Yes, you do not use Bing. Neither do I. But some people do, enough that webmasters and other such people have to pay it some mind. After all, how are people going to find their dose of Kardasiawhater if the Internet’s sites aren’t well tuned?

Today Bing released an update to its suite of webmaster tools, working to promote, according to the company’s notes, increased transparency, more shared data, and more total features. Or, more simply, to make interacting with Bing less difficult and more useful.

What is in the update? We have broken it down into useful bullet points to save you time:

• Expanded crawl information: Bing is now sharing more information from its crawl process, including being “no longer limited to just seeing inbound links which point only to pages returning a 400 header response code.”


• Improved email alerts: Bing will email you if it wants to change how it crawls your site. That is, if it wants to get up in your business a bit more.


• Increased URL normalization power: Bing will now allow for up to 50 “query string parameters that can be normalized” that can be normalized per website.


• Increased data provided by Bing’s Index Explorer.


• Expanded DNS verification for domains, including a “third option will now allow you to place a discrete CNAME record to your DNS to validate a domain.”


• Integrated data from AdCenter: “when viewing Traffic data and looking at the keywords which drove traffic to your site, you’ll notice an Avg CPC column on the left now, with more details in a floating pane to the left of that.”

It’s a good list of solid incremental improvements to Bing’s toolkit. In its blog post, Microsoft cited a year’s worth of listening to come up with this specific list of upgrades. You can therefore hope that the company managed to put together a strong blend of updates that were honestly needed. It appears so.

In other Bing news, its global market share is all but flat.

After announcing on October 20 that Google Reader would be annexed by Google Plus, Reader has gotten the ol' +1 today. Google is rolling out the new, clean Plus theme that has already come to Gmail, Docs and elsewhere, and it is replacing the Reader "Like" function with the +1 button. Sharing from Google Reader now produces a +snippet. I guess we no longer need that nice workaround.

But it's not all plusses on Google Reader today. Reader's social features, beloved by some avid readers who didn't want the noise of sharing on full-fledged social networks, are now switched off. No more friending, following and sharing; it's all circling and +1s now.

Sponsor

The changes don't really remove any functionality, either (edit: except note-taking. Did you know Google Reader had note-taking?), but they do force those who like to share via Google Reader to join Plus. Shuttering features that have devoted users, even if it isn't many, is always a bold move.

"Retiring Reader's sharing features wasn't a decision that we made lightly," says engineer Alan Green in Google's blog post, "but in the end, it helps us focus on fewer areas, and build an even better experience across all of Google."

But it seems like Google has had it out for Reader for a while now. In January, it demoted Reader below the fold in Gmail. Google's essence is social now, and standalone Reader users have to join the party.

The close-knit sharing between avid readers was nice, but there are clear advantages to sharing on Google Plus, not the least of which is the fact that +snippets are much more attractive to click on than simple Google Reader links. For those mourning the loss of their Google Reader communities, wouldn't creating a Google Reader circle do the trick?

Although, it sure is lame that Google didn't make it easy to convert your Reader friends into a circle automatically.

For anyone who doesn't use Google Plus, there are some amazing RSS clients that use your Google Reader as the back-end but let you share however you'd like. And you know you can still add all your preferred sharing services to the 'Send To' tab, right? The same settings we showed you before to add Google Plus as a Reader service will let you add anything else, too.

View the story "Die In Hell With A Cherry On Top" on Storify]

Did you use Google Reader's social features? How do you feel about the changes?

• A new look and feel that's cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at.

• The ability to +1 a feed item (replacing "Like"), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (replacing "Share" and "Share with Note").

News crossed the wire last night that the ed-tech startup Codecademy has raised $2.5 million, led by Union Square Ventures. That’s a nice chunk of change for a very new company (it’s only been in existence since August.) It’s also a strong vote of confidence for the startup’s vision and product from one of the most respected investment firms in consumer tech, one that’s also funded Twitter, Etsy, and Edmodo.

Headlines talk about Codecademy as “the future of learning” and the new path to “coding mastery.” Me, I took to Twitter with my reaction:

I know. That’s harsh. And as a huge supporter of education technology startups but also of tools to teach people how to code, let me apologize for cussing. And let me clarify:

See, I’m currently trying to learn to code. Other than some BASIC I taught myself some 30 years ago, I have absolutely zero programming knowledge. I’ve never taken a class. I’ve never cracked open a How To book. But I want to learn, particularly as a technology journalist who’s committed to looking “under the hood,” if you will, of the tools that she covers.

I’ve opted to learn JavaScript, mainly because I think it’s one of the essential building blocks of the Web. Also, if this whole education writer thing doesn’t work out, maybe I can get a job using node.js.

