How many tweets does an earthquake make?

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to send a tweet about it, did it really fall? This is the question I've been trying to wrap my head around today, after reading Steve Gillmor's latest missive from the realtime future (where they speak a somewhat different version of English than we do at present). Gillmor reports on a seismic event that happened near his home earlier today: This morning I felt a jolt and reached for my iPhone to check in with my wife on the highway. She immediately asked whether it was on Twitter... http://ping.fm/Cj4iP

What Publishers Need to Learn from Software Developers

There was a great exchange on the O'Reilly editors' backchannel the other day, so illuminating that I thought I should share it with the rest of you. We've been discussing the fast-track development we're using to produce The Twitter Book. (We're basically authoring the book as a presentation, after I realized how much more quickly I am able to put... http://ping.fm/h7dr9

Four short links: 31 Mar 2009

Web traffic, web design, hacker spaces, and feature spaces: iPhone and Android Make Up 50% of Google's SmartPhone Traffic Worldwide -- Matt Gross found this interesting tidbit in a TechCrunchIT story. Refining Data Tables -- Luke Wroblewski gives some seriously good tips for designing usable tables in web pages. After forms, data tables are likely the next most ubiquitous interface... http://tinyurl.com/cp95sf

Continuous deployment in 5 easy steps

One of the lean startup techniques I’ll be discussing at this week’s session at the Web 2.0 Expo is called continuous deployment. It’s a process whereby all code that is written for an application is immediately deployed into production. The result is a dramatic lowering of cycle time and freeing up of individual initiative. It has enabled companies I’ve worked... http://ping.fm/TJJsC

Four short links: 30 Mar 2009

A great free book, dead newspaper dig, movie Torrent wakeup, and money from free: Digital Foundations with Adobe Illustrator -- CC-licensed book that gets you started using Adobe Illustrator. I'm loving it, and I have the artistic ability of a particularly philistine rock. See also their advice to authors on how to negotiate a Creative Commons license. (via bjepson's delicious... http://ping.fm/0WLnQ

Web2Open: An Exciting Experiment

As I've written here recently, we've got some amazing sessions scheduled for Web2Open--the free unconference hosted by Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. One that I'm particularly excited about is a new experiment, "Practice Your Customer Pitch." We're bringing in five startups who will get two minutes each to give their customer pitch (not their VC pitch), as if... http://ping.fm/Fcluy

Potemkinpedia

Today's Sunday Times features an interesting essay on Wikipedia by Noam Cohen, Rough Type's Journalist of the Week (my last post was inspired by his article on ghosttwittering). Cohen draws an elaborate parallel between Wikipedia and a city: With its millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of volunteers, its ever-expanding total of articles and languages spoken, Wikipedia may be the closest thing to a metropolis yet seen online ... The search for information resembles a walk through an overbuilt quarter of an ancient capital. You circle around topics on a path that appears to be shifting ... Wikipedia encourages... http://ping.fm/hcsrB