Three perspectives on the generative web
Three great articles with themes and variations on FOI ideas: Joe Hewitt, Facebook’s iPhone app developer, has quit developing for the iPhone because he is “philosophically opposed” to Apple’s review policies and their tight control over their platform. But instead of hitching his wagon to Android or some other mobile platform, he’s decided to focus instead on making the mobile web as strong as it can be. He

The sentence the UN doesn’t want you to see
“The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous ‘Great Firewall of China’ is one of the first national Internet filtering systems.” That’s it.  Its presence on a poster advertising the OpenNet Initiative’s academic book Access Controlled was enough to deem it prohibited by UN security forces at the Internet Governance Forum, who are shown in

Not quite time to quit your day job
Newsweek recently carried a story noting that the App Store isn’t the fount of instant riches that Apple, and occasionally the media, sometimes suggest. The story follows some developers who created very popular applications, but found themselves just barely profitable, or sometimes losing money. It’s a good read, and has some particularly interesting stats: —Per Forrester Research, most apps “take at least six months of full-time work and cost between $20,000 and $150,000 to develop.” Which means that sales have to be quite robust to turn a profit. —Nearly 60% of apps are rej

Introduction: Ubiquitous Human Computing
Those of you who follow Professor Zittrain’s work know that he’s been writing and thinking about ubiquitous human computing for the last several months. Another name for it might be distributed human computing: the phenomenon of disaggregating a task into component pieces and then parceling them out around the world. Perhaps the best-known example is Amazon Mechanical Turk, where simple tasks that cannot be done by a computer—for example, labeling images—are outsourced to anyone with an internet connection for 1 or 2 cents apiece. All the way at the other end of the scale, a company might pay $20,000 to anyone

Google responds to privacy critics with Google dashboard
Most readers of this blog probably use several Google products; my rough count is that I use about 15. Privacy advocates have been understandably concerned about having so much information stored by one company. In partial response to these concerns, Google created the Google dashboard, a site that tells you which Google apps you use and what data they’ve stored. (From the Google home page, if you’re signed in, you can find it under Settings > Google Account Settings > Dashboard.) It’s kind of fun to b