2011 threat predictions, Google's Hotpot trial, and Facebook's stuffed piggy bank.
by David Sims
| @ndwoods | 7 January 2011
In this edition of ePayments Week: mobile platforms and geo services appear in McAfee Labs' Threats Predictions report; Google tests near-field communications; and what will Facebook do with all that new money?
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A look at what works in a census visualization.
by S?bastien Pierre
| @ffunction | 7 January 2011
In this first post in a new series on data visualization, S?bastien Pierre takes a close look at the New York Times' "Mapping America" interactive census map.
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User Experience, Big Data Case Study, DimDim Acquired, Secret to the Web
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat | 7 January 2011
- Users Can Self-Report Problems -- users self-report 50% of the problems that professional usability testing uncovers, and they find problems that usability testers don't. (The other way to look at this is: self-reporting only finds half the actual problems in a site)
- The Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox (PDF) -- challenges faced by Gmail Priority Inbox and how they beat them. Priority Inbox ranks mail at a rate far exceeding the capacity of a single machine. It is also dif?cult to predict the data center that will handle a user’s Gmail account, so we must be able to score any user from any data center, without delaying mail delivery(via Hacker News)
- DimDim Acquired by Salesforce -- congrats to the founder, who was an OSCON speaker, and his team. The open source remains, but will not be contributed to by Salesforce. DD Ganguly, the founder, is a good smart chap and I look forward to his next project.
- WWIC -- As Tim said when he forwarded this around: This is absolutely brilliant. Think deeply on it. Act on it. (via Alex Howard in email)
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A look at free services that reveal traffic data, server details and popularity.
by Pete Warden
| @petewarden | 6 January 2011
You no longer have to be a technical specialist to find exciting and surprising data. In this excerpt from Pete Warden's ebook, "Where are the bodies buried on the web? Big data for journalists," Pete looks at four services that reveal underlying information about web pages and domains.
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The founder of Drawn to Scale explains how his database platform does simple things quickly.
by David Sims
| @ndwoods | 6 January 2011
Bradford Stephens, founder of of Drawn to Scale, discusses big data systems that work in "user time."
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Q&A;, Phone Numbers, CoffeeScript 1.0, and Open Source Community Building
by Nat Torkington
| @gnat | 6 January 2011
- Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions (Joel Spolsky) -- StackOverflow has mechanisms to remove the need to reask common questions. The editing feature is there so that old question/answer pairs can get better and better. For every person who asks a question and gets an answer on Stack Overflow, hundreds or thousands of people will come read that conversation later. [...] This is fundamentally different from Usenet or any of the web-based forums. [...] it’s actually a community-edited wiki of narrow, “long-tail” questions. Joel then goes on to plead, When you see a question that seems like it might reflect a common problem, don’t just answer it to get a few points. That doesn’t make the Internet any better, which sounds like a broken incentive system (get points for reanswering common questions, not for merging). The Wikipedia reference reminded me of Benjamin Mako Hill's comment to me at dinner several years ago, that Wikipedia's invisible advantage is the naming system where each concept has a single name. Stack Overflow's content-matching smarts will have to substitute for the naming scheme, and that could be tricky.
- libphonenumber -- Google's Java and Javascript libraries for parsing, formatting, storing, and validating international phone numbers. (via Hacker News)
- CoffeeScript -- a little language that compiles to Javascript. Just went to v1.0.
- Open Source Community Building: A Guide to Getting it Right (Dave Neary) -- The history of free & open source software development is filled with stories of companies who are disappointed with their first experiences in community development. The technical director who does not understand why community projects do not accept features his team has spent months developing, or the management team that expects substantial contributions from outside the company to arrive overnight when they release software they’ve developed. Chris Grams once described the Tom Sawyer model of community engagement - companies who expect other people to do their job for them. Make sure you don’t fall into that trap. (via Glyn Moody on Twitter)
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