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A Matter of Semantics

By Mike Amundsen
May 16, 2013

Messages on the Web carry three levels of information: Structure Semantics, Protocol Semantics, and Application Semantics. No matter the implementation style, all three of these are needed for any successful communication between client and server. This threesome (S-P-A) forms the …

What Kind of JavaScript Developer Are You?

By Simon St. Laurent
May 14, 2013

“JavaScript developer” is a description that hides tremendous diversity. While every language has a range of user skill levels, JavaScript has a remarkably fragmented community. People come to JavaScript for different reasons from different places, and this can make communication …

JavaScript Makes Browsers Behave

By Elisabeth Robson
May 14, 2013

If you know HTML and CSS, you’re ready to begin learning JavaScript. But you might be surprised, because JavaScript looks quite different from both HTML and CSS. That’s because JavaScript is a language for computation. Unlike HTML, which is for …

Strata Week: President Obama opens up U.S. government data

By Jenn Webb
May 10, 2013

U.S. government data to be machine-readable, Nicole Wong may fill new White House chief privacy officer role The U.S. government took major steps this week to open up government data to the public. U.S. President Obama signed an executive order …

Four short links: 9 May 2013

By Nat Torkington
May 9, 2013

On Google’s Ingress Game (ReadWrite Web) — By rolling out Ingress to developers at I/O, Google hopes to show how mobile, location, multi-player and augmented reality functions can be integrated into developer application offerings. In that way, Ingress becomes a …

Cutting Your Programming Teeth on JavaScript

By Elisabeth Robson
May 7, 2013

JavaScript is a bit different from other programming languages. How? Well, JavaScript runs in an environment, and that’s usually the browser. So when you learn JavaScript, you’ll learn both the language basics, as well as how to use JavaScript in …

Cultural capital goes commercial

By Julia Errens
May 2, 2013

It wasn’t one of my proudest moments when, a week before Christmas last year, I was hunched over my smartphone towards the back of the famous Hamley’s Toy Store on London’s Regent Street, composure tethered to an elusive bar of …

Numbers never lie…unless you’re talking social media

By Rob Eagar
April 30, 2013

Back in college, I took a class on statistics and never forgot the first lesson my professor taught us, which was, “Anyone can manipulate numbers to make them mean whatever they want.” I see this point magnified today by the …

White House Science Fair praises future scientists and makers

By Alex Howard
April 29, 2013

There are few ways to better judge a nation’s character than to look at how its children are educated. What values do their parents, teachers and mentors demonstrate? What accomplishments are celebrated? In a world where championship sports teams are …

German digital publishing – the Berlin way

By Ruediger Wischenbart
April 29, 2013

My favorite number at the first TOC buchreport in Berlin on April 23rd was 20, as in 20% of the 2.4 million ebook buyers in Germany in 2012 had not bought any books in the previous twelve months, according to …

Google Glass and the Future

By Mike Loukides
April 29, 2013

I just read a Forbes article about Glass, talking about the split between those who are “sure that it is the future of technology, and others who think society will push back against the technology.” I don’t see this as …

Publishing News: Our brains on screens

By Jenn Webb
April 26, 2013

Digital vs paper: ink on paper may still have the advantage In a recent edition of Scientific American, Ferris Jabr took a look at how technology is affecting the way we read and the differences between reading on screens and …

Glowing Plants

By Mike Loukides
April 26, 2013

I just invested in BioCurious’ Glowing Plants project on Kickstarter. I don’t watch Kickstarter closely, but this is about as fast as I’ve ever seen a project get funded. It went live on Wednesday; in the afternoon, I was backer …

Four short links: 25 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 24, 2013

Alcatraz — package manager for iOS. (via Hacker News) Scarfolk Council — clever satire, the concept being a UK town stuck in 1979. Tupperware urns, “put old people down at birth”. The 1979 look is gorgeous. (via BoingBoing) Stop Designing …

Stop standardizing HTML

By Simon St. Laurent
April 24, 2013

When HTML first appeared, it offered a coherent if limited vocabulary for sharing content on the newly created World Wide Web. Today, after HTML has handed off most of its actual work to other specifications, it’s time to stop worrying …

Four short links: 24 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 24, 2013

Solar Energy: This is What a Disruptive Technology Looks Like (Brian McConnell) — In 1977, solar cells cost upwards of $70 per Watt of capacity. In 2013, that cost has dropped to $0.74 per Watt, a 100:1 improvement (source: The …

Pre-publication samples

By Joe Wikert
April 23, 2013

This one has been nagging at me for years and I’m amazed none of the major ebook retailers offer a solution. I’m talking about the ability to pre-order an ebook sample prior to publication. Yesterday I received a bulk email …

