Media Technology

This may be old news, but it looks like the New York Times is developing an API for accessing their content:

The goal, according to Aron Pilhofer, editor of interactive news, is to “make the NYT programmable. Everything we produce should be organized data.”

Once the API is complete, the Times’ internal developers will use it to build platforms to organize all the structured data such as events listings, restaurants reviews, recipes, etc. They will offer a key to programmers, developers and others who are interested in mashing-up various data sets on the site. “The plan is definitely to open [the code] up,” Frons said. “How far we don’t know.”

Pilhofer and Frons both declined to give any specific dates, but Pilhofer said the API itself will be done “within a matter of weeks.” In the next six months, “we’ll have some of the major pieces — a restaurant guide, weekend events listings and books,” Frons added.

(Link by way of the IdeaLab Blog.)

My coworker Steve Savitzky has some interesting musings on the Kindle, Amazon’s new ebook reader:

If you want everyone else’s opinion, see the links after the cut. Here’s mine: interesting play, but it’s in the wrong game.

You see, Kindle is Amazon’s attempt at an iPod for books. They’re using what they hope is an elegant, convenient, and reasonably-priced piece of hardware (which I’d guess that they’re selling at pretty close to cost when you factor in the pre-paid data plan) to sell digital copies of books (which are fairly expensive considering all the atoms they don’t have to handle compared with their dead-tree counterparts).

Apple, on the other hand, is using convenient access to an extensive collection of audio tracks (which they sell at pretty close to cost) to sell a particularly elegant and convenient, but overpriced, piece of hardware. Apple isn’t even in the hardware business, really: they understand that they’re in the fashion business, and have made it really easy for other companies to sell accessories for iPods.

Hands up, who’s going to build fashion accessories for the