One small problem: it’s actually damn hard to learn to code if you have no background in engineering or math. And frankly, Codecademy has been no help.

I’ve worked my way through all the “Getting Started with Programming” lessons and I’ve even tackled the Intermediate Javascript course. I’ve got badges. I’ve earned achievements. And I don’t know shit.

If you were to sit me down in front of a blank IDE and ask me to build something, I wouldn’t have any clue how to begin. (And the fact that I know what an IDE is probably sets me apart from a lot of novice would-be programmers.)

I can set a variable. That’s one of the first Codecademy lessons, and no doubt its most compelling one. And let me give the startup huge kudos for that, because I think the process of on-boarding people, particularly non-programmers, into programming is a challenge in itself. It can be intimidating — both the code and the coders, frankly — and I like the idea of a Web interface that makes it easy and non-threatening to learn to program. “Fun” is good, “easy” is good — all in the service of demonstrating to non-techies that this is a skill they can indeed obtain.

But once you’re past that first lessons, then what? Codecademy offers an interesting UI, sure, but let’s not confuse interface and understanding, lessons and learning, engineering problems with education problems. There’s no help with definitions or concepts, for example (um, WTF is an array?!) In fact, there’s no help at all.

I’m fairly convinced that those who love Codecademy and see it as the great new way to learn how to code already know how to code. (Either that or they’ve just tackled the first two lessons.) And as such, this seems like a tool that can really only benefit those who are already programmers.

That’s a shame and a missed opportunity. We need to help extend the skills of programming to others who aren’t tech elites — to girls, to minority youth, for starters.

The pursuit of knowledge about programming shouldn’t be conflated with the pursuit of badges. That’s the beauty of this sort of DIY learning tool too — the people who want to learn to code want to learn to code and the reward should be that knowledge, not some virtual item.

A lot of people have come to Codecademy. In investing in the startup, USV points to the interest the startup has already attained — some 500,000 registered users. But these sorts of numbers, while touted in consumer tech, seem like the wrong metric when it comes to ed-tech. You can look at something like Instagram in contrast, another “hot new startup” that boasts some 5 million users and over 100 million photos. You can ask, “how many of those photos are actually crap?” and the answer is probably “it doesn’t matter.”

But when you ask “how many of those 500,000 Codecademy users actually learned any JavaScript?”, the answer is actually really important.

Posts and links get shared over and over again, but we usually don't know how. We get counts, but who shares what and how far do does a link reach? Google+ Ripples gives you a peak into the process. A link or status is posted, and like when a pebble is dropped in a pond, a pattern forms outwards.

The above, for example, is the view for Sergey Brin's update when Steve Jobs passed away. Each circle represents a share, and arrows indicate the direction of a share. Larger circles indicate heavier resharing.

Zoom in to see more details of sharing sequences:

That's not all though. There are lot of details that make this feature impressive. First and most importantly, this feature is available for all users and all publicly shared posts. Select the dropdown options for a post, and 'View Ripples', which brings you to a fast-loading visualization. It usually takes a few seconds for these sort of things to load and process, but Ripples loads instantly.

Then there's the draggable timeline in the bottom that lets you see when shares happen. Press play to see bubbles pop up instantly.

Finally, the visualization is tightly coupled with Google+ itself and not just some lab experiment in the boonies of Google land. A scrollable list of shares on the right update as you zoom in and out of the Ripples, which makes it easy to find influential people and see what people are talking about.

See it in action in the video below, or just try it out for yourself.

[Google+ Ripples via @blprnt]

Exclusive: Gnip, a provider of social media data to enterprise applications, is announcing today that it will be incorporating data from Google+ into its streams. Gnip will offer a keyword search stream for Google+ that is built on the social platform’s new API.

For background, Gnip serves as an API hub for social streams, collecting data from services like Twitter, Facebook and other social sources, and pushing it out to other data-consuming applications and Websites. Applications using Gnip’s platform can get public data streams for over 100 feeds and sites, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, Flickr, and others without ever visiting those sites or accessing their individual APIs. And Gnip also has premium access to the Twitter firehose of data.

Adding Google+ data to the stream was 100 percent based on demand from clients, says Chris Moody, COO and President of Gnip. “Large companies making business decisions based on social conversations as well as social media monitoring companies have been asking for this as a compliment to other feeds from Facebook and Twitter.

Using the keyword search stream for Google+, customers select relevant terms and phrases that Gnip uses to deliver matching public activity, comments, photos, URL and video data from Google+. Gnip’s Google+ keyword search stream comes with the startup’s standard metadata enrichments including format normalization, deduplication and URL unwinding.