Twisted Python: the engine of your Internet

By Jessica McKellar
April 22, 2013

I want to build a web server, a mail server, a BitTorrent client, a DNS server, or an IRC bot—clients and servers for a custom protocol in Python. And I want them to be cross-platform, RFC-compliant, testable, and deployable in …

Four short links: 22 April 2013

By Nat Torkington
April 22, 2013

Meshlab — open source, portable, and extensible system for the processing and editing of unstructured 3D triangular meshes. HTML5 Video on iOS (Steve Souders) — While it’s true that Mobile Safari on iOS doesn’t buffer any video data as a …

Simpler workflow tools enable the rapid deployment of models

By Ben Lorica
April 21, 2013

Data science often depends on data pipelines, that involve acquiring, transforming, and loading data. (If you’re fortunate most of the data you need is already in usable form.) Data needs to be assembled and wrangled, before it can be visualized …

Publishing News: Crowdfunding, the new way to raise money for news

By Jenn Webb
April 19, 2013

Fundraising for news Mathew Ingram reports this week on one entrepreneurial blogger and journalist who, finding local news coverage of his home town lacking, crowdfunded his own hyper-local news blog. Ingram notes that Joey Coleman does not have a journalism …

Strata Week: Movers and shakers on the data journalism front

By Jenn Webb
April 19, 2013

Reuters launches Connected China, Pew instructs on downloading its data, and Twitter gets a data editor Yue Qiu and Wenxiong Zhang took a look this week at a data journalism effort by Reuters, the Connected China visualization application. Qiu and …

Finding and telling data-driven stories in billions of tweets

By Alex Howard
April 18, 2013

Twitter has hired its first data editor. Simon Rogers, one of the leading practitioners of data journalism in the world, will join Twitter. He will be moving his family from London to San Francisco and applying his skills to telling data-driven …

Commerce Weekly: Amazon patent indicates its interest in the payments space

By Jenn Webb
April 18, 2013

Editor’s note: This will be the final installment of our Commerce Weekly series. Mobile payments security, privacy concerns rise; Amazon may have a solution The race is on to democratize mobile payments, to create a solution that improves the payment …

We need incognito book purchasing

By François Joseph de Kermadec
April 18, 2013

In the physical realm, purchasing a book without revealing one’s identity involves little effort beyond proceeding to a store one does not usually patronise and paying in cash. Unless one is seeking illegal volumes, which are unlikely to be obtained …

Building native apps from JavaScript using Titanium

By Andy Oram
April 18, 2013

In this interview, the author of Titanium: Up and Running describes how Titanium can be used to generate native mobile apps from JavaScript code. He distinguishes the Titanium platform from native API programming and from other popular JavaScript platforms for …

Homo abudantia: From Oldowan to Ubiquity

By Corey Pressman
April 15, 2013

[This is the first in a series of articles intended to identify key watershed moments in the history of content and container.  Our intent is to frame the current moment in this story so that we may better understand the …

Publishing News: Democratized publishing and the digital divide

By Jenn Webb
April 12, 2013

Will rise in self-publishing leave world’s digital have-nots behind? Barnes & Noble announced this week it has upgraded and rebranded its PubIt! self-publishing platform and is launching Nook Press to better compete against platforms such as Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. …

Newbie author rediscovers his natural aversion to all things bureaucratic

By Michael Daugherty
April 12, 2013

Last week I talked about putting pen to paper, or keystrokes to Microsoft Word, and all the behind the scenes work that involved. When I felt I had no clue what I was doing, I remembered what my developmental editor …

The Fluent Online Conference Preview

By Simon St. Laurent
April 12, 2013

As JavaScript and the Web connect more and more technologies, conversations grow broader and broader. While the Fluent conference is large enough to cover a broad range, we created a sampler of topics for the two-hour online conference I hosted …

Three years of TOC at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair

By Sarah Towle
April 11, 2013

O’Reilly Media took its Tools of Change in Publishing Conference to Italy for the first time in 2011, teaming up with the Bologna Children’s Book Fair organizers to focus on opportunities for children’s content in digital publishing. That year the …

R as a programming language

By Courtney Nash
April 11, 2013

Garrett Grolemund is an O’Reilly author and teaches classes on data analysis for R Studios. We sat down to discuss why data scientists, statisticians, and programmers alike can use the R language to make data analysis easier and more powerful. …

Code Simplicity: The science of software design

By Max Kanat-Alexander
April 10, 2013

If you want to be a better programmer, a good first step would be to choose an area of software development to take additional responsibility for. Now, when we say “responsibility,” we don’t mean the sort of “you’re to blame …

Three questions for…Adam Salomone of The Harvard Common Press

By Joe Wikert
April 8, 2013

1. The Harvard Common Press recently announced plans to open an office in San Francisco to become more closely aligned with the food startup community. The food industry probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when most people …

What do you call a rhino with a pink horn? Alive.

