Last year, Bill Janeway really got my attention (pdf) when he noted that "over time, Wall Street 'firms began to trade against their clients for their own account, such that now, the direct investment activities of a firm like Goldman Sachs dwarf their activities on behalf of outside customers.'" As I wrote in my blog post at the time, Trading for Their Own Account, "I thought, whither Google, Yahoo! and Amazon?"

At the time, I noted the way that more and more information that was once delivered by independent web sites was now being delivered directly by search engines, and that rather than linking out to others, there were strong signs of a trend towards keeping the link flow to themselves.

This thought re-surfaced when Techcrunch launched Crunchbase. Now, rather than linking directly to companies covered in its stories, Techcrunch links to one of its own properties to provide additional information about them. I noticed the same behavior the other day on the New York Times, when I followed a link, and was taken to a search result for articles on the subject at the Times (with lots of ads, even if there were few results).

Journalism professor Jay Rosen noticed this too, and wrote the tweet that sparked this post:

@NYTimesComm Could you try to find out for me why Week in Review pieces do not link out even when vital to the story? http://is.gd/1Hzd

Follow Jay's link and you come to a story that indeed doesn't have any outbound links, except to other Times stories. Now, I understand the value of linking to other articles on your own site -- everyone does it -- but to do so exclusively is a small tear in the fabric of the web, a small tear that will grow much larger if it remains unchecked.

Business Week is also getting into the act, per a New York Times article entitled Topic Pages to Be Hub of New BusinessWeek Site:

The core of Business Exchange is hundreds of topic pages, on subjects as broad as the housing market and as narrow as the Boeing 787. Plans call for the number of topic pages to grow quickly into the thousands. (The first one created, which may or may not be in the public version of Business Exchange, was “BlackBerry vs iPhone.”)

Want to place a bet whether articles in the magazine will link exclusively to these "topic pages?" At least Business Week plans to have outbound links from the topic pages (Crunchbase does this too, just siphoning off the first step in the link stream, unlike the NYT roach-motel links.)

Each Business Exchange topic page links to articles and blog posts from myriad other sources, including BusinessWeek’s competitors, with the contents updated automatically by a Web crawler. Nearly all traditional news organizations offer only their own material, spurning the role of aggregator as an invitation to readers to leave their sites.

When this trend spreads (and I say "when", not "if"), this will be a tax on the utility of the web that must be counterbalanced by the utility of the intervening pages. If they are really good, with lots of useful, curated data that you wouldn't easily find elsewhere, this may be an acceptable tax. In fact, they may even be beneficial, and a real way to increase the value of the site to its readers. If they are purely designed to capture additional clicks, they will be a degradation of the web's fundamental currency, much like the black hat search engine pages that construct link farms out of search engine results.

I'd like to put out two guidelines for anyone adopting this "link to myself" strategy:

1. Ensure that no more than 50% of the links on any page are to yourself. (Even this number may be too high.)

2. Ensure that the pages you create at those destinations are truly more valuable to your readers than any other external link you might provide.

The web is a great example of a system that works because most sites create more value than they capture. Maybe the tragedy of the commons in its future can be averted. Maybe not. It's up to each of us.

The fourth Ignite Boston will be on Thursday, September 11, from 6 to 10pm at the Hooley House, one block from Faneuil Hall in Boston, MA. THIS IS A LARGER VENUE. So the acoustics will be better than our last event and there will be room to sit, stand and mingle.

From 6-6:45 pm, mingle and talk tech with your fellow FOOs, alpha geeks, and techies from the greater Boston area. After the mingling and social stuff, we'll have a couple of special keynote presentations to kick off our Ignite talks. Then, onto guest speakers who'll catch you up on the cool, new, innovative stuff going on in technology today. Don’t blink or you’ll miss their lightning-fast, five-minute presentations. During intermissions, get a cold beer and chat with speakers, sponsors, and O’Reilly’s own editors. Join us Thursday, September 11th, for a fun, energetic evening of talking, learning, collaborating and drinking!