The key takeaway, explains Moody, is that businesses actually want to monitor the Google+ stream. With 40 million users, he says, “it’s a worthwhile source.”

Got something you want to find on the Guardian website? Tweet your question at our new @GuardianTagBot service to get an answer with the help of the Guardian's Open Platform

The Guardian is experimenting with a new Twitter-based service, and would like your help to test it out. @GuardianTagBot is a Twitter account set up for our content API robot, TagBot. If you tweet it with a search term on your phone or online, it will then send you a link to our latest coverage that best matches what you were looking for. It's rather like playing fetch with our articles, videos, galleries and audio.

For example, if you tweet "@GuardianTagBot latest Arsenal news?", TagBot will match the words 'news' and 'Arsenal' against the content we have stored and tagged on our API, and return you our most up to date content on Arsenal FC.

This is a beta service however. TagBot will definitely make some mistakes, but it's here to help us check how well our tagging system is working. To help you get the most relevant results however, here are some quick FAQs:

How should I tweet TagBot?

TagBot will try its best to understand full sentence queries e.g. 'What's happening in the Middle East?' but it will probably respond best to more specific search-style terms like 'Middle East news', or 'Nigel Slater recipes'. TagBot might get confused if you are asking for news on Jordan the country rather than the latest antics of Katie Price, so you might want to be as clear as possible! Of course you can swear at TagBot too, but you might make it sad. TagBot will also struggle with personal requests like 'Will you marry me?'. It's not Siri.

How will TagBot respond?

TagBot will reply to your 'Mentions' feed by sending you an @ reply with a link to a results page similar to the one below. This will show you the most up-to-date content the Guardian has managed to find on the tag or keywords TagBot thought you were looking for, as well as asking for your feedback.

TagBot is only as good as the tags we have so if it returns something that's not relevant, that's probably because we haven't got a tag for it yet, so it's doing its best. However if TagBot replies with 'Sorry, no content' and you're certain we should have something, let Tagbot's puny humans know by tweeting @TagBotsHuman or emailing tagbot@guardian.co.uk.

Can I give feedback?

Yes please! We'd love for you to let us know how well TagBot did getting the content you wanted, even if it's done a bad job. This will help us improve our tags in the future. So please let us know by clicking the 'I am a good Bot' or 'I am a bad Bot' buttons at the end of your results page. If you'd like to give more feedback, again tweet @TagBotsHuman.

Is there a maximum amount I can tweet TagBot?

There is no personal limit, but TagBot's batteries are only so powerful, so after responding to around 3000 queries a day it will fall asleep. The best way to know when this is happened is to follow @GuardianTagBot which will tweet status updates and let you know when it is dozing, as well as any news on new tags, and any interesting tag-related content it thinks everyone should know about.

If I follow @GuardianTagBot won't I be sent everyone else's TagBot replies?

No. TagBot will go and search for your query but send you an answer from one of his related accounts, @GuardianTagBot1, @GuardianTagBot2 or @GuardianTagBot3. In fact it's probably best you do follow @GuardianTagBot so you know when it's dozing so can't answer.

Will I get further updates on my query when you publish new content?

No, you will only get a response from TagBot when you initiate a new query, during this trial.

Are there are humans watching TagBot's account?

Yes - but only intermittently. This is a beta service so won't have Guardian's usual customer service standards. The humans can be contacted through @TagBotsHuman or through tagbot@guardian.co.uk.

Why are you doing this test?

The idea for a Twitter-based Guardian search client came from Guardian content development manager Nina Lovelace and was developed in collaboration with social media agency Smesh with input from the Guardian development and user experience team. We wanted to test whether in future we could provide a service by which users 'sign up' to get content updates through social media networks according to their favourite tags, eg Arsenal.

We're also interested in building new things that can help show off potential of the Guardian's Open Platform to users and potential content and commercial partners. If you've any other thoughts on how we could improve TagBot, please let @TagBotsHuman know.

The recent (12th September 2011) copyright extension, by the European Parliament and Council, of copyright in sound recordings and performances from 50 to 70 years, was greeted with mixed and often contrasting reaction. For example: It was described as a “brilliant moment” by General Secretary of The Musicians Union and as “a cultural disaster” by Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group.

The UK government backed the extension which ought to surprise, as the UK government commissioned the Hargreaves Review on IP & Growth, which reported in May 2011, and which appeared to be arguing against copyright term extension referring to the need for economic evidence. The Gower’s Review another government commissioned review in 2006 had been more specific in its argument against term extensions.

photo of Ed Vaizey, who was in favour of the extension, by Dept of CM&S on Flickr CC BY NC ND

The lobbying on this issue from the music industry has been indisputably vocal. As Music Week states: “The industry – backed by Music Week’s Extend The Term campaign – has waged a skilful, but difficult lobbying exercise, to first persuade the UK Government of the merits and economic benefits of copyright term extension, and then push the legislators in Brussels in the right direction.”

