Category: Internet

Apple announced last week that it wants to change the way textbooks work for US schools: Instead of schools buying books that are given to a succession of pupils, each kid should receive its own copy of the textbook as an ebook on his iPad.

So far, so interesting. I have two observations on this:

a) Richard Stallman wrote once a short story called “The right to read“. Having textbooks solely on DRM-infected ebook readers is yet another step in that direction.

b) This is a huge opportunities for crowd-sourced textbooks. The material that basic textbooks cover have been summarized, prepared for lectures, lessons, books, … by successions of teachers, home-schoolers, students and other people over and over again. This is a market that is pitch-perfect for some sort of Wikipedia-style cooperative editing.

There will be no single common edition for all topics, some are just too controversial. In other cases, there will be different approaches on how to teach a certain subject. Nevertheless, if it is easy enough to share enhancements to copylefted textbooks, we might see that many teachers will enhance the ebook for their class (add some multimedia content, add exercises, provide additional information) and feed all these back into the public pool of ebooks.

Optimally, this would work as a plugin into Apple’s ebook writing software to make it a seamless experience. The economic incentive for Apple is not there, so I doubt that will happen soon. But if someone writes a decent conversion tool that takes a set of pages from Wikipedia (perhaps enhanced with some special tags for this purpose) and builds a textbook from them, this could take off very quickly.

This could do to textbooks what Wikipedia already did to lexica.

(And of course, Amazon will also try to ruin Apple’s plans.)

How many research grants have been awarded to “Semantic Web” research proposals over the last few years? I always maintained that this is a typical academic solution to a problem that will be solved by very simple additions to the existing web like microformats.

Now the search heavyweights have joined the semantic web for real. But not by doing RDF or any of those full blown perfect solutions developed over the last years by burning research money.

As I see it, most of the research projects are now completely obsolete given the launch of schema.org.

Ametsreiter in der Fuzo:

Der Einsatz von “Deep Packet Inspection” (DPI), mit der der Netzverkehr durchleuchtet werden kann, sei eine Angelegenheit des Betreibers, wird Ametsreiter im “Wall Street Journal” weiter zitiert. Kaufe eine Fluglinie eine Boeing 777, schreibe ihr auch niemand vor, wen sie damit befördern dürfe.

Die Analogie ist super, darf ich die auch mal hernehmen?

Kauft ein Endkunde einen Internet-Zugang, dann schreibe ihm auch niemand vor, welche Applikationen er darüber nutzen dürfe.

Wie wär’s damit, Herr Ametsreiter?

I don’t know whether my still-not-quite-native IPv6 at home is to blame, or whether Google has some capacity problems over v6, but watching youtube videos at home with v6 enabled offers a significantly worse user experience, than via v4.

An intern working for facebook created a beautilful map based on the relationship graph of facebook users.

So far, so widely blogged about.

One thing is remarkable: you can still see the border between the old west- and east part of Germany:

vs.

I wonder whether this is just the result of more people per square mile in the west, or if this one effect of still differing infrastructure or social structures.

Today, heise wrote about Linotype’s offer in the “fonts for webpages” market.

If I’m not mistaken, that’s not the first commercial offering of licensing fonts for the new HTML/CSS font feature. On one hand, this a really good offer, as it allows amateur sites to use professional fonts for free and commercial, high-traffic sites can use these fonts for a reasonable price.

But one thing bugs me about these offers: In order to enforce the pay-per-pagehit business model, these services need to serve the fonts from their own servers. That means:

• On the plus side, potentially better caching between different sites.
• But: the font-servers implicitly track all visitors to the website using these fonts.

Given all the privacy implications that embedded ads and social media gizmos (“click here if you like this”) are starting to raise, fonts seem to be the next thing you need to be careful about if you’re conscious about the traces you leave in third-party access-logs.