News Providers are Embracing the iPhone

To mark another iPhone milestone (1.5 billion app downloads in a year), I checked our iTunes app store data warehouse. I was expecting the Books category to continue to register the fastest-growth but was instead greeted by an explosion in News (and to a lesser extent, Navigation) apps. News content providers increasingly need to have a strategy for delivering content to the iPhone and similar mobile devices. At least for the iPhone, many news organizations have done just that: during the week ending 7/12, there were over 1,500 News apps. http://bit.ly/2Bm97l

Developers Create Unofficial Find My iPhone API

The iPhone is correctly credited with bringing location services to the consumer. It started at launch with Google Maps. It kicked into hyper-drive with the launch of the App Store (there are now over 2800 location-enabled apps - via Skyhook). However, there is still a step to go, the iPhone needs the ability to share your location in the... http://bit.ly/12awMm

Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World

Even professional writers are prone to infrequent accidental plagiarism. But in the world of novels, newspapers, and college exams, there are rules about bootlegging others’ work that are well-established - most everyone agrees on what behaviors are unacceptable and what the consequences are. In bantamweight publishing, however, the rules are not so clear. In order for the British Army to... http://bit.ly/1b9qXk

Ignite Show: Greg Elin on Hackers in Washington

The Obama Administration has taken broad steps to open up the government. It's created Twitter accounts, launched data portals, and released spending dashboards. Even with these steps Washington D.C. can seem a strange place to geeks. Greg Elin (@gregelin) is a hacker living inside the beltway working with government officials to help with the process of opening up. In... http://ping.fm/BIRQl

Making Government Transparent Using R

With Open Source now considered an accepted part of the software industry, some people are starting to wonder if we can't bring the same degree of openness and innovation into government. Danese Cooper, who is actively involved in the open source community through her work with the Open Source Initiative and Apache, as well as working as an R wonk for Revolution Computing, would love to see the government become more open. Part of that openness is being able to access and interpret the mass of data that the government collects, something Cooper thinks R would be a great tool for. She'll be talking about R and Open Government at O'Reilly's Open Source Conference, OSCON. http://ping.fm/MlaGs

Four short links: 14 July 2009

Twenty Questions about GPLv3 (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- twenty very challenging questions about the GPLv3. foo.js is a JavaScript library released under the GPLv3. bar.js is a library with all rights reserved. For performance reasons, I would like to minimize all my site’s JavaScript into a single compressed file called foobar.js. If I distribute this file, must I also distribute... http://ping.fm/ORmrH

Recovery Mapping: ARRA Spending Across the US

GIS is the killer app for data.gov -- @mikehogan paraphrasing Spatial Sustain To really understand economic and government data you need a map. This is especially important to remember right now with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) spending. There's a lot of data out there and it's when you see can see the relative concentration of funds... http://ping.fm/8QjLb