The legislators were indeed “pushed in the right direction’” and the Directive passed by 17-8 votes. Belgium was one of the states that voted against the extension referring to “a negative impact on the accessibility of cultural material” for consumers as one of its arguments.

The proponents for the term extension point to the hard pressed session and ‘non-superstar’ featured artists who stand to lose out on vital royalties at their most vulnerable stage of life if the copyright term remained at 50 years. The Council of the EU referred to how some performers “face an income gap at the end of their lifetimes”.

Proponents for the term extension also argue that the resulting royalties will be reinvested to support fresh talent. They point to provisions in the Directive such as: a record label financed fund for musicians who signed away their rights when a recording was made; a clause to allow performers to renegotiate contracts with record labels after 50 years; a provision to enable artists to regain their rights to a recording if their label is not marketing or making the recording available to the public; as all being illustrative of a fair deal for the artists.

Many well-known artists have welcomed the extension.

However, not all musicians are convinced. Ed O’Brien of Radiohead who is also one of the leaders of the Featured Artists Coalition, a British group that advocates for musicians’ rights referring to the term extension said: “It means they have 20 more years in servitude to contracts that are no longer appropriate to a digital age.”

And Sandie Shaw said: “This is extremely good news for record companies and collection agencies, but bad news for artists.”

Some experts studying the issue also remain unconvinced that the artists are going to benefit. Martin Kretschmer, Professor of Information Jurisprudence and Director of Centre for Intellectual Property Policy & Management at Bournemouth University says: “72% of the financial benefits from term extension will accrue to record labels. Of the 28% that will go to artists, most of the money will go to superstar acts, with only 4% benefitting those musicians that the European Council claims is facing “income gap at the end of their lifetimes”

The percentages Professor Kretschemer quotes are difficult to ignore. I am able to appreciate the arguments of the rights holders of the works of certain ‘superstar’ artists (such as the Beatles and Rolling Stones) not wanting to lose revenue from lucrative catalogues when their copyright expires. Importantly however the beneficiary artists and rights holders are very few in number. The change in the law benefits a relatively small number of people but affects a large number of artists and members of the public, with any significant sums of revenues going to the rights holders (the record labels) and superstar artists. Not for the first time we have an example of copyright policy and law being changed to benefit a few but affecting the many, copyright term being extended upwards rather than down in order to align with terms existing in other jurisdictions. Professor Hargreaves’s plea for evidence based policy on intellectual property appears to have been unheeded by the UK government.

It’s been said that if the term extension Directive had not been voted through there was a risk of hits from the Sixties being “lost to the public domain” the counter argument is that now the Directive is to be implemented the public domain has been deprived of the hits as well as the “non-hits” that may have been re-discovered and released.

I remain unconvinced that smaller artists will benefit due to the term extension and can’t argue with Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group who says “It puts money into the pockets of big labels – it’s unlikely to benefit smaller artists”

The music industry comprises of a myriad of players in a labyrinthine landscape which includes the performer, producer, the record label, collection societies. This complex network is further complicated by copyright law. Accounts of declining revenues in the music industry are common place, blamed on copyright infringement more often than not. Arguably new business models are needed and slowly evolving.

Looking at this complex picture very simplistically, I personally would like to see the artist enjoy more freedom over her creative work; to be able to exercise more flexibility over it that would allow her to make better use of the online opportunities for self-promotion. If artists assign their copyright to record labels or collection societies as is usual in the UK and generally in Europe, they are not able to share their own works for free by licensing it say under a non-commercial creative commons licence. This form of self-promotion may not be suitable or necessary for the super-star block buster type of artist but for those artists that don’t fall into that category (the majority) may benefit from the viral nature of digital sharing. The way the music industry is structured and the contractual relationships between the artists and the record labels and collection societies don’t currently appear to make it easy for the artists to explore such opportunities.

Photo of CC by Kalexanderson on Flickr CC BY SA

Amongst the examples of artists who have used creative commons licence to good effect include Curt Smith formerly of Tears for Fears who is a great proponent of Creative Commons (CC) licences for his music.

Photo of Curt Smith by Randy Stewart on Flickr CC BY SA

Nine Inch Nails is another often cited example. There are numerous others on the CC website

A very interesting illustration of evolving business models in the music industry is provided by Brian Message who is an accountant turned music manager and investor. Message used to manage Radiohead amongst other well-known names and is only too aware of the new way of doing things in the music industry: “Under the new way of doing things, you’re a chief executive of an artist’s business with multiple revenue streams that go across multiple countries,” he says.

