Posts

Larry Lessig writes about transparency in The New Republic. Here’s his argument: How could anyone be against transparency? Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse. And I fear that the inevitable success of this movement–if pursued alone, without any sensitivity to the full complexity of the idea of perfect openness–will inspire not reform, but disgust. The “naked transparency movement,” as I will call it here, is not going to inspire change. It will simply push any faith in our political system over the cliff. ...

Rogers Cadenhead posted a thoughtful reply to Derek Powazek’s anti-SEO rant that’s worth reading: Have you ever tried to help a small business launch a new site and be discovered by potential customers on search engines? It’s a difficult task that’s vital to their livelihood. The black-hat junk that he slams makes it even harder for them. Good SEO is essential to these businesses, which aren’t in a position to simply “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again,” since they are not web auteurs with a 14-year track record of launching great sites. Try explaining to a company that provides environmental cleanup services across two states that it doesn’t need SEO because it just has to create something cool and tell people about it. Or a local chiropractor. Companies pay yellow-page publishers hundreds or even thousands of dollars for a single ad because the need to be found by customers is so important. A lot of customers never look at those phonebooks anymore. They use Google. ...

Derek Powazek on search engine optimization: And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you. Do. Not. Trust. Them.

One of the oddest things I’m thankful for in life was that I didn’t love football enough to be really good at it. I played football in junior high and high school, but I never really loved it. To be more specific, I love the game of football, but I was never able to turn off the part of my brain that constantly does cost/benefit analysis. I have known for a long time that the more years you spend on the football field, the more you have to deal with joint pain and stiffness later in life, but it’s only been recently that people have started talking about the huge concussion problem that afflicts former football players. ...

Letters of Note has a really cool example of steganography in practice – a letter from a British revolutionary war general that includes a secret message readable by placing a mask over the letter. The mask and letter were sent to the recipient via different routes.

Felix Salmon lays out one of the reasons I really hate credit scores.

Matthew Yglesias has a very smart post on the news business that really captures the problem for people in the news business. Mainly, that the Web and Google are bad for the news business, but not really bad for people following the news. I honestly don’t know how good the national news coverage is in my local paper, much less the international news, but I really don’t care. The local paper does a good job on local issues, and for national and international news, I have the New York Times, the BBC, and whatever washes up on Google News. If I want to know what’s going on in Israel, I read papers from Israel. The structure of the news business that’s going away made sense when you had to go to the library to read national papers, but in this day and age, I can read anybody’s local paper. I’m with Yglesias, now is the best time ever to be a news junkie. ...

If you’ve ever been curious about what kind of money you can make writing computer books, check out Peter Cooper’s post What I’ve Earned (and Learned. Having written a number of books myself, I find his article matches up pretty well with my experience.

GitHub explains their new architecture, having replace Mongrel with Unicorn (the hot new Ruby Web server all the kids are talking about). Even if you’re not deploying Rails applications, it’s interesting to read about how Unicorn’s process-based architecture beats Mongrel’s thread-based approach.

Google founder Sergey Brin takes to the pages of the New York Times today to explain the value of Google Books: But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down. ...