Potato I have

The NY Times has a good portrait of another industry fighting innovation; this time, it’s real estate.

In February, [Redfin] introduced a Web site that automates the bidding process — and the commission rebates. The sale of a $500,000 house, for example, typically yields a 3 percent commission of $15,000 for the buyer’s agent. A Redfin customer would get $10,000 back.

“At that point we became a true pariah to the industry,” said Rob McGarty, Redfin’s director of West Coast operations.

(more…)

Simon Phipps has an excellent post on open data formats. Looking for a connection between a lot of new desktop tools, he notes:

all of these tools have worked out that lock-in is the new lock-out

And later:

injecting the network into society removes the commercial benefits previously achieved by closed behaviour […]. Truly open formats are creating the new market, and those who attempt to subvert the trend with pseudo-openness will fail.

While my sensitivity is not nearly as evolved as Mark Pilgrim’s outrage, Apple’s mostly closed data models are a doggedly nagging annoyance in my otherwise pleasant Dive Into Mac one year ago. I know where I want to go, and over time I’ll migrate my digital life into apps and formats that make me feel like the stuff is actually mine. It would be just ideal if Apple would move in this direction faster than I do, because I am so not in a place where I want to spend time doing what Fowler did here.

But how many people understand or care about open data? Far from enough to nudge Apple in a different direction I suspect.

(via t.bray)

I’ve been listening to this music for twenty years, but like a lot of us I wasn’t able to watch Coltrane or Evans or Wes Montgomery. Now I see YouTube starts to have some old concerts and TV shows.

I particularly like this one of Coltrane’s Quartet playing Naima somewhere in Europe (on Arte!) in 1965. Grainy B&W, very good camera work, and Elvin Jones is literally steaming – how great is that?

What do you make of Cecil Taylor’s facial expressions after he finishes playing here?

Someone in one of the comment threads laments the extreme paucity of recorded video of this amazing era; at the moment, I’m mighty happy to have stumbled on to some of it here.

Nature is not afraid to experiment with a core process — peer review — that they believe is working well, to see what the internet might bring: they are piloting one variation of an open peer review process, and have initiated a web debate (good supporting content from those links). Here’s an organization fully engaged with the question of what the web does.

From the comments on the oreilly post, a reminder that Nature was also behind the Britannica-vs-Wikipedia study last December that found W close to B in accuracy.

(via oreilly radar)

I’m much more visual than aural, but podcasts are proving a really good channel for me, somewhat to my surprise. Here’s one where Cory Doctorow discusses DRM and related stuff in “Europe’s Coming Broadcast Flag” (thanks again IT Conversations), recorded at last year’s European Open Source convention. Cory is an excellent presenter, and these are important topics. To paraphrase one part of the talk:

• security systems have sender(s), recipient(s), and attacker(s)
• DRM is a security system that considers the user(s) — who own the content — as the attacker(s)!
• users can therefore not be allowed to modify the system (so, no open source solutions)
• we can’t know if a system is secure if it is not “published” (=open source)

Lots of other interesting viewpoints on copyright, innovation, etc in the digital world.

Cory has also accepted a Fulbright at USC to work on DRM.

I found this interesting: there is a project to add semantics to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia and lots of other wikis. The goals page is clear and concise, and here’s a sample of the kind of stuff they want to enable. There is a background page touching on RDF/RDFS and OWL, and how semantic wiki is different from semantic web.

There’s a ton of information buried in wikis; semantic annotation would make it explicit and more directly usable. One challenge is doing this in a way that doesn’t cause usability problems — hopefully anyone who can handle wiki syntax can also handle the annotations.

(via rw)

Okay, I’ve been bitten by the podcast bug. Listening, not creating. Now I’m trawling through old stuff I missed because I was still reading blogs. IT Conversations is proving valuable.

Here’s one I heard this weekend from Kent Beck on developer testing (recorded November 2004!). TDD and refactoring are the two big software development epiphanies for me in the last 4-5 years, and Beck literally wrote the book on TDD.

In this podcast Beck highlights the accountability aspect of TDD, and it resonated big time for me. I was also encouraged by his comments on his own difficulties writing tests being due to “not being a good enough designer. Yet.” I think that stance/insight would help more developers move into TDD.

This is reflections on, not an introduction to, TDD — for that, I don’t know a better treatment than his short, participatory text. I think it’s hard to really get it until you intentionally write that stupid little hardcoded implementation that you’re going to change in a minute … just after you write the next test.

Jorn Barger coined the term weblog, sees its original sense being usurped, and so would like to take the term back.

the unit-measure for blogging
is the blogger

Here’s a great post from Cory about open standards and Windows media player, including an exchange with a Microsoft apologist, for those (like me) who only have a passing knowledge of the issues. Norway’s public service broadcaster has launched a video service that is Windows media specific; now there is a debate about open alternatives.

Finally bumped to firefox 1.5 beta and predictably lost a lot of extensions. I knew this was just a conservative compatibility mechanism, and not real breakage, but wasn’t immediately sure how to work around it. This post is a particularly clear presentation of what’s going on and how to fix it. The comment stream mentions another extension that simply does a workaround (for all extensions) without showing any details.