In contrast to the usual deals entered into by artists the bands Message signs get to keep ownership of their work. The contract is a so-called “360 deal”: all income – from records, concerts, merchandise, commercial tie-ins, everything – is split between band and backers, after the initial investment has been repaid.” Message explains “We’re trying to get away from a copyright trading model more towards a venture capitalist approach with artists”. This is a start-up model of entrepreneurial musicians which is very interesting and crucially the artists retain the rights over their creative works. Rights ownership is the crucial thing – this provides the freedom the flexibility and the control.

There are some interesting copyright challenges percolating in the US relating to who should own the rights and for how long. The New York Times reported on September 12th:“The copyright law approved by Congress in 1976 includes a provision, known as “termination rights,” that allows recording artists and songwriters to reclaim ownership of their work after 35 years.

Many American musicians, who made recordings in the 1970s, including Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Loretta Lynn, are now filing such claims. The four major labels — Sony, Universal, EMI and Warner — are strenuously resisting, arguing that the performers were employees doing “work for hire,” and thus not entitled to claim copyright.”

This development is worth keeping an eye on.

Photo of singer by Joe Abbruscato on Flickr CC BY NC

It is worth noting that the European Commission had originally proposed an extension to a term of 95 years from the existing 50 years. So the extension to 70 years is a minor concession. Organisations such as Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Open Rights Group (ORG) should take credit for their efforts in this regard.

Other vocal opponents to the extension included Christian Engström, Pirate MEP.

Bizarrely much of the evidence that the European Commission relied on proposing the Directive appears to have been sourced from the British Phonographic Industry.

It is not clear if or how much awareness or interest in the term extension there is amongst the general public. There may be a lack of awareness of the significance of the changes to the law amongst the public. At the time Lord Mandelson, the then UK Business Secretary announced the Digital Economy Act in October 2009, there was a suggestion there would be a drive to raise public awareness about copyright and copyright infringement. This was promised by the government in order to address cases of copyright infringement covered by the provisions of the Digital Economy Act. This awareness raising has yet to happen. At the time the Digital Economy Act was voted through (in April 2010) by parliament in the final days of the previous Labour government, there was palpable outrage and objection at some of the controversial parts of the Act, amongst online communities (e.g. Twitter) while the awareness or concern amongst the members of the public was not apparent. It is arguable that more needs to be done to ensure the public are more aware of the value of the public domain and the consequences of the changes in law such as this term extension that is depriving the public domain.

There appears to be two groups of people who will benefit as a result of the extended term: the record labels and the multi- millionaire mega-acts/artists. I personally struggle to be convinced by the argument that the session artists and the non-superstar featured artists benefit at any notable level.

The Guardian provides some sobering figures “figures estimated by a group of economists, intellectual property experts and music academics who studied the effects of copyright term extension: “the typical performing artist, the annual payout is in the lower hundreds of pounds and will not increase from extension … £250 a year is not a pension.”

The same Guardian article features an artist (Nic Jones) who had a hit album in 1980 but received no royalties as he doesn’t own the recordings. It would appear to be that it is the rights and the contractual relationships between the artist and the others in the music industry that needs renegotiating for a fairer deal for the artists who are not in the well-known Beatles league.

Copyright is necessary and may fuel creativity in the short term by providing an income to artists but hinders creativity in the longer term by creating monopolies and preventing creative reuses. It is worth reminding ourselves that copyright term was originally 14 years . Most (two-thirds) of the revenue from a recoding is said to be generated in the first six years. So the arguments in favour of the extension to 70 years would appear to be unconvincing. Unfortunately UK and European legislators do not agree.

Mimi & Eunice sums it all up much better than I can ever hope to.

Godtfred Kirk Christiansen et al, filed Jul 28 1958 [US Patent Office/Google Patents via 365blanc]

Previously: The Lego brick turns 50; Lego cannot be trademarked, European judges rule.

Last night the cream of London’s thriving, growing technology community descended, en masse, on one of London’s most prestigious venues.

As they turned up, they spent their time going through the usual motions of any startup event: twittering, checking in, taking photos. But unlike most similar occasions, this wasn’t a meet-up or a conference or even a launch party: it was a reception at Buckingham Palace.

Under the auspices of Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, dozens of startuppers were invited into the heart of Britain’s royal family to discuss the future and plans to invigorate the economy through technology. It marked the latest moment in the Tech City initiative, a government plan to make a corridor in East London “the digital capital of Europe”, which has seen Andrew acting as a sort of ambassador.