RSVP If you plan to attend, email IgniteBoston at oreilly dot com for the chance to win $300 worth of O'Reilly books of your choosing. You must be present to win. There will likely be other items like tee-shirts and other promo items for those who alert us ahead that they plan to attend. Presentation Guidelines

Ignite is a user-generated event. If you’re interested in speaking, then submit a proposal for consideration.

Presentations must:

* Be no longer than 5 minutes

* Be on an innovative topic (no sales pitches, please!)

* Be viewable on a PC [a MacBook Pro with Powerpoint and Keynote, and PDF] with standard AV equipment

* Did we mention, no Sales Pitches.

For anyone that's never been to Ignite, you may find it useful to see a talk or two. Here's a link to examples from the Boston Ignite 3 talks.

The New York Times today has a fascinating profile of Jon Stewart, host of The Daily Show, entitled Is This The Most Trusted Man in America? The article is a wonderful celebration of the person and the spirit of the show he's created.

But perhaps more interestingly in the internet context, this article is a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of journalism. It shows how the informality and attitude that we take as characteristic of blogging can be combined with the tough-mindedness, research, and craft that is displayed by the best investigative reporters.

Let's start with passion about stuff that matters, something top bloggers and top journalists ought to have in their genes:

MR. STEWART describes his job as “throwing spitballs” from the back of the room and points out that “The Daily Show” mandate is to entertain, not inform. Still, he and his writers have energetically tackled the big issues of the day — “the stuff we find most interesting,” as he said in an interview at the show’s Midtown Manhattan offices, the stuff that gives them the most “agita,” the sometimes somber stories he refers to as his “morning cup of sadness.” And they’ve done so in ways that straight news programs cannot: speaking truth to power in blunt, sometimes profane language, while using satire and playful looniness to ensure that their political analysis never becomes solemn or pretentious.

“Hopefully the process is to spot things that would be grist for the funny mill,” Mr. Stewart, 45, said. “In some respects, the heavier subjects are the ones that are most loaded with opportunity because they have the most — you know, the difference between potential and kinetic energy? — they have the most potential energy, so to delve into that gives you the largest combustion, the most interest. I don’t mean for the audience. I mean for us. Everyone here is working too hard to do stuff we don’t care about.”

Much like blogging, a key to the show's success is its authentic, personal voice, and its ability to synthesize news with viewpoint:

Ms. Corn [the show's executive co-producer] noted that while things “may be exaggerated on the show, it’s grounded in the way Jon really feels.”

“He really does care,” she added. “He’s a guy who says what he means.”

Unlike many comics today, Mr. Stewart does not trade in trendy hipsterism or high-decibel narcissism. While he possesses Johnny Carson’s talent for listening and George Carlin’s gift for observation, his comedy remains rooted in his informed reactions to what Tom Wolfe once called “the irresistibly lurid carnival of American life,” the weird happenings in “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque” country.

“Jon’s ability to consume and process information is invaluable,” said Mr. Colbert. He added that Mr. Stewart is “such a clear thinker” that he’s able to take “all these data points of spin and transparent falsehoods dished out in the form of political discourse” and “fish from that what is the true meaning, what are red herrings, false leads,” even as he performs the ambidextrous feat of “making jokes about it” at the same time.

But there's also a lesson for bloggers that the show, however personal, is finely honed, with lots of research:

“We often discuss satire — the sort of thing he does and to a certain extent I do — as distillery,” Mr. Colbert continued. “You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a hewing process, chipping away at things that aren’t the point or aren’t the story or aren’t the intention. Really it’s that last couple of drops you’re distilling that makes all the difference. It isn’t that hard to get a ton of corn into a gallon of sour mash, but to get that gallon of sour mash down to that one shot of pure whiskey takes patience” as well as “discipline and focus.”

And:

The day begins with a morning meeting where material harvested from 15 TiVos and even more newspapers, magazines and Web sites is reviewed. That meeting, Mr. Stewart said, “would be very unpleasant for most people to watch: it’s really a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset, and the rest of the day is spent trying to mask or repress that through whatever creative devices we can find.”

The writers work throughout the morning on deadline pieces spawned by breaking news, as well as longer-term projects, trying to find, as Josh Lieb, a co-executive producer of the show, put it, stories that “make us angry in a whole new way.” By lunchtime, Mr. Stewart (who functions as the show’s managing editor and says he thinks of hosting as almost an afterthought) has begun reviewing headline jokes. By 3 p.m. a script is in; at 4:15, Mr. Stewart and the crew rehearse that script, along with assembled graphics, sound bites and montages. There is an hour or so for rewrites — which can be intense, newspaper-deadlinelike affairs — before a 6 o’clock taping with a live studio audience.

What the staff is always looking for, Mr. Stewart said, are “those types of stories that can, almost like the guy in ‘The Green Mile’ ” — the Stephen King story and film in which a character has the apparent ability to heal others by drawing out their ailments and pain — “suck in all the toxins and allow you to do something with it that is palatable.”

What a call to action! What a way forward for all of those trying to understand the future of news! Point of view fused with fact checking, bluntness and informality fused with ruthless editing, a humanistic vision that acts as a filter to make sure that the stories covered actually matter!

Norman Mailer's brilliant novel Why Are We in Vietnam? doesn't talk explicitly about the Vietnam war; it tells a story about American culture and the American psyche, thereby producing a devastating critique of the war with the title and last line alone.

In a similar way, it may be easier to understand why America is falling behind at math and science with a few simple stories.

Last week, Robert Bruce Thompson, author of An Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, wrote a guest blog post on makezine.com, Home Science Under Attack, which told the sad story of how a retired chemist was arrested and his lab confiscated because he was doing experiments:

The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports that Victor Deeb, a retired chemist who lives in Marlboro, has finally been allowed to return to his Fremont Street home, after Massachusetts authorities spent three days ransacking his basement lab and making off with its contents. Deeb is not accused of making methamphetamine or other illegal drugs. He's not accused of aiding terrorists, synthesizing explosives, nor even of making illegal fireworks. Deeb fell afoul of the Massachusetts authorities for ... doing experiments.

Authorities concede that the chemicals found in Deeb's basement lab were no more hazardous than typical household cleaning products. Despite that, authorities confiscated "all potentially hazardous chemicals" (which is to say the chemicals in Deeb's lab) from his home, and called in a hazardous waste cleanup company to test the chemicals and clean up the lab.

Pamela Wilderman, the code enforcement officer for Marlboro, stated, "I think Mr. Deeb has crossed a line somewhere. This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation."

Allow me to translate Ms. Wilderman's words into plain English: "Mr. Deeb hasn't actually violated any law or regulation that I can find, but I don't like what he's doing because I'm ignorant and irrationally afraid of chemicals..."

I forwarded this message to Dave Farber's IP list (which is now searchable via markmail, the amazing mailing list search engine!), and got back some great stories that I wanted to share.

Armando Stettner wrote one story that illustrates just how much our culture has changed. His story also involves the cops, but here, they understand and support science. Too bad that was 40+ years ago:

When I was about 13 or so, I also had a chemistry set in my basement. I was living on Long Island - Freeport, to be exact. I also remember the hobby shop with ALL sorts of glassware and little labeled bottles of chemicals. I had some really neat stuff: all sorts of chemicals - I seem to remember potassium ferrocyanide with which I did some chemoluminescence (I think that's one of the ingredients), sodium in liquid form, various acids, a few rolls of magnesium - not to mention all the paraphernalia: lots of pyrex stuff, triple beam balances, etc. All the chemicals were neatly arranged in this cabinet.

One day, I had mixed a concoction and was carrying it (premixed!) in a tin coffee can. Myself and a friend were carrying the stuff to the train tracks to test it out (light it) where it was relatively safe. The stuff started getting warm but I thought it was the sun heading the can up. Then it started getting REALLY warm. As it got hot, I dropped it in the middle of the street. The stuff flashed over. It was VERY cool.

But, I decided I didn't want to stay around any more and left.

Unfortunately for me, this all occurred in front of the house of someone who knew me (she was a 'friend' of my parents). She called the cops.

The Freeport police came to my house questioned me and my parents, joined in a little while by some county detectives. They were very polite. We took them down to the basement where I showed them all the stuff. The uniformed police left and the detectives continued to look at all the stuff and ask questions. They called somebody to ask some advice. It turns out they called the county labs. The guy got off the phone and asked 'you're not making any drugs down here are you?" I said no!! He smiled - he winked at my parents. Then he said the most unexpected thing: he said the gang at the labs offered to give me a tour of the labs anytime I wanted.

Then they left asking me to be careful. For me, it was actually a positive experience.

Today, I'm sure I'd face a visit from the Hazmat teams and the DHS. And, because of the triple beam balance, my house (or my parents') would be confiscated under the forfeiture rules.

At Maker Faire earlier this year, Robert Bruce Thompson gave a talk (video unfortunately truncated at both ends) that highlighted how attitudes towards chemistry have changed since he was a kid, starting with a tour of the powerful chemistry sets available in 1964 (courtesy of the Sears Catalog), and tracing the dumbing down and rising fear of liability that doomed them, until, as Kevin Kelly noted in a recent review of Robert's book, we reached "the so-called chemistry sets today which boldly (and insanely) advertise they contain 'No Chemicals!'" (Review sent out in Cool Tools email, up on the Cool Tools site soon.)

Why are we failing at math and science? Because it isn't fun any more. When you put safety on the highest altar, what do you give up? When fear of lawsuits -- not to mention fear of technology -- drives product design, marketing, and public policy, you eliminate science at its roots, in the natural experimentation of kids who want to know how the world works.

With the iTunes App store now over a month old, I decided to look closely at data from the U.S. store over the last three weeks. While sales numbers are not publicly available, Apple publishes overall as well as category-level rankings. There are currently just over 1,800 (paid and free) applications in the App store, double what it was three weeks ago. Games is the largest category with about 500 applications (roughly 27% of all apps), up 87% from three weeks ago. Puzzles, Arcade, and Board games are the three largest Gaming subcategories:

The fastest-growing category, Education, more than tripled over the last three weeks.

The average price per paid app is around $5.50, with 94% of apps priced at $10 or less. Prices vary considerably by category with expensive apps skewing the average price in a category: a single application priced at $449 drove up the average price of Finance apps to more than $22. Excluding the top and bottom 1% priced apps, the average price of an iPhone application is about $5.20. Similarly, by removing the top and bottom priced app in each category, we get a more reasonable estimate of the average price per app within a category (click here for details).

The Book category is comprised mostly of ebooks and while there are over 150 such "apps", it was the only category not represented in the Top 100 rankings:

In contrast, more than 1 in 10 of all Music apps were among the Top 100 Paid Apps:

Looking beyond the Top 100 paid apps to all paid iPhone applications, the best-performing categories (in terms of popularity) are Music, Weather, Navigation, Lifestyle, and Entertainment (click here for details).

On average, app providers have slightly over one app each, with 25 (out of the close to 1,100) providers accounting for about 21% of all paid apps:

Most providers had 0 or 1 app listed in the Top 100 Paid Applications, with the following exceptions: Hottrix, Pangea Software, Inc., Phase2 Media, telience.com, and Electronic Arts all had 2 apps in the Top 100 list. For now, the cohort of web developers who dominate the Facebook application platform have been unable to make similar inroads in the iPhone platform. Perhaps it's time to brush up on Cocoa and Objective-C?

翻译：xiaochong

iTunes App Store开张一个多月，我决定仔细看一下美国店最近三周的数据。销售数据没有公开，苹果只发布了总体情况以及按类别的排名情况。目前有超过1800个（收费或免费的）应用，是三周前的两倍。最大的类别游戏大约有500个应用（大约占所有应用的27%），比三周前增长87%。Puzzles、Arcade、Board是最大的三类游戏：

增长最快的类别是教育类，是三周前的三倍多。

收费应用的平均价格为5.5美元左右，94%的应用定价在10美元或更少。价格在不同类别之间差别相当大，有些很贵的应用足以影响所在类别的平均价格：金融类别中一个449美元的应用将平均价格拉到22美元多。不算价格最高和最低的1%应用，iPhone应用的平均价格应该是5.20美元。同样，如果不计算每一类别中最高和最低的应用，我们就能得到一个每类别中应用更合理的平均价格估算（详细情况请参照这里）。

图书类大多数都是电子图书，有150多个这样的“应用”，这也是唯一一个没有出现在前100名中的类别：

相反，超过10%的音乐应用出现在收费应用前100名中：

通过前100名收费应用和所有收费iPhone应用可以看出，最突出的类别（从受欢迎程度来看）是音乐、天气、导航、生活方式以及娱乐（详细情况请参照这里）。

平均来讲应用提供商有稍微一个多应用提供，25个（总共将近1100个）提供商占了所有收费应用的21%：

大多数提供者有一个或者没有应用进入前100名收费应用名单，但有如下例外：Hottrix、Pangea Software, Inc.、Phase2 Media、telience.com以及Electronic Arts都有两个应用在前100名中。现阶段大量在Facebook平台上成功的Web开发人员还没有在iPhone平台上有相似的作为。也许是时候该研究研究Cocoa和Objective-C了？

The U.S. Court of Appeal for the Federal Circuit has issued a wondrously clear and unambiguous opinion (pdf) that supports the enforceability of open source and public licenses. It is great news for user and contributor communities, and their lawyers.

The Back Story:

The software in the case is licensed under  Artistic License 1.0, which was written by Larry Wall in the late 80s. The defendants allegedly copied the software into their own products without complying with key Artistic License requirements—they did not include the original authors’ names, copyright notices, references to the COPYING file, information about sources of the original files (e.g., SourceForge), or a description of how the original files had been modified.

The plaintiff asked the court for an injunction prohibiting distribution of the defendants’ products, arguing that by violating these license conditions, the defendants violated the copyright in the software.

In a nutshell (and omitting legal fine points), the decision under appeal denied the injunction, holding that copyright protection is not available for software distributed free-of-charge under an open source license.

This truly shocked the open source, free software, and public license community, and a coalition of groups led by Creative Commons filed a “friend of the court” brief (pdf) in support of the appeal. (In the interests of full disclosure—Allison Randal and I worked on the brief on behalf of The Perl Foundation.)

The Ruling:

The appellate court reversed the lower court’s decision in an opinion that open source lawyers have dreamed about but never thought that we would see.

The court paid tribute to the diversity and importance of the open source, free software, and public community:

“Public licenses, often referred to as “open source” licenses, are used
by artists, authors, educators, software developers, and scientists who
wish to create collaborative projects and to dedicate certain works to
the public…Open source licensing has become a widely used method
of creative collaboration that serves to advance the arts and sciences in
a manner and at a pace that few could have imagined just a few decades
ago.”

And after noting that “lack of money changing hands” does not equate to lack of economic value, it wholeheartedly endorsed enforcement of the Artistic 1.0 license:

“The clear language of the Artistic License creates conditions to protect
the economic rights at issue in the granting of a public license. These
conditions govern the rights to modify and distribute the computer
programs and files included in the downloadable software package. The
attribution and modification transparency requirements directly serve to
drive traffic to the open source incubation page and to inform downstream
users of the project, which is a significant economic goal of the copyright
holder that the law will enforce.”

Perhaps the happiest aspect of the opinion is the assured and sophisticated discussion of open source processes, projects, and economic value. Although the briefs filed by the plaintiff and by Creative Commons undoubtedly assisted the court’s analysis, it seems safe to conclude that the court was already aware of the significance of open source—yet another sign that the “movement” actually has come of age.

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

"None of us is as dumb as all of us," but the opposite of this profound truth is also true. Systems that channel individual behaviours to create new and valuable data are showing up everywhere. We point to Amazon Recommendations as the canonical example, but it's hard to find an area that isn't using individual actions to produce collective wisdom.

Watchlist: Luis von Ahn, Intrade, Robin Hanson, David Pennock, Slashdot Karma.

翻译：西门吹雪

[这是Radar系列文章的一部分，本系列会简述在O'Reilly我们正在关注的一些趋势。]

“三个和尚没水吃”，但是这句真理相反的一面也是正确的。现在引导众多个人行为来创造新的、有价值的数据的系统到处都是。我们把Amazon Recommendations作为例子，但是很难发现一个没有利用个人行为来产出集体智慧的领域。

关注列表: Luis von Ahn、Intrade、Robin Hanson、David Pennock、Slashdot Karma。

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

Art is emotion hacking, intended to provoke or illuminate rather than profit. Artists play on the boundaries of new materials, new modes of interaction, new technologies. Often what they build can inspire or inform useful and commercial hacking.

Watchlist: Natalie Jeremijenko, NYU ITP, We Make Money Not Art.

翻译：西门吹雪

[这是Radar系列文章的一部分，本系列会简述在O'Reilly我们正在关注的一些趋势。]

艺术是情绪的突破，意在启发和阐明，而不是获利。艺术家们活跃于新材料、新的互动模式以及新技术中。往往他们构建的事情会激发或启发一些有用的商业机会。

关注列表: Natalie Jeremijenko、NYU ITP、We Make Money Not Art。

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

The lessons and techniques of open source are applicable beyond source code. Open standards, open hardware, open data, open government are all borrowing from the legal, cultural, and technical toolbox of open source.

Watchlist: Sunlight Foundation, Limor Fried, Change Congress, Wesabe Data Bill of Rights, Creative Commons.

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

New materials follow a curve: initially expensive and so used by R&D only, but many eventually become mass-produced and cheap and so enable mainstream applications. By tracking new materials with interesting possibilities, we can be ahead of the mass-manufacturing curve. The trick is to identify the alpha-hardware-geeks prototyping great things from the new materials.

Watchlist: Inventables.

翻译：西门吹雪

[这是Radar系列文章的一部分，本系列会简述在O'Reilly我们正在关注的一些趋势。]

新材料总是沿着这样的曲线发展：最初很贵，只能由研发部门使用，但是很多最终将大规模生产，变得很便宜，从而成为主流应用。通过跟踪新材料的各种有趣可能性我们可以提前大规模生产曲线。诀窍就是要识别出超级硬件极客利用新材料实践的伟大构想。

关注列表: Inventables。

On Friday & Saturday of August 22nd & 23rd we'll be doing 8 Ignite talks at Gnomedex in Seattle. These talks will each be 5 minutes long with 20 slides and only 15 seconds a slide (they auto-advance). We want to hear your cool ideas, hacks, lessons, and "war stories". What do you want to talk about? Feel free to submit a talk if you are local to the NW or are attending Gnomedex.

Gnomedex is Chris Pirillo's annual conference. This year it's being held at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle, WA. The schedule includes Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Land), Evan Malone (Fab@Home) and Ben Huh (I Can Has Cheezburger?). If you haven't seen an Ignite talk watch some videos at http://ignitenight.blip.tv.

There are other Ignites coming up soon:

• Ignite Portland IV - 11/13/2008 (Ignite Portland will also be showcasing some speakers at Gnomedex)
• Ignite Baltimore - 10/16/2008
• Ignite NYC II - 9/15/2009 (details coming soon)
• Ignite Denver - 9/10/2008

As you can see Ignite is spreading! If you are interested in doing your own Ignite check out the Ignite community site and read the HowTo.

Image courtesy of Hyku. Thanks!

[This is part of a series of posts that briefly describe the trends that we're currently tracking here at O'Reilly]

We have access to more information than ever before, so now rather than attempting to acquire more information sources we're challenged to filter the ones we have. We want technology to make us more productive, more effective, and smarter. Life hacking was the start, and intelligent software tools are the next step.

Watchlist: Linda Stone. (Pointers to other interesting people in this area gratefully accepted)

翻译：西门吹雪

[这是Radar系列文章的一部分，本系列会简述在O'Reilly我们正在关注的一些趋势。]

人们现在能获得的信息比以往任何时候都要多，所以现在的挑战是如何过滤信息而不是得到更多的信息。我们需要使我们更富生产力、更有效、更聪明的技术。Life hacking是个开始，下一步是智能软件工具。

关注列表: Linda Stone。(您如果能给出其他这方面的杰出人士我将不胜感激。)