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When Jack Hidary told me about National Lab Day, I got chills. The tag line for National Lab Day is: A National Barn-Raising for Hands-On Learning. Using the internet and social computing technologies, with the support of the White House and the business and scientific communities, National Lab Day reaches out to the education community, providing a tool set that brings context, community, and passion to education, and that has the potential to transform our educational system into a true learning commun...

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If you are reading this post it means that after countless misfires, I finally kept my attention focused long enough to finish it. That may seem like no big deal, a mere trifling effort, but I'm basking in the moment. In fact, I'll probably tweet it.

It didn't start out to be about digital Skinner boxes. It was a Radar backchannel email about the infamous Web 2.0 Expo Twitterfall incident. I got all curmudgeonly and ranted about continuous partial attention, Twitter as a snark amplifier, and the "Ignit...

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1. Why Git Is So Fast -- interesting mailing list post about the problems that the JGit folks had when they tried to make their Java version of Git go faster. Higher level languages hide enough of the machine that we can't make all of these optimizations. A reminder that you must know and control the systems you're running on if you want to get great performance. (via Hacker News)
2. Wooden Combination Lock -- you'll easily understand how combination locks work with this find piece of crafty construction work.

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Thy self thou gav'st, thy own worth then not knowing

(This post is the fourth in a series called "Being online: identity, anonymity, and all things in between.")

Voracious data foraging leads advertisers along two paths. One of
their aims is to differentiate you from other people. If vendors know
what condiments you put in your lunch or what material you like your
boots made from, they can pinpoint their ads and promotions more
precisely at you. That's why they love it when you volunteer that
inf...

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1. Trading Shares in Milliseconds (Technology Review) -- With the rise of automation, the bulk of U.S. stock trading has moved from the once-crowded floor of Manhattan's New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to silent server farms run by exchanges and broker-dealers across the country: the proportion of all trades that the NYSE handles has shrunk from 80 percent in 2005 to 40 percent today. Trading is now essentially a virtual art, and its practitioners put such a premium on speed that NASDAQ has considered issuing ...

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I've been a fan of Jackson Fish Market's work since before they existed. My first Radar post about them talked about founder Hillel Cooperman's personal food site, Tasting Menu, which was and is amazingly detailed and hunger-inspiring. Jackson Fish has the same, or higher, quality of work -- software craftsmanship that makes each of their sites immediately identifiable and distinct, graphically full and compelling.

I'm totally gaga, though, over their new site, A Story Before Bed. This might be one of t...

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The 8th Ignite Seattle is this Tuesday, 12/1. We've got an amazing set of speakers and fun opening activity. We are once again at the King Cat Theatre in Downtown Seattle.

Doors open at 7PM. The contest will start at 7:30 and the talks will begin at 8:30. You can track Ignite Seattle updates at http://igniteseattle.com.

Here is our list of awesome speakers:

Benjamin Franklin Intellect: without an outlet in the world

Do we remain in awe of Ben Franklins capacity and accomplishments or do we take on ...

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After the recent Web 2.0 Expo NY--a sprawling, week-long conference and exhibition--I ducked into the Morgan Library to catch "A Woman's Wit: Jane Austen's Life and Legacy." A one-room show about an 18th century novelist seemed like the perfect antidote to a week of tech talk in the Death Star Javits Center.

As I'd hoped, the Morgan focuses on a handful of objects from Austen's life, and the commentary is thoughtful. I was surprised, though, to find myself thinking that had Twitter been around in Austen's...

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1. Paywall Performance for News -- the National Business Review (NBR) in New Zealand went to a paywall in mid-July, and Foo Camper Lance Wiggs says their visitor numbers reveal a grim picture. As a commenter says, of course, visitor numbers go down but NBR makes money directly from the visitors that stay. I'm curious to see the effect on advertisers now the site's incentives are not to spray their load far and wide to land on as many eyeballs as possible. An interesting canary in the mine for Rupert's paywa...

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1. English Shellcode (PDF) -- paper presented at ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, showing how to encode arbitrary x86 shell code (the payload in a malware or other attack that elevates privileges and pwns your machine) as something that looks, at first glance, to be English text. Impressive piece of work. (via Slashdot)
2. The Twelve Scams of Christmas (McAfee) -- a press release, but one to send to all your civilian (non-computer-professional) friends. Scam IV: The Dangers of Holiday E...

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Loren Feldman. 1938 Media. Audience Conference.

Thats about as much of a summary as youll find about the Audience Conference held in New York last Friday. Thats because there were no open laptops allowed during the performances. There was also no Wi-Fi, no video streaming, no tweeting, and no blogging. Something akin to omertà joined the members of the Audience Conference together.

This bond of silence was at the core of the Audience Conference, and it goes against everything that technology and Web 2.0...

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Loren Feldman. 1938 Media. Audience Conference.

Thats about as much of a summary as youll find about the Audience Conference held in New York last Friday. Thats because there were no open laptops allowed during the performances. There was also no Wi-Fi, no video streaming, no tweeting, and no blogging. Something akin to omertà joined the members of the Audience Conference together.

This bond of silence was at the core of the Audience Conference, and it goes against everything that technology and Web 2.0...

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1. ParticipateDB -- database of online tools for public participation. Closed alpha now, with 32 tools and 15 projects in the database. (via Sara Winge)
2. DataTO -- like data.gov, but it's where users request data sets. (In this case, from the Toronto municipal government)
3. Go -- new language from Bell Labs and Unix central figures Rob Pike and Ken Thompson, who now work at Google. Bits of C, bits of Google, it compiles to native binaries and runs nearly as fast as C. Built with concurrency and memory manage...

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The people of the United States are finally pulling together around the
goals of reducing health care costs (by far the highest per capita in
the world) and improving outcomes (we have the worst health of any
developed country). Everyone seems to recognize the critical
importance of data and communications in these efforts. So several of
us at O'Reilly Media, having been involved with information
technologies for some time, are tracking the issues that come up in
deploying computer technology in health ca...

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1. The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version -- Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh)
2. Screens in Context -- ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of the longest histories of trying to understand interaction, its a very different set of tools that digitalness brings; ones that designers a...

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Twitter is suffering outages today as they fend off a Denial of Service attack, and so I thought it would be helpful to post John Adams exceptional Velocity session about Operations at Twitter.

Good luck today John & team I know its going to be a long day!

1. Computers Unlock More Secrets of the Indus Valley Script -- Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script. The team led by a University of Washington rese...

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1. Computers Unlock More Secrets of the Indus Valley Script -- Four-thousand years ago, an urban civilization lived and traded on what is now the border between Pakistan and India. During the past century, thousands of artifacts bearing hieroglyphics left by this prehistoric people have been discovered. Today, a team of Indian and American researchers are using mathematics and computer science to try to piece together information about the still-unknown script. The team led by a University of Washington rese...

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In 1906 a researcher realized that in the 13th century a book of Archimedes' treatises had been over-written with prayers. Almost a century later the original manuscript was recovered through the high-tech efforts of Dr. Will Noel. In this Ignite talk he shares the secrets of the Palimpsest and the technology used to uncover them.

As described on the Archimedes Palimpsest on Wikipedia:

Archimedes lived in the third century BC, but the copy of his work was made in the tenth century AD by an anonymous scrib...

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Velocity 2009 took place last week in San Jose, with Jesse Robbins
and I serving as co-chairs. Back in
November 2008, while we were planning Velocity, I said I wanted to highlight "best practices in performance and operations that improve the user experience as well as the company's bottom line." Much of my work focuses on the how of improving performance - tips developers use to create even faster web sites. What's been missing is the why. Why is it important for companies to focus on performance?

That ques...

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1. The Onyas -- New Zealand web design awards launch, from the people behind Webstock and Full Code Press. The name comes from "good on ya", the highest praise that traditionally taciturn New Zealanders are allowed by law to give.
2. The Year of Business Metrics: Don't make your users run away! -- wrapup of the Velocity conference. AOL: Users who had a slower experience view far fewer pages. Some interesting notes on performance from a Google-Bing study: Notice that as the delays get longer the Time To Click i...

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The code for Adrian Holovaty's Everyblock has been released. The open-sourcing of the site's system were apart of the Knight News Challenge Program. Everyblock is very impressive site that aggregates and geocodes local data -- news, crime, fire, restaraunt inspections and reviews - and then lets users define their interests down to the block-level.

Adrian made the announcement on 6/30. Here's the list of newly open-sourced, GPL'd goodies found on Everyblock's new Code page:

The main package (probably...

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On Monday Neil McAllister posed the question "is the hacker ethic harming American developers?" Slashdot picked it up and Tim forwarded it to the Radar list. As you might expect, it resulted in some spirited discussion.

James Turner kicked things off with this response (it has been slightly edited from its email form). After James lays out his argument I'll reply with my thoughts. Then we hope to hear from you. Let us know what you think.

I've worked in a lot of organizations that thought that the ki...

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1. The Digital Open -- The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers.
2. Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian's Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment -- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like a game. "Any time that youre trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what theyre do...

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We were honored to have Jonathan Heiliger, Facebooks VP of Technology Operations, as our opening keynote speaker at Velocity. Jonathan is one of the most accomplished leaders in our field, and is a master of the craft.

Here is his keynote in its entirety:

Note: Other videos from Velocity are being posted to VelocityConference.blip.tv

This article is the last in a series leading up to the

Personal Democracy Forum.
The
first article
was posted on June 16
and the
second article
on June 19.

Whole libraries could be filled with writings about the growth of
executive power during United States history. The power of the
executive branch is likely to increase with technology. But for open
government, that growth may be a necessary transition to more public
involvement.

As its name indicates, the executive branch is responsible for
ca...

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I spoke at Jeff Pulver's 140conf a few weeks ago. My subject was the continuity of what I do, from publishing through conferences through my presence on twitter. I tried to draw the connections, and to explain how "social media" means drawing from, curating, and amplifying the voices of a community. I suggest that the role of an editor and publisher is analogous to the role of a point guard in basketball, handing out "assists" and improving the performance of his or her teammates. After all, I point out, ...

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