There’s no doubt that building the city’s startup community could help the country, bring jobs and go at least a little way to fixing a broken economy. And while London has serious competition for the continental title — not least from Berlin, which has its own thriving scene — it is interesting to see it begin to believe in itself a little more.

But… but… but…

I couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed as the number of tweets from the palace built up in my stream. Here were people I deeply admire and respect — including some of my closest friends — giggling like children at the prospect of their royal moment. I was uncomfortable. Why?

At first I thought it was tinged with jealousy. After all, I wasn’t invited. It was sour grapes: the corridors of power were closed to me. But while I thought about whether my discomfort was merely at my own failures, I realized it wasn’t that at all.

Startups are meant to be disrespectful

Thing is, I’m a republican (in the true sense of the word). I believe in meritocracy. I hate the groveling, I hate the cap-doffing, I hate the insane, unaccountable privilege of those who control Britain. I hate my country’s obsessions with class. And I’m not ashamed of these feelings: I am frustrated that in a world where Occupy Wall Street marches to try and represent the interests of the 99 percent, Britain has basically codified the 1 percent’s control into its laws and systems.

And to be honest, I think these biases are an important part of why I love covering startups.

Startups are meant to be disruptive. They’re meant to be disrespectful. They’re meant to look at the existing order and scoff, saying “we can do it better than that”. The best technologies have been enormous levelers, breaking down cultural barriers, probing the existing order for weaknesses, exploiting them and overturning it. Technologies don’t wait. They don’t ask permission.

Yes, it can be arrogant and unseemly sometimes — things that leave many of us stiff upper-lipped Britons feeling rather uncomfortable. But the assumption that the system can be better, and the burning desire to make it better, is a big part of what makes the startup world so exciting.

Yet as I worked at my desk into the evening, I watched a sequence of the country’s best and brightest entrepreneurs lining up to visit the Palace and felt disappointed. This wasn’t telling truth to power, this was cosying up to it. And while it might be a bit of fun — a great story to tell your friends or your parents — where does it get them in the long run? Oh yes, investors might benefit from this (most of the world’s money lives with the powerful, after all) but where does it really get startups?

My friend Ben Hammersley recently gave a speech to the security industry in which he argued that the decision-making elite — the rich, the powerful — are totally disconnected from one of the most important changes in human history. That makes it their job to keep up with technology, not technology’s job to slow down for them.

Moore’s law. You all know it: the rule of the thumb that has computing power doubling for the same price every 18 months. It makes planning really difficult. Mostly because people don’t see its relentlessness.

For example, a two term Prime Minister today would end his term of office with an iPhone 64 times as powerful as the one he won the election with. (Or the same thing, but 1/64th of the price.) His policies, therefore, need to written with that future in mind, not the present. Good luck with that.

Another example: a civil servant only gets to do really good stuff in their 40s. If they’d joined up straight out of Oxford, by the time they get a big chair, their desktop machine will be 1000s of times as powerful as when they joined.

[…] This is all obvious for us, yes, but Truth Number One, is that anything that is dismissed on the grounds of the technology-not-being-good-enough-yet is going to happen. We have to tell people this.

The fact that we still play to the old dynamic is what made me so uncomfortable. Of course the power brokers want to court technology, because they realize — even if they don’t admit it — that they’re on the brink of watching it all slip away. They know that a new order is coming, that old businesses and old systems won’t always have the power.

So don’t be co-opted. Don’t get fooled. Don’t mistake a quick, groping handshake with a prince for success.

I hope a glimpse into the corridors of power doesn’t make Britain’s startups think they’ve made it — or even that this is the way they need to make it. I hope they realize that they’re in charge.

Don’t suck up to the establishment. Scare them.

Photograph of Buckingham Palace used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user Jimmy Harris; Ben Hammersley courtesy of Campus Party Mexico.

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For a long time, Sal Khan has remained adament: he’s the teacher at Khan Academy. He’s made all the 2500 some-odd videos on the site. He’s researched the material. He’s designed the lecture format. The instruction — it’s all him.

But as he hinted when he spoke last week to Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, that control over instruction is changing. And now it’s official: for the first time, Sal Khan is allowing someone other than himself to create content that will bear the Khan Academy brand.

In a blog post this evening, he announced that Khan Academy will be expanding to include art history, with videos provided by SmartHistory‘s Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. In fact, you’ll find that the URL that once led you to SmartHistory’s online open textbook full of wonderfully rich, interactive art history material now redirects to smarthistory.khanacademy.org/.

This also makes it the first move towards seriously including the humanities in the Khan Academy curriculum. While there have been a few odd history videos up til now, this is different. It’s also the first real move to add other content providers under the non-profit’s umbrella. “Acquire” is actually the wrong word here. It’s a “real partnership”, Smarthistory tells me, and it’s an important one.

