Tropophilia

Published by Jarred on October 23, 2009 in Google, News and Web 2.0. View Comments

I try not to spend too much time pimping Google’s products in this space, but let’s face it: we make really cool stuff, and whether I work for the company or not, I absolutely adore most of our products. Fact is, our engineers and product teams cook up tools that are really useful for those who are ready to embrace the digital future. Google Reader is one of those tools, and the team has just released a set of features that have got me plain jazzed.

Google Reader is a tool for pulling interesting content to a central inbox via “feeds.” Almost every website on the web that publishes regular updates also sends out a feed that can be subscribed to via various tools. As a result, instead of clicking through a long list of bookmarked sites to see if there’s something new to read, you can just subscribe to that site’s feed and all the new content will build up in your inbox. (If you want to subscribe to Tropophilia’s feed, click here.)

Though it got off to a rocky start, Reader has been incrementally socializing and personalizing itself over the past two years. First it let you share items publicly; later, those shared items became directly available to your contacts who also use Reader. Recently, the team introduced the ability to “like” an item in addition to sharing it, and it also created a section of “recommended” feeds based on your reading, sharing, and liking history (although it was a little hard to find). It has also given users new ways to share with the “send to” feature that lets you post to Twitter and other third party sites.

At first, it was confusing as to why there was both a “like” and a “share” feature, with many people not understanding when they would do one without doing the other. This week, the Reader team cleared that up by delivering the punch line:

You can now sort any feed (including the comprehensive feed) by “magic.” The sorting is based on what Reader has determined you’re interested in, as reflected by your reading/liking/sharing history.
The “recommended feeds” feature now has prime real estate in the main sidebar in a new “Explore” section.
There is a new “popular items” feed (also sortable by your personalized “magic”) that shows you what items have been popular across the web recently.

Continue reading ‘Google Reader Gets Magical’

Rebooting Justice

Published by Jarred on October 17, 2009 in Legal Issues. View Comments

Yesterday, I had an envelope in the mail from my dad. I opened it up to find a photocopy of the “Opening Statement” of the Summer 2009 issue of Litigation, the official journal of that section of the American Bar Association. The Litigation Section’s chair, Lorna G. Schofield, dedicated her essay to an observation of how, like so many industries, the legal profession is being challenged by the rapid innovation of the information age.

As a future lawyer (side note: I sent 12 of 15 law school applications last weekend!), it reassures me that at least the ABA’s leadership has recognized that lawyers, firms, and their clients need to adapt in order to survive. But I found it even more encouraging that Schofield highlighted the need for the entire justice system — especially the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which were last updated in 1938 — to be refreshed for the present times. I’d like to highlight a couple of her points and add my own thoughts as well.

The first area that Schofield specifically targets is the billable hour. The billable hour system rewards firms and attorneys for the time spent working on a project. While the rate can vary depending on the type of work performed, the rates typically do not reflect the value added by the work performed. And it doesn’t even really make logical sense, as Evan Chesler noted in Forbes back in January: “If you are successful and win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia, you make more money. That is frankly nuts.” He went on to propose a system more similar to how a construction contractor operates:

For reasonable periods of time during the life of a lawsuit, say three months at a time, I should do what [a contractor] does: identify the client’s objectives, measure, calculate, build in a contingency and come back with a price. Once the price has been agreed upon, the billable hour should be irrelevant. The client will no longer be surprised by a whopper bill and met by the standard (albeit true) explanation that “litigation is unpredictable.”

Whether this is the approach that wins the day is up for question but, as Schofield concludes, “sooner or later, something has to give.”

Continue reading ‘Rebooting Justice’

Ring Them Bells

Published by Taylor on September 18, 2009 in Music. View Comments

Sometimes the only way to break the silence is by playing music at a ridiculously loud volume. Now is one of those times. I’ve been absent for the blogosphere for quite some time, tending to incredibly important things like a life that is altogether new, amazing, and fulfilling thanks to the love of my incredible wife, an affectionate puppy, and many supportive friends. I’m well, and I hope to write more now that the dust (good dust!) has settled.

In hopes of making this post more than a typical “I swear I’ll blog more often….starting NOW!” vow (I’d love to see statistics on how many blog posts start with some variation on this theme), I thought I’d share a mix that I created tonight for my friend Sam. Sam hasn’t received his mix in the mail just yet (is it possible to ever find a blank CD lying around when you need one? I think not), but it’s ok because there are a a few surprises left out of the online mix.

Enjoy the tunes. I might blog more often, and I might not. You’re busy people. You understand.

I recommend listening to this playlist in a car at night or under headphones, just because those are my two favorite ways to listen to music.

Mix for My Friend Sam

From The Archives: reCAPTCHA and Spare Cycles

Published by Jarred on September 16, 2009 in Computing, Google and Web 2.0. View Comments

This morning, Google announced that it will be acquiring reCAPTCHA, a company devoted to putting the few seconds you spend solving CAPTCHAs – those funny puzzles you fill out on Ticketmaster and other sites to verify that you’re human – into good use. As announced, Google will integrate reCAPTCHA’s technology into its own spam and fraud countermeasures, and will use the human output of those puzzles to advance its Book Search and Newspaper Archive scanning efforts.

One of my first posts on Tropophilia profiled the founder of reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn, and his efforts to harness otherwise-wasted human effort. Given today’s announcement, I thought it made sense to repost it in order to put into context this acquisition and the “spare cycles” philosophy that it engenders.

Disclosure: I am an employee of Google. I was not an employee at the time this post was originally published. All views expressed in this post are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of Google.

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“Spare Cycles: Distributing Computing Among Machines and Minds” - published January 19, 2008.

A few weeks ago I read an article in The Economist about distributed computing, defined by Wikipedia as “a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.” Basically what you do is download a program that, when you’re not around, uses your computer’s processor (which would otherwise be mostly idle) to crunch data sent to it from a central server. Your computer joins thousands of others crunching data at any one time, forming a giant networked supercomputer with each unit working on a different piece of the puzzle.

What’s the puzzle? It can be anything, or at least anything that requires a whole lot of computer power to figure out. Some puzzles are humanitarian in nature; for example, the World Community Grid (sponsored by IBM) currently has projects tackling cancer, AIDS, and Dengue fever research, as well as African climate change. Others are more geeky (or, should we say, scientific), like the SETI@home project which is searching for extraterrestrial intelligence by analyzing radio telescope data.

So the bottom line is this: while one way to save the planet and contribute to science is through the donation of time and money, another way is through the donation of your computer’s processing power. Why let your computer idly sit while you’re at work or school all day — occasionally using a small processor burst to throw the next picture from your hard drive onto your screensaver, which no one but your dog is watching — when you can have it use its full capacity to solve some of the world’s toughest problems?

The buzz word for this phenomenon is “donating spare cycles.” Basically, a cycle is the process your computer goes through to retrieve a command from its memory and execute that command. It’s how your computer works and, in a way, it’s how our minds work too. A human cycle, then, would be the process our brain goes through to retrieve and process information from our memory. But do humans have spare cycles to donate? You bet.

Continue reading ‘From The Archives: reCAPTCHA and Spare Cycles’

Go Put Your Records On: A Review of iTunes LP

Published by Jarred on September 10, 2009 in Apple, Business and Music. View Comments

A while ago, I suggested that physical books may become to reading what vinyl records have become to music: produced in limited numbers, used by the very few who know it to be the best quality experience, but mostly collected for their nostalgic value. It appears that this comparison may be inapt, because record companies, with some help from Apple, are trying to bring the vinyl experience back to life.

I am a pretty rabid fan of a little music ensemble called Dave Matthews Band. You might have heard of them. I just returned from a trip with my brother to the ostensible Mecca of DMB fandom: the band’s annual three-night stand at The Gorge Amphitheatre in central Washington. Counting this weekend, I have been to 16 of their concerts. I have all of their studio albums, most of their official live releases (they number in the double digits), and countless (legal) amateur recordings of other shows. The total track count in my iTunes library for the band and their side projects numbers over 800.

But if you think those numbers are sickening, try these on for size. I am such an unabashed fanboy of the band that when they released their latest studio album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, I ended up buying it in two different formats:

the iTunes Pass version ($20), because along with the album tracks it also came with (so far) 16 extra pieces of exclusive video, studio audio, and live audio content delivered piecemeal over time;
the (physical) Deluxe Box Set ($60) which included the same extra studio audio as above, did not include video or live audio, but added in extra artwork and photos.

Let’s pass over the rather obvious and self-admitted fact that I have obsession issues. The interesting thing about the information above is that I had to pay $80 – eight times the album price – to get what might be called the total media experience available in physical or digital form. Isn’t there a way to merge these two, and make it less expensive (and therefore more attractive) to feel like you truly own not only the music, but the album experience itself? This is the question Apple has asked as sales of entire albums in the iTunes Store have dwindled, with consumers instead opting to buy tracks piecemeal. Their first answer was a service called iTunes Pass.

iTunes Pass was Apple’s first attempt at solving the riddle of how to replicate the experience of buying a box set or, to go even further back in time, a vinyl. You pay twice the normal album price, but in addition to the entire album itself, you get extra “special” content: early track releases ahead of the full album sale date, demo tracks, live tracks, the entire cover leaflet, videos, and more. What makes it more interesting is that this extra content is not delivered all at once, but it is sent to you over time. So every week or two, you have a nice little mini-Christmas when you find a new video or exclusive track to enjoy. This rolling delivery method also enables access to content that might not otherwise be available on the album release date — like, say, live versions of tracks from the band’s tour.

I am not aware of how successful iTunes Pass has been, but it apparently was not satisfactory. Yesterday, Apple supplemented that service with the long-rumored iTunes LP. Both Apple and the record labels were interested in going beyond iTunes Pass to renew the “retro” experience of going to a store and buying a big, beautiful LP, and combining that with the feeling of exclusivity that comes with owning an exclusive content-filled box set.

Continue reading ‘Go Put Your Records On: A Review of iTunes LP’