Home / radar.oreilly.com rss archive / August-27-2007


Grandma definitely gets MySpace
A popular piece of advice teens are given about sharing their lives online in places like MySpace is "don't put up anything that you wouldn't want your grandma to see". So I was rather amused to learn today that my...

Carl Malamud Takes on WestLaw
Carl Malamud has this funny idea that public domain information ought to be... well, public. He has a history of creating public access databases on the net when the provider of the data has failed to do so or has...

My Tongue-Lashing from Eben Moglen
It created a bit of a stir at the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing on Open Source a few weeks ago when Eben Moglen, who'd been invited to speak with me about free software licensing in the era of Web...

The Ethics of Web Advertising (and a 10-Year-Old Secret Revealed)
Jakob Nielsen, who's been writing about usability roughly since our prehuman ancestors crawled out of the primordial muck, has a characteristically rigorous post about banner blindness in which he examines, among other things, the ethics of display advertising. It starts...

Google Releases YouTube-Style Embedded Maps
View Larger Map As rumored last week, Google Maps has released a feature that lets you easily embed a Google Map on any web page (see above, I hope) that would normally accept YouTube Videos or an iframe. Be...

GIS, Landsat, and Public Data
Google has announced new integration between two of their most popular products, Google Earth and Google Book Search. My Radar colleague Brady Forrest has eloquently discussed these features. This is wonderful, and a step toward truly integrative functionality among diverse...

Books In Google Earth
Google is continuing the integration of its web services into Google Earth. On the same day that they announced their embeddable maps, they have announced that you can turn on the book layer in Google Earth. They have also...

O'Reilly Launches Money:Tech Conference
Earlier this year, I began noodling on the parallels between Web 2.0 and financial markets. That led to a session on this topic as part of the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing at ETech, and an issue of the Release 2.0...

University Publishing with Comments
From the Institute for the Future of the Book: The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library, in partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book, has published an interactive, publicly commentable edition of the the...

Peak Google
Google is presently the big pig at the online advertising trough, commanding by some estimates up to 62% of the $40B online advertising market. I was reading the latest 10-Q quarterly filing from Google, where it quite clearly states:...

The Google Exchange
Paul Duguid's recent article in First Monday on the worth and merits of Google's Book digitization drew a range of comment and criticism. The most insightful and valuable subsequent exchange to my knowledge was that occurring between Paul himself and...

Should Do This: The Robot Coop's Suggestion Box
The Robot Coop's site 43Things prompts users to answer the question "What should I do with my life?". Today they have launched a new product, Should Do This, which prompts people to tell others what they should do. It's...

eBooks with that "old book" smell
During the TOC Conference in June, keynoter Manolis Kelaidis talked about how much he loved the feel and smell of books, even those on his shelf that he's never read. A compelling case for the codex form factor. Now comes...

German and Japanese Wikipedia scanner
Time for more excitement on the Wikipedia front. Last week Virgil released the English Wikiscanner, as I wrote about previously. This week, it is time for German and Japanese edits to be exposed, with the newly-released German and Japanese Wikiscanner....

Context Aware Image Re-Sizing
If you have a large image that you need to make smaller you can either scale it or crop it. Scaling makes everything smaller and cropping can cut out important content. This jaw-dropping video demonstrates an image re-sizing algorithm...