Saturday, March 12, 2011

You Can HELP JAPAN !!

If you run your own site — and we know lots of you do — you can use your pageviews and influence to help Japanese people struggling to recover from yesterday’s devastating natural disasters. All you need is a couple lines of code from the Hello Bar.
We showed off the Hello Bar a while ago; it’s a slender bar that floats at the top of your website, giving visitors a brief message and a link.
Best of all, you only have to insert the code snippet on your site once. From a convenient web dashboard, you can customize the bar with your colors and text. You can also tweak the behaviors of the bar and easily turn it on or off from the dashboard. All of this makes it incredibly easy to solicit donations for Japan now, then turn the bar off or change the message and link later, if you so desire.
For example, you might set your Hello Bar to read something like, “Japan has been hit by a devastating earthquake and tsunami. Click here to make a Red Cross donation.” Then later, when Japan is well on its way to recovery, you can change the bar to contain a message about your favorite charity instead, or simply switch the bar off for the time being.
You can set the bar to appear for a brief interval at the beginning of a website visit and hide itself afterward. If you run multiple websites, you can run multiple Hello Bars, again controlling them all from the same dashboard.
The Hello Bar comes from UK design shop digital-telepathy. If you haven’t used Hello Bar before, you’ll need a new account; just sign up with the invite code “helpjapan.”
And if you don’t feel like signing up for a new app, you can just use this code anywhere in the <body> tag of your site to display a standard donation request:

Friday, March 4, 2011

Behind Open Source.

 
Unless you're a developer, or have dabbled in programming, the whole concept of open source software may be a bit confusing, so let's start with the basics.
All software has source code behind it. This is code written by the developers in whatever programming language they chose. This code is usually compiled, eventually, into a form that your computer can understand. With this compiled code (what you'll see as an EXE program or something similar), your computer can run it, but you can't see any of the underlying code. The original developers still retain the original (or source) code and can do with it what they wish, including making changes or adding features. Through what is basically reverse engineering, knowledgeable users can still hack in some changes, but even they would rather have the original code to do with as they wish.
An application's source code is the property of the developers, and they can choose to keep it entirely to themselves (closed source) or to share it with the world so that others can make changes to it or include it in their own software (open source). That's not to say that anyone is free to do anything they want with open source code; most open source software is usually licensed to dictate how other can use it. For example, some licenses require that any software created using the source code is also released as open source, with full credit to the original developers, so improvements can go back to the community; others restrict the source's use in commercial products or the like. One notable example of open source licensing was in 2009, when Microsoft accidentally used open source code in a closed-source tool released to the public; after realizing the mistake, they had to release the entire source code of the tool according to its original licensing.
Seems simple enough, but a number of misconceptions can arise from this distinction. People may see large corporations like Microsoft or Apple as greedy because they keep most of their code to themselves and don't allow others to see, use, or improve upon it. Of course, the closed-source choice often makes sense from a business standpoint, and proponents of this model say that keeping the code a secret allows them to ultimately put more money into the product and make it better over time.
People also often see open source endeavors as being run by a few unkempt coders in their parents' basements on a budget of nothing, updating when they get a chance (if ever). While many open source projects are run by less than a handful of contributors, larger open source systems like the Mozilla Foundation and the several Linux distributions clearly show that the system can work on a large-scale as well. In these cases, greater understanding of the underlying code can lead to more customizations and further development without actually requiring more money.
Open source isn't necessarily right for every piece of software out there, but we do love open source. It can provide (and has provided) the world with some excellent software that anyone who knows what she's doing can change to suit her desires. In the end, the software isn't necessarily better or worse, but just different from a point of view that most users will never see.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Pictographic story of social news



It runs from pre-historic cave paintings all the way up to social news aggregators like Paper.li, Flipboard, Pulse and Taptu, taking in the likes of marathon runners, radio and colour TV along the way.

"I'm fascinated by the social news aggregation space right now, particularly how we got to where we are today and where it might go.Who would have thought thirty years ago that the internet would go mainstream and the World Wide Web would transform content business models (and many other business models come to that) so radically?"
 
You can see the image over the page. It's available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can read more about it on Sheldrake's blog.