I finished reading “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” by Timothy Wu. Here’s my short review in more than 140 characters.
Timothy Wu describes how, historically, information industries have tended to cycle from the freedom and openness that follows a disruptive invention to monopoly. About two thirds of the book are devoted to retelling the history of four such industries: Telephone, radio, movies, television. These are intriguing and eye-opening stories: How Hollywood started out as a bunch of “IP pirates”; how the FCC came about and what they were up to; how the Bell System delayed technologies like magnetic storage media and the answering machine for decades; etc.
UPDATE: The problem has been fixed on identi.ca’s side. Maybe the workaround will be useful to others in some other context at some other time. I will also remove the certificate mentioned below from my system. It won’t be needed any longer, and who knows what nasty side effects it might have going forward…
I ran into this problem today where Gwibber (the micro-blogging client) on Ubuntu would not work with identi.ca anymore. The bug report referred to the log file ~/.xsession-errors, which contained this message:
When gNewSense GNU/Linux migrated their web site from PmWiki to MoinMoin, I volunteered to write a script to get the job done. These were the requirements:
Convert ~1500 pages with attachments without losing any data or formatting
Migrate 4 years worth of revision history (>10000 edits)
Import ~2500 user accounts
The versions that we used on the gNewSense web site were PmWiki 2.1.27 and MoinMoin 1.7.3 (also tested with 1.9.3).
The gNewSense web site after the migration to MoinMoin
I modified the PmWiki engine so that it produces intermediate markup instead of HTML. The intermediate markup is then converted to MoinMoin markup by a Python script.
I decided against writing my own PmWiki parser based on one of the existing scripts listed on the MoinMoin web site. These scripts were written for older PmWiki versions, and getting them to understand all the details of PmWiki markup the way PmWiki does would have been quite a challenge in any case.
By having PmWiki produce intermediate markup, I leave the hard work to PmWiki itself, while still retaining the semantic information that might not be available in the HTML anymore (for example, a Table of Contents might look like any ordered list in HTML; on the markup level, it’s something entirely different).
Maybe you have a blog, a Twitter page, a Flickr photostream, and a bunch of other sites. And maybe when you post to one of your sites, you want the post to appear on all your other sites automatically.
I currently do this with RSS and Atom feeds and some Yahoo Pipes magic.
Flowchart of connected sites
If the web site has an RSS feed (and which site doesn’t?), it is very easy to connect it to Twitter, identi.ca, and other social networks by using Twitterfeed. Basically, you create an account on Twitterfeed, tell it the address of the RSS feed, connect it to your Twitter account (using OAuth), and whenever there is a new post on the RSS feed, it will be posted to Twitter.
In order to connect a site to your Google Profile, you first add a link to it in the profile settings. Make sure to tick the box that says “This is a profile page about me”. Then, on the linked site, you add an XFN link with a rel="me" attribute back to the Google Profile. This can be either a visible link using the <a> tag (which is what Twitter and other sites use for the web link that you specify for your profile page there), or using the <link> tag inside the page header:
When Google launched “Instant Search” earlier today, commentators applauded and/or criticized the way Google predicts what you’re searching for.
If you haven’t seen Instant Search yet, see Google’s announcement or watch a video.
In a nutshell, when you start typing in the search box, a drop-down list appears suggesting possible completions. What’s new and actually quite exciting about Instant Search is that the results page for the topmost completion is automatically displayed in the background. You don’t even have to click the Search button.
So, when I type “p”, the topmost suggested completion is “pandora”. While I’m typing, the search results for “pandora” are displayed, just as if I had pressed Return.
Mike filed the story in the category “from the this-is-a-joke,-right? dept”, so I figure he didn’t buy it entirely. But the story goes to show how screwed up the patent system is, so to hell with it—why not post it anyway, right?
I dug deeper and it turns out that the patent thing was added to the German Wikipedia page on January 3, 2006 by an anonymous user. Here’s the full edit, translated to English by me (emphasis is mine):
The media is full of opinion polls. But knowledge polls would often be much more interesting. For example, if people weren’t asked about their opinion on government reform plans but about what they actually know about these reform plans that they are to judge.
The “Bild” newspaper [Germany's top-selling tabloid] did this today—unintentionally, of course. They asked lots of people what they think about “Google Street View” and whether they will make sure that their houses are not being shown in the controversial offering[1]. (“Google Street View” combines the maps of “Google Maps” with images of entire streets that the company has photographed, and for the first time this year it will show views of 20 German cities.)
The responses of many people that are given a voice by “Bild” show one thing above anything else: how little the respondents know about the offering. Many seem to believe that it consists of live recordings and that Google virtually monitors the whole world around the clock. In addition, people faces and license plates are blurred in the photos.
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