There is a small genre of posts around re-inventing the interfaces of popular open source software; I thought I’d collect some of them for future reference: Recent: Drupal WordPress: ma.tt, wp.com Older: Firefox: 0.1 release notes Visual Editor: first blog post I can find (though I’m sure there are many emails), Economist The first two…
paper ideas Archives
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Flickr recently started selling prints of Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike photos without sharing any of the revenue with the original photographers. When people were surprised, Flickr said “if you don’t want commercial use, switch the photo to CC non-commercial”. This seems to have mostly caused two reactions: “This is horrible! Creative Commons is horrible!” “Commercial…
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It has been nearly a full decade since Jon Udell’s classic screencast about Wikipedia’s article on the Heavy Metal Umlaut (current text; Jan. 2005). In this post, written for Paul Jones’ “living and working online” class, I’d like to use the last decade’s changes to the article to illustrate some points about the modern Wikipedia.1 Measuring…
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I’m trying to find a book on the political history of multilingualism in the US; in other words, of why/when it started becoming acceptable (and in some cases required) for government works, electoral ballots, etc., to be written and printed in multiple languages. This is related to some of the talk about mozilla-as-social-movement that a…
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A few months ago I finished reading Arthur Bestor‘s ‘Backwoods Utopias‘, a book on the Utopian social-communitarian movements of the pre-Civil War US. Some belated notes on the book’s themes follow. The average high school US history textbook gives a thumbnail sketch of these movements, but for those who didn’t get that or don’t remember…
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Samuelson Picker Grimmelman Perhaps some day before the case settles I’ll actually be able to read them all. In the meantime linking here so that I can find them all later.
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Hey, all. I’m in need of data about ‘typical’ computer usage- i.e., ‘in 2007, the average computer user spent X% of time on the internet, Y% of time doing word processing, Z% of time listening to music, etc.’ The ideal data set would have this information for a number of years- ideally going back at…
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Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License: For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon Gächter may be of interest. Key sentence: [W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people’s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more…
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All too short and insubstantive piece on the Amazon ‘top reviewers’. Reminds me a bit of the wikipedia cabal discussion. We will eventually demand transparency in these institutions, I think. (via the awesome furdlog– must-read if you want to keep tabs on some of the big picture tech policy issues, especially as understood by the…
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Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund is speaking at the Princeton Cloud Computing seminar I’m at. Their ‘data bill of rights’: This Data Bill of Rights is our promise to you. You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want. Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and…