It’s one that recognizes that Sal Khan cannot teach every subject, despite all the hoopla that the man will single-handedly educate the world. The cracks in that facade seemed most evident, I’d argue, when he appeared on the Colbert Report and confessed that when he goes to teach history, he uses Wikipedia as his main resource.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with Wikipedia. (And in his defense, Khan does say “I click on the footnotes” to which Colbert wittily responds “I’m responsible for some of those.”) Wikipedia is an amazing reference tool. But it’s not really the material you should lean on if you are going to teach a class on a particular topic.

Granted, having to turn to Wikipedia (or any other encyclopedia or research book) in the first place isn’t something that Khan does when he goes to teach STEM or business subjects. After all, he has a bachelor’s degree in math, one in electrical engineering, one in computer science, a Masters in electrical engineering and computer science and an MBA. His expertise on linear regression is hard to challenge.

But his expertise on the Italian Baroque? Um, yeah.

So, enter Smarthistory.

But I think this move isn’t just about adding subject-matter expertise. The other thing that Sal Khan lacks is an education background. And so adding the Smarthistory team to Khan Academy means something else. It’s the addition of teachers. Both Harris and Zucker have extensive research and teaching backgrounds, making them an important contribution to an organization that I’ve argued has been long on promises of “education disruption” but short on the actual pedagogical know-how on how to get there.

Nevertheless, I am very curious to see how this new partnership between the two organizations will progress. I’ve been a long-time supporter of Smarthistory (disclosure: I contributed to its Kickstarter campaign.) How do videos fit into art history? Will Khan Academy move away from its YouTube emphasis to include other multimedia resources? And how will curriculum in the humanities fit into the scaffolding process that Khan Academy has started to promote as part of its classroom-oriented platform? It may be easy for some people to see how Algebra leads to Calculus (although there are some educators, I should add, who are very skeptical of scaffolding’s forced linearity). But it’s less clear how an inability to “master” the artwork of the Renaissance should block you from moving forward to study the Reformation.

I’m also curious how badges and points and multiple choice testing works in the humanities. How will the Khan Academy system account for some of the nuance that comes with art appreciation and art analysis?

How will adding the humanities to Khan Academy curriculum (and adding humanities teachers) counter some of the problems educators have pointed to with the organization? Will it? Can it?

Does this indicate that Khan Academy is serious about covering all subject areas? What will be the next partnership we’ll see it make?

With an ever-so-apt art metaphor here, I’d say this seems to be a “work-in-progress,” but it’s one that will be interesting to watch.

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Specific design decisions are important to achieve specific outcomes. The one that iss most poignant to me is the decision to build quantity or quality content.

If you want big numbers and lots of content, make it super simple to join/post/etc. “Of course we want big numbers, Tara!” you are thinking. But it’s not entirely desireable. The downside to simple signup/posting/etc is that it attracts low-brow content. Sure, there are lots of users, but the content can become terribly uninteresting and sometimes spammy.

If you want quality content and users, you make sign up a little more arduous and content a little harder to post. Not impossible or even difficult, but your design requires the user to sign up with a little more information and posts to require a little more thought.

But it seems that today, all people seem to care about is quantity. Big numbers. Fast. This leads to ‘hyped up startups of the week’ where everyone talks about how freakin awesome and huge a startup is for 2 seconds, then moves onto the next one and rarely (if ever) discusses that startup again. When the in crowd moves on, all that’s left is drivel content. That’s not a sustainable business or something that I ever want to build (but it seems to be what any angels or vcs want us to build).

“Allow anonymous posting!”

“Take out steps to adding content!”

“RE-tweet/share/post/tumble/pin/poke/blah!”

I think there is a happy balance of creating an app where there is an ease of use and quick posting while requiring real people that have something significant to say to have a voice.

Facebook used to be that place. You needed to sign up with your real name. If you were going to post, you’d have to come up with something fairly original and semi-interesting to say before you hit post. Not all content was interesting to everyone. But it was original and it said something about the person posting it. There were rants, personal photos, bad days, breakups, new relationships, inspirations, arguments, embarrassing drunken confessions, more embarrassing tagged photos of others in compromising moments, commentary, food porn….the list goes on and on and on. Whether or not you found something interesting in your feed was completely subjective. I, for one, love the mundane. I’m deeply interested in the bits and bobs of people’s lives.

And that content still exists, but it is starting to give way to something else: RE-posting.

The other day I thought to myself, “Egad, Facebook has turned into Tumblr!” I think Tumblr is lovely. It’s easy to use and well-designed, but I find the content on Tumblr shite. It seems to be all about following as many people as you can, then finding the best, most inspiring, funniest, prettiest, craziest stuff and hitting a little button to post it to your own Tumblr. It’s the image equivalent to retweeting and I wouldn’t mind it so much, but it creates a whole lot of noise without any originality.