By Edie Freedman
April 8, 2013

Pink is the new black, at least for some lucky rhinos in Africa. Endangered rhinos in South Africa are being hunted for their horns, which are smuggled to Asia and ground into powder for cooking and medicinal use. In an …

The post What do you call a rhino with a pink horn? Alive. appeared first on Animals.

Publishing News: Data is proving to be the backbone of emerging publishing models

By Jenn Webb
April 5, 2013

Data’s growing role in the digital publishing ecosystem Data is becoming a driving force in the era of digital content. From subscription strategies to target marketing and advertising to content curation and methods of consumption, data is increasingly becoming the …

A first-time author builds his team and starts writing the story

By Michael Daugherty
April 2, 2013

Last week I talked about the lessons learned from self-publishing boot camp. After the boot camp ended I knew I had a lot to learn. I liked the business challenges that I was seeing. For a guy coming in out …

Goodreads + Amazon: Winners and losers

By Joe Wikert
April 1, 2013

I decided to wait a few days before writing about Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads. I wanted to let the dust settle before weighing in with my own opinion. Now that I’ve had some time to mull it over, here’s what I …

Data Science tools: Are you “all in” or do you “mix and match”?

By Ben Lorica
March 31, 2013

An integrated data stack boosts productivity As I noted in my previous post, Python programmers willing to go “all in”, have Python tools to cover most of data science. Lest I be accused of oversimplification, a Python programmer still needs …

Publishing News: Goodreads readers are now valuable Amazon products

By Jenn Webb
March 29, 2013

Amazon marches on toward global retail domination The whiplash-inducing headline this week was Amazon’s announcement late Thursday that it has acquired book discovery and sharing site rival Goodreads. Industry response to the announcement was “swift and laced with skepticism,” Leslie …

Inspired by children’s ebooks

By Joe Wikert
March 27, 2013

The third TOC Bologna took place this past Sunday on the eve of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. It was a terrific show and closed with a session announcing the winners of the Bologna Ragazzi Awards for digital publishing. You’ll …

Dangerous ideas from the world of startups

By Todd Sattersten
March 26, 2013

Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager at Melville House, wrote a piece last week about the incursion of startup vocabulary in the world of book publishing. He says: [N]ow the models and the metaphors of the tech industry are, full-throatedly, without embarrassment, being used …

Publishing News: The SCOTUS “first sale” ruling spells trouble ahead for publishers

By Jenn Webb
March 22, 2013

Publishers express disappointment in SCOTUS “first sale” ruling Headline news this week was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the student textbook seller in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in which the court upheld the “first …

Commerce Weekly: The lucrative art of tracking shopper behavior

By Jenn Webb
March 21, 2013

Snooping on shoppers pays off Liz Gannes took a look this week at how online retailers’ desires to track consumers’ shopping habits are resulting in emerging startups offering services to track various behaviors on behalf of retailers. In a post …

The demise of Google Reader: Stability as a service

By Mike Loukides
March 21, 2013

Om Malik’s brief post on the demise of Google Reader raises a good point: If we can’t trust Google to keep successful applications around, why should we bother trying to use their new applications, such as Google Keep? Given the …

Commerce Weekly: The lucrative art of tracking shopper behavior

By Jenn Webb
March 21, 2013

Snooping on shoppers pays off Liz Gannes took a look this week at how online retailers’ desires to track consumers’ shopping habits are resulting in emerging startups offering services to track various behaviors on behalf of retailers. In a post …

A Nate Silver book recommendation engine

By Joe Wikert
March 21, 2013

It’s NCAA tournament time here in the U.S. and plenty of bracketologists are turning to Nate Silver for his statistical expertise. Silver, of course, is known for his book, The Signal and the Noise, as well as predicting presidential elections and Major …

The Kirtsaeng ruling: What’s your opinion?

By Joe Wikert
March 19, 2013

Wow. I’m very surprised by the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Kirtsaeng vs. Wiley case. I figured it would go the other way. Here’s a nice summary of the majority opinion from the Supreme Court (you’ll find more detailed analysis here): …

Publishing News: A used ebook market may hold more opportunity than risk

By Jenn Webb
March 15, 2013

Opportunities in used ebook resale With the recent patents filed by Apple and Amazon to create used digital resale platforms and digital resale company ReDigi’s ongoing court case that will weigh in on the legality of reselling used digital goods, …

Commerce Weekly: Intuit Pay heats up U.K. mobile payments market

By Jenn Webb
March 14, 2013

Intuit Pay enters U.K., PayPal Here takes on Square Register On the heels of PayPal announcing it would bring PayPal Here to the U.K. later this year, Intuit launched its Intuit Pay mobile payments solution in the U.K. market. The …

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