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Make Magazine Weekend Project: Beetlebot - Simple robot from your parts bin that avoids obstacles

2009-11-21T01:01:54Z

O'Reilly Media

What's Hot in O'Reilly Answers - iPhone sensors, Managing traffic load, Making email filters work, and much more!

2009-11-21T00:57:57Z

Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Watch Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo Keynote - Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009 Concludes

2009-11-20T16:12:30Z

Watch Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

Find news coverage and the latest photos and video, plus the full session schedule at the Web 2.0 Expo site.

Asia Continues to be Facebook's Strongest Growth Region

2009-11-20T12:00:00Z

With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).

Four short links: 20 November 2009 - Social Network Search for Morons, Bulking Up Bio Data, Better E-Mail, Better Standards

2009-11-20T11:00:00Z

Introducing the Open Web Foundation Agreement -- Applying the open source approach to better standards. The Open Web Foundation Agreement itself establishes the copyright and patent rights for a specification, ensuring that downstream consumers may freely implement and reuse the licensed specification without seeking further permission. In addition to the agreement itself, we also created an easy-to-read "Deed" that provides a high level overview of the agreement. This and more in today's Four Short Links.

Health gets personal in the cloud - Google Health Beta and Microsoft's My Health Info

2009-11-19T21:00:00Z

Healthcare in the near future will be quite different than it is today. Web enabled technology is already changing the way medicine is practiced. As the digital nation comes of age we will see new opportunities, and new challenges, bringing healthcare in America into the 21st century. Health consumers will come to expect they will have control over their own health data. Having secure, interoperable access to clinical data will allow patients to partner with their care providers in new ways incorporating Web 2.0 principles.

Google Closure: A New Way of Developing in JavaScript - A Guide and Links to Google Closure's Mature and Complex JavaScript Framework

2009-11-19T20:00:00Z

Every day million people make use of Google products and these products are written mainly using one well known language: JavaScript! What makes this online software stable, fast and responsive is a good use of the language and an excellent system of data compression and asynchronous loading. Today this power is available to everyone, since Google has released its magic tool under Apache 2 license.

Featured Ignite Video: Blessed Are the Cheesemakers - Episode 39

2009-11-19T16:48:21Z

Subscribe to this video podcast series via iTunes. Or, visit the O'Reilly Media area at iTunes to find other podcasts from O'Reilly.

Live in New York: Web 2.0 Expo - Watch Tim O'Reilly's Keynote

2009-11-19T16:09:33Z

Watch Tim O'Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York.

The Web 2.0 Expo is happening right now in New York. You can watch selected sessions streamed live from Web 2.0 Expo New York plus additional off-stage interviews and demos! Highlights from today's schedule include:

Find news coverage and the latest photos and video, plus the full session schedule at the Web 2.0 Expo site.

Open for Business - Designing Social Interfaces

2009-11-19T14:00:00Z

This is an excerpt from Designing Social Interfaces. From the creators of Yahoo!'s Design Pattern Library, Designing Social Interfaces provides you with more than 100 patterns, principles, and best practices, along with salient advice for many of the common challenges you'll face when starting a social website. Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone share hard-won insights into what works, what doesn't, and why. You'll learn how to balance opposing factions and grow healthy online communities by co-creating them with your users.

Four short links: 19 November 2009 - Chumby One, Gorgeous IE Debugger, Freer Than Free, and Phone-a-Friend for Government IT

2009-11-19T11:00:00Z

Less Than Free -- Begins by talking about Google giving away turn-by-turn directions on Android, and then analyses Google's "less than free" business model: Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an “out” if they part ways with Google in the future. I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” Here was the big punch line - because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!! This and more in today's Four Short Links.

CarTunes

2009-11-18T20:00:00Z

Green Technologies and Interactive Audio are two fields not generally considered related, but a new trend may change that: "Generated Sounds for Electric Vehicles", aka "EV Audio", aka "CarTunes". When I first heard that "electric cars are so quiet, manufacturers want them to make noise", I had a strong memory flashback to 1995, when I was contracted to produce my first ringtone (Fur Elise for Sprint PCS). At the time, I thought "mobile phone plays melody when it rings" was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard of; now, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you think audio personalization of your cellphone is an important statement of your individuality (as many do), imagine how much more important personalizing the sound of your car will be!

Success of a Broadcast Medium: The Muzak Transmission Process

2009-11-18T18:26:17Z

Muzak grew from constant technological innovation and originally succeeded as a broadcast medium using spare spectrum, a business model rarely examined today.

What's Hot in O'Reilly Answers - iPhone Sensors, Backup Systems, Sharing Printers in Windows 7, and much more!

2009-11-18T15:59:05Z

Share knowledge, ask questions on O'Reilly Answers today.

Visualizing Stackoverflow's data dump

2009-11-18T15:42:34Z

Stackoverflow releases a monthly XML data dump (CC-licensed) of all the data in their system. Unlike a lot of other data sets that just reflects what developers are buying, this data reflects what developers are actually using and asking questions about, which is pretty cool. I used this dataset to create a topic map that reflects the relationships among the top topics (based on how frequently the topic was used as a tag on a post) for the month of October, 2009. There was a lot of interesting stuff in here. For example, I love the fact that plain old "regex" is the main link between "php" and "c#." Also, it's interesting that only PHP has a direct link to various database topics; I would have expected databases to be more central.