Biweekly links for 02/29/2008

• FriendFeed Changelog
  • FriendFeed is publishing the change log as they revise their code. It’s like being able to see a telegraphic version of Shakespeare’s (well, maybe Stephen King) thoughts as he revised his work. Looks like junk at first, but I’ll bet it’s a gold mine.
• Google gives free voicemail to San Francisco’s homeless – Machinist – Salon.com
  • “The service, [San Francisco Mayor] Newsom said, will help people who are filling out job applications or are awaiting medical test results.” 4000 numbers already handed out. Good stuff.
• Joel Spolsky: How Hard Could It Be?
  • “The combination of “seems impossible” and “strong network effects” is about as close as you can get to the magic formula for incredible, sustainable success, as with eBay, Wikipedia, and Google.”
• Underground Value: Warren Buffett at Emory
  • Buffett appears both unusually insightful and to have his head screwed on.
• Infovore: Making bridges talk
  • The London Tower Bridge now has a Twitter account: “I am closing after the MV Dixie Queen has passed upstream.” I used to occasionally feel like I was living in a William Gibson novel. The feeling is getting near-continual.
• The Remembrance Agent
  • The Remembrance Agent (Remem) is an Emacs plug-in that watches over your shoulder and suggests information relevant to what you’re reading or writing.
• darcusblog: Remembrance Agent for Web 2.0
  • The Remembrance agent was (is, in fact, although I haven’t used it in years) an interestingemacs application that reminded you in real time of documents that might be relevant to what you’re working on. This post discusses possible networked analogues.
• Scott Rosenberg’s Wordyard
  • A new blog subscription. Rosenberg was co-founder of Salon.com, and wrote “Dreaming in Code”, a thoughtful biography and ethnography of the Chandler software project.
• Peer Review Report
  • Interesting report summarizing scientists’ attitudes towards peer review. This is the summary (22 pages!), a longer report is available at the same site. I do wonder whether the organization that commissioned the report has an axe to grind.
• Git: Linus is a designer
  • Interesting comments on Git, the new distributed version control system. Important for more than programmers, I expect we’ll see distributed version control seep into all kinds of user-generated content.
• a canadian startup: User Statistics Overload
  • Helpful advice on extracting statistics from a website.
• Coding Horror: I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users
  • The title is a tease. Really about how exactly software developers should (and shouldn’t) listen to their users. Mostly, pay attention to what they do, rather than what they say they want.
• Information Arbitrage
  • Just added to my blogroll. The author, Roger Ehrenberg, is a former Wall Streeter using “the Internet to pursue the dream of Information Arbitrage, a place where hard-to-find, ‘long tail’ information is accessed, analyzed and monetized”.
• BoingBoing: Love: massively multiplayer world created by lone developer
  • Beautiful screenshots. It’s all done by one guy! We’ve come a long way from MacPaint.
• Kevin Kelly on unconferences
• Peer Review – perspectives of the scholarly community
• The Advantages of Closing a Few Doors – New York Times
  • A form of bias: people try to keep their options open, even when that is to their disadvantage.
• David Rusenko: The importance of launching early and staying alive
  • Good article on the growth of startup companies. Has data which graphically illustrates the benefits of press versus word of mouth.
• The downside of a good idea
  • Claim: “When information is freely shared, good ideas can stunt innovation by distracting others from pursuing even better ideas”
• Official Google Blog: Hal Varian on what makes Google better
  • Varian’s conclusion is rather banal – Google has been doing this longer, which helps them do it better. I’m skeptical this is the whole story.
• 30 of the Most Creative Bookshelves Designs
  • I’m partial to the first.
• YouTube: MapReduce lectures
  • A set of six lectures explaining Google’s MapReduce algorithm.
• Karl Schroeder: Technology really is legislation
  • Karl Schroeder points to and provides interesting metacommentary on Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby’s recent comments that code really can be law.
• Joel Spolsky: Can Your Programming Language Do This?
  • Excellent article explaining Google’s MapReduce algorithm, a tool used internally by Google to parallelize tasks across their cluster.
• Dunning-Kruger effect
  • Roughly, the effect that the ignorant think they know more than they do, while the expert think they know less.
• Pakistan accidentally launches massive denial of service attack on… Pakistan
  • The Onion cannot hope to compete.

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