Take, for instance, the screenshot I took today. Yes. I think the post is interesting and very poignant…the first time I see it. And I may even appreciate how others share it because it shows me who is aligned with this line of thought in my stream. But after 20+ shares (or REposts), I start to roll my eyes. And believe me, I’m JUST as guilty of this as anyone here. It’s a rush to REpost something poignant and have a whole bunch of people REpost it from you. “Look at all the people I influenced! I’m special!” But I’m not. I was most likely the 2,345,896th person to REpost this on Facebook. I just happened to get a jump on a few dozen others.

I hate to wax poetically about the good ole days (though I have been more and more lately), but back when I started blogging, people became popular by producing amazing original content and thoughts. And if you were going to discuss someone else’s idea, you would ADD to the conversation by coming up with some of your own thoughts and then link back to the original blogger’s post. And we got smarter and were made to think about why something resonated with us and how we could improve on the original rather than just add noise.

Maybe there is no such thing as original thought anymore? Or maybe we’ve just got too busy to form our own ideas and articulate them. Or maybe it’s just unpopular to do so. Who knows. But when every platform becomes a REposting platform, I start to get really bored of the “social web” and long for a small community of original thinkers who don’t care about popularity or REposts, but instead care about learning and growing and making something worth archiving.

Tumblr is great and it exists to REpost stuff ad nauseum and somehow it works for the communities it serves. Google+ attempted to do it, too (but when you start with poor content, the hype wears off fast – lesson?). If Facebook wants to go in that direction, then I’m worried about its future. Maybe we’ll go back to blogging. Maybe something else will come along to fill that void.

But popular or not, I’m going to continue to try to produce content that isn’t about hype and is about adding to the conversation instead of just adding noise. At least as much as I can.

Today LinkedIn launched http://www.linkedin.com/classmates.

LinkedIn Classmates comes on the heels of status updates from companies, which lets administrators of company pages post short updates, just like users.

Today we are announcing Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich — a new version of the platform that brings a refined, unified user experience for phones, tablets, and more.

Android 4.0 builds on the things people love most about Android — efficient multitasking, rich notifications, customizable home screens, resizable widgets, and deep interactivity — and adds powerful new ways of communicating and sharing. It includes many great features for users, including social and sharing integration, network data usage control, innovative connectivity and camera options, and an updated set of standard apps.

For developers, Android 4.0 introduces many new capabilities and APIs. Here are some highlights:

For a complete overview of what’s new for users and developers, please read the Android 4.0 Platform Highlights.

Alongside the new Android platform, we are releasing new versions of the SDK Tools (r14) and ADT Plugin (14.0) for Eclipse. Among the highlights are:

• Improved build performance in Ant and Eclipse


• Improved layout and XML editors

To get started developing on Android 4.0, visit the Android Developers site for information about the Android 4.0 platform, the SDK Tools, and the ADT Plugin.

If you have already developed and published apps, we encourage you to download the Android 4.0 platform now, to begin testing your app before devices arrive in stores.

Check out the video below for a closer look at Android 4.0 in action.

We may be on the brink of a third industrial revolution, but it’s going to happen in Europe rather than America. That’s at least the view of Jeremy Rifkin, whose new book The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World, argues that the internet will be a thousand times more powerful when merged with the renewable energy revolution.

But as Rifkin told me when we talked on Skype last week, he chose to focus his analysis of this third industrial revolution in Europe rather than America. “We’ve lost our imagination,” Rifkin told me about an America that, he thinks, has lost what he calls “the narrative” on both the analog crisis and the digital opportunity in energy. Most controversially, Rifkin believes that President Obama – for all his good intentions – has failed to connect the dots on energy, thereby making America a footnote in the Euro-centric energy and internet revolution that will transform the 21st century world.

The W3C Provenance Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of The PROV Data Model and Abstract Syntax Notation. PROV-DM is a core data model for provenance for building representations of the entities, people and processes involved in producing a piece of data or thing in the world. PROV-DM is domain-agnostic but with well-defined extensibility points allowing further domain-specific and application-specific extensions to be defined. It is accompanied by PROV-ASN, a technology-independent abstract syntax notation, which allows serializations of PROV-DM instances to be created for human consumption, which facilitates its mapping to concrete syntax, and which is used as the basis for a formal semantics. Two other documents, to be released shortly, are: 1) a normative serialization of PROV-DM in RDF, specified by means of a mapping to the OWL2 Web Ontology Language; 2) the mechanisms for accessing and querying provenance.