Gamers Mimic the Season’s Ups and Downs. The popular teams among players of Madden NFL 2011 were those that were winning and successful in real life. Pretty cool data from the New York Times. (via Flowing Data)
Heavy Analytics for BuddyPress. Pretty cool looking plugin in development to display detailed stats about users in a WordPress multi-site installation. Hat tip to Stephane Daury.
Ian Dunt at The Guardian writes about the hypocrisy of the media attack on Wikileaks:
The only difference between Wikileaks and other news organisations is that Wikileaks is doing its job properly. This is not a symptom of its greater intelligence, merely its ability to comprehend the ramifications of new technology. Wikileaks is like a symbol of globalisation.
37signals launched a bulk subscription suite for their apps a couple of days ago. In the launch announcement I noticed that they refer to users as owning their apps:
Currently the 37signals Suite is only available for people who already own a Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire account. If you own any one of these apps you can upgrade to the Suite in less than 60 seconds. We will be offering the ability to sign up for the Suite from scratch down the road, but we just don’t know when yet. Note: If you don’t own one of our products yet, and you’d like to purchase the Suite, just sign up for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, or Campfire and then follow the upgrade instructions above. (emphasis mine)
Despite the fact that you pay a monthly fee to use those apps 37signals says users own the product. They back this up by allowing a functional HTML or XML export of most content at any time.
Compare that to Twitter, whose Terms of Service say “what’s yours is yours – you own your content.” Sounds similar right? Too bad Twitter does not provide a way to export more than 3200 tweets.
My last post threw me against an odd stumbling block with new-style retweets on Twitter: there are no permalinks for retweets.
In a post explaining the changes to retweets almost a year ago Evan Williams noted various problems with the old style of retweets. Two mentioned were that retweets were untrackable and that they created confusion over attribution. This may be true of the old style but the new method is even worse for attribution in any medium other than Twitter’s.
That post I mention above was about a slick, adaptive CSS grid framework. I only found it because Lauren Rabaino retweeted an earlier post from Nathan Smith.
So what are my options if I want to give Lauren credit in a blog post?
I can link to her profile page which will be irrelevant for that tweet in a short while.
I could link to the original tweet from Nathan Smith. This would show Lauren’s profile picture as one of the retweets but it doesn’t scale well. If the tweet were more popular and had dozens of retweets Lauren’s information might not even appear. For example, 56 people retweeted this but only 15 avatars show.
There ought to be an easier way. Twitter should have a permalink to both the original tweet as well as something I can link to showing it was Lauren that made me aware of the post.
Proper attribution in this case only exists within Twitter’s platform. Maybe that’s the point. If that’s true it’s frustrating to say the least. Retweeting is a form of publishing and we as users ought to be able to link to any form of published content on the web.
Later today I’m presenting about how to use Edit Flow to master an editorial workflow from within WordPress. The slides below cover what I’m talking about which includes some new features coming in 0.6 which will be released shortly.
If you have any questions about the plugin or the talk feel free to drop by in the comments. We’re also looking for general feedback about features and how Edit Flow is being used. We’d love to hear your thoughts about how you’re using Edit Flow.
VaultPress added more detailed stats yesterday. In this release are ways of measuring your site’s vitality as well as displaying what time of day and what day of the week you blog most often. Pretty cool stuff.
Alex Byers makes an interesting case for journalists not learning programming skills:
Writers will produce the best written word, photographers will snap the best pictures, and programmers will build the best apps. That’s not going to change, so don’t give up being awesome at something so you can be insufficient at a lot of things.
Perhaps, but this presumes a disconnect between writing and knowing the code that drives your platform of choice. I would argue that knowing the fundamentals of development allows you to fine tune your writing.
The best writer is one that hones the craft and pushes a medium’s boundaries. If you know the basics of code you’ll be best able to set yourself apart as a writer who does something exceptional with a platform.
http://www.r2.co.nz/clientbin/player-licensed-viral.swf
Mark Pesce’s blog the human network is a must read and he just published the full video of his talk at Webstock. The transcript was posted back in February but the video is well worth watching.
Here are some scattered annotations on what Pesce discusses:
In an effort to start tracking some of the ideas I have while reading I want to start making note of ideas and questions that come up here. This is the first of such posts and we’ll see what form they take in the future.
Interesting article that examines some of the frustrations with current systems for tracking reading habits. Since I just finished writing an article for The Whitman Pioneer about open knowledge systems this got me thinking:
Long feature piece from The New York Times about the various ways people are tracking data about their everyday lives. It turns out that seemingly mundane things can offer remarkable insight into how our minds and bodies work. Couple points about this:
