The Mozilla Festival is a yearly celebration that brings together hundreds of passionate people to explore the frontiers of the open web. We mash developers, designers, and big thinkers together to make things that can change the world.
This year’s theme is Media, Freedom and the Web—how can the web can make us more creative, collaborative and connected in an age of broadcasters big and small?
Today is a big day for Mozilla and web video. Popcorn, Mozilla’s new HTML5 media toolkit, just launched version 1.0. And the National Film Board of Canada’s “One Millionth Tower” project, a unique Popcorn-powered web documentary, makes its world premiere this weekend at the Mozilla Festival in London and online at Wired.com.
Starting today, you’ll see a new talk every single day on the homepage of TED.com! Each Saturday and Sunday, we’ll be posting a great talk from one of the thousands of independent TEDx events around the world.
We launch with a powerful story from reporter Paul Lewis: Crowdsourcing the news. He uncovered evidence of a police coverup surrounding a killing — using bystanders’ cameraphones and Twitter.
Rumor has it your (not yet posted) TEDTalk gave a sneak peak of your piece ABACUS.
Yes, of all my current projects, I’m most excited about ABACUS, which I spoke about at TEDGlobal. I want ABACUS to start a conversation about our relationship to screens, and about how, in our culture, propaganda wins over content so much of the time. It’s a very visual, sixty-minute direct address to the audience. It’s about national borders, our relationship to screens, and contemporary persuasion.
Update (11/4): Google has politely declined my offer. I spoke with the director of product management who oversees Reader and, while they do plan on making repairs to the UI, they don’t feel that I would be a good fit at this time. I’m fine with this, and am happy that they’re putting some resources into fixing some of the UX problems.
And so I put my resources where my mouth is. As the former lead designer for Google Reader, I offer my services to Google, rejoining for a three month contract in order to restore and enhance the utility of Google Reader, while keeping it in line with Google’s new visual standards requirements. I will put my current projects on hold to ensure that Google Reader keeps its place as the premier news reader, and raises the bar of what a social newsreader can be.
Online learning platform and non-profit organization Khan Academy has been granted $5 million from The O’Sullivan Foundation. The organization has previously raised $2 million+ from Google and The Gates Foundation.
The Khan Academy is brainchild of Salman Khan, who brought the idea of educating young people, self-starters, people who learn at their own pace — online. The educational startup now counts over 2,600 videos in its library, with sessions or classes on everything from arithmetic to physics, including 211 practice exercises, to let students watch videos and learn at their own pace.
Khan just announced that the platform is seeing 39 million pageviews and 3.5 million unique users per month. That 3.5 million unique users is up 309 percent year-over-year. Khan Academy’s free lessons have been viewed more than 82 million times on YouTube.
The Creative Commons 2011 Global Summit was a remarkable success, bringing together CC affiliates, board, staff, alumni, friends and stakeholders from around the world. Among the ~300 attendees was an impressive array of legal experts. Collectively, these experts brought diversity and depth of legal expertise and experience to every facet of the Summit, including knowledge of copyright policy across the government, education, science, culture, and foundation sectors. We designed the Summit’s legal sessions (pdf) to leverage this expertise to discuss our core license suite and the 4.0 license versioning process.
Kauffman partnership will enable Startup Weekend to scale and expand initiatives that empower entrepreneurs The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation today announced that Startup Weekend, a global series of events for entrepreneurs, aspiring founders and startup supporters, is now an affiliate of the Foundation.
Unity Dow wears many hats. She’s a lawyer, a retired judge (who happens to have been Botswana’s first female high court judge), a prolific author of four works of fiction and one non-fiction, and an advocate for the rights of women and girls. During her PopTech talk, which we’ll be posting shortly, she shared her perspective on a spectrum of topics connected to her pursuits including rethinking the future of Africa, reimagining the role of women and girls, and reclaiming one’s self and identity in the process. We caught up with her after she left the stage to follow up on some of the most salient points from her talk.
Among the most exciting PopTech conference moments are when the Fellows each give a glimpse into their compelling work and how it might change the world. The Fellows’ 2011 presentations are now available online so you can revisit those you savored and catch up with others you might have missed.
The strength of New York's start-up community can be attributed to its diversity of talent and the strong collaboration between those involved. Meet the people who are making it happen.
Can't wait to read the new Steve Jobs Bio? While waiting for your book to be shipped, enjoy the 10 most inspiring quotes from the Bio. Stay hungry, Stay foolish.
A new study — The Great Sharing Economy: A Report into Sharing Across the UK — has found that a good 80 percent of British citizens are happier when they share. Those statistics are at odds, however, with the wealth disparity that plagues the UK just as it does the U.S. There, a full 50 percent of the population accounts for a mere 1 percent of the nation's wealth.
“Certainly, some products like Google search will support ‘incognito’ mode,” he tells me, outlining the three ways I could use any web product: unidentified, identified or pseudonymous.
“All three modes have different values to the user and different product implications,” says Horowitz. “Not every product will support all three modes. Something like Google Checkout is the highest bar, where financial processes are involved. And there’s a spectrum in between. Some products make sense to support in multiple modes, and it’s sort of a product-by-product decision.”
Ultimately, Horowitz says, the company’s goal is to give you the freedom to be who you want or need to be in any given moment.
The UK has issued a direct challenge to China and Russia over regulation of the internet, with William Hague insisting that cyberspace must not be "stifled by government control or censorship".
In a strongly worded opening address to an international conference hosted in London, the foreign secretary told delegates that the internet "must remain open and not become ghettoised" – rebuffing the notion that new international treaties were needed to police online activity.
"Nothing would be more fatal or self-defeating than the heavy hand of state control on the internet, which only thrives because of the talent of individuals and of industry within an open market for ideas and innovation," he said.
So, how could Google make this update less emotionally distressing for affected users? Just integrate Google+ with Google Reader as well! Give me a special folder in Google Reader with all my friends’ shares, include a comment system that bumps back all comments Google+. Even if everything else like status updates and pictures were included it would be closer to the old Shared Items than nothing at all.
In the end, If I do like Google wants me to and start to share everything I shared in Google Reader on Google+ instead, that would be the only thing the service would be good for because my stream would be too cluttered for normal updates stand out. How is this solution even a good alternative?
What really bothers me, however, is Google’s casual decision to remove all of Google Reader’s “social” features, including friending, following and shared link blogs.
Look, I get that there’s probably only ten of you out there reading this who care much about changes to Google Reader. For mainstream news consumers, that Google is now streamlining and beautifying this neglected product is probably welcome news. But for those of us who use Google Reader regularly as a utility – as a place to track, follow, archive and search dozens of sources of information from favorite blogs to company feeds and more – any change to Reader has the equivalent impact as an overhaul of Gmail. In other words, proceed carefully or prepare for an earful.
And in this particular case, here comes the earful: I’m going to miss the “social” features Google Reader delivers.
Full disclosure: I am an ex-PM on Google Reader, and I worked on comments and the last round of sharing changes. I also left Google in July.
Google released the previously announced set of changes around G+ integration and UI updates today, and boy is it a disaster. Since the general changes were pre-announced last week, most of us were prepared for the letdown, but actually seeing how it works end to end has made several flaws abundantly clear. Let's start with the obvious.
Below is a translation of an open letter written by Wen Yunchao (twitter: @wenyunchao), an outspoken blogger and free speech activist on the Chinese Internet. It is addressed to the investors of Sina Corp, and explores the censorship practices and implications of the corporate structure of the company, which runs the most popular microblogging service in China. If you are not familiar with Wen Yunchao, the recent New York Times feature about him, Where an Internet Joke is Not Just a Joke, is strongly recommended. For an extensive discussion of the methods used by Sina to censor its micro-blogging service, be sure to read the blog post by Jason Ng at Kenengba. The post is in Chinese, but William Farris has provided a helpful English summary.
I can see Google’s desire to consolidate its social sharing strategy, but there’s a simple solution.
Rebuild Google Reader’s social sharing using the Google Plus API as a foundation. You make existing Google Reader users happy, you broaden their reach by extending the shares seamlessly into Google Plus, and you make a showcase for third-party developers on the kinds of products and services that can be built to enhance and extend Google Plus.
* I helped design Google Reader and have opinions about it.
If one were to look at pictures of the Occupy protests that are spreading in major cities all across the world, the one group of people you can’t afford to miss out are the people wearing the Guy Fawkes masks and holding up quotes from Alan Moore’s famous graphic novel V for Vendetta.
TEDxBoston cordially invites you to engage in more than thirty unique, cutting-edge event Adventures that celebrate both the dynamic Boston region and the TED mission. Adventures are a great way to interact not only with revolutionary hosts but also with members of the TEDxBoston community. Adventures are offered both before the TEDx event as a way to pre-meet members of the community and offered throughout the rest of the year as a way to extend and build on the powerful TEDx experience.
It’s that time of the year again and we’re thrilled to be here at TEDMED 2011 at the beautiful Hotel Del in San Diego. This is the third time we’ve covered this conference in depth and for those of you who were not with us the last two years, we tend to take a different approach to this event than others. Instead of cherry-picking one or two things we like, we prefer to give a recap of each day, briefly covering what we feel are the most relevant talks to our audience. TEDMED is a fast four days filled with sixty speakers and if we’ve done our job properly, you’ll leave our coverage having gotten the highlights of the conference.
Tonight marked the first “day” of TEDMED, though it was simply a two and a half hour kick-off session that started this evening. A big elephant in the room this year was the notable absence of TED (and TEDMED) founder Richard Saul Wurman as co-host. Last year there was a bit of controversy in the sale of TEDMED and, to make a long story short, Richard is out and inventor and entrepreneur Jay Walker is in. Everyone (including Jay and former TEDMED president Marc Hodosh) clearly misses Richard as the host and we hope the casual and light-hearted flaire that dominated the last two years holds without Richard’s charming stage presence.
We’ve just wrapped up day two at TEDMED, retiring to our rooms after a beach clambake at the beautiful Hotel Del Coronado. After a bit of a slow start in the morning sessions, things picked up to make a great day of talks, filled with medical innovation, performances, and more. In addition to this summary of the day’s events, stay tuned for a set of interviews with companies from the TEDMED innovation showcase, among others.
f098q4rut TEDMED Day 2 Glow in the Dark Tumors that Blind Rats Can Now SeeSong-a-day writer Jonathan Mann (of iPhone Antenna Song notoriety) kicked-off today with a song introducing TEDMED and getting the audience ready for a rapid fire talk by Daniel Kraft, chair of Singularity University’s FutureMed (a spectacular program that we’ve also covered).
We’re here at TEDMED 2011 and have just finished up day three of the conference. It was a spectacular. Yesterday (day 2) was solid and today (day 3) was stellar. The talks, ranging from mushrooms to the FDA, allowed TEDMED to really flex its muscles as a world class affair.
Today’s proceedings started with another song-based wrap-up (of yesterday’s talks) by Jonathan Mann and led into a talk by renowned photographer Rick Smolan. His photography book The Power to Heal was given as a part of the TEDMED schwag bag and his talk told the story of his career including the conception of the day in the life series which grew to be one of the most popular photography projects in history. His next goal is to produce a work that takes the digital pulse of the nation through “Big Data.” He’s on the hunt for collaborators so if you’re interested in how data reflects the state of human beings, email us and we can pass your thoughts his way.
TEDMED 2011 finished up with a short morning session for attendees to learn just a little bit more before they checked out of the Del and headed out of San Diego. On the whole, the TEDMED crew once again pulled off a spectacular conference. The quality of the talks (especially Day 3) and social events was exceptional and we’d like to give a big thanks to the TEDMED team for working so hard to put on such a meaningful event.
Jay Walker himself started off the morning by showing us some rare artifacts from his amazing library of human imagination. Most interesting was a punch card from the Jacquard loom, the first machine to use an automated and replicable input of instructions to reliably repeat an action. This innovation from the early 1800s inspired Charles Babbage years later as he built his difference engine, largely considered to be the foundation of modern computing technology. Along with the punch card from the loom itself, Jay had a small book of prayers where each page was woven out of silk using the Jacquard loom itself. This served as an incredible marketing piece for the loom and instantly changed people’s notions at the time of what a loom could do.
The event will be held at the Park of Expositions of Aveiro and last during the afternoon of November 20, 2010 from 13:45hrs onwards. This day is also celebrated as "Universal Children's Day". The detail program of our idea sharing event will be uploaded soon on our website. The timings of the event are from 13:45 to 19:00.
The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,600 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching...
New Google Reader killed many important share features. I hate the decision. And, the new look is bad for Reading.
Even a former product manager for Google Reader chimed in with a biting critique of the overhaul and a small, but passionate #OccupyGoogleReader meme was born.
Matt Lingard said, "While i understand the need for Beta - if you’re this far from being ready, don’t launch". That's the reason why you see #deliciousfail are rising on Twitter.
http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23deliciousfail
The Freesouls Weekly is out! 58 curated webpage links for the Week of October 24-30, 2011. Featured stories via @CreativeCommons #rightscon #OccupyReader
#Freesouls
The #Freesouls Weekly is out! 44 curated webpage links for the Week of October 17-23, 2011.
Featured stories via @PopTech, @Wikipedia, @TED, #Occupy, #Anonymous and #FreeSpeech.
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