Trice
June 30, 2010

There's a great writeup on YouTube's developer blog covering their experience with HTM5 video, Flash video, and the future of video distribution on the web. If you have some spare time, be sure to check it out.

YouTube: Flash will play a critical role in video distribution

By Andrew Trice
June 30, 2010

There's a great writeup on YouTube's developer blog covering their experience with HTM5 video, Flash video, and the future of video distribution on the web. If you have some spare time, be sure to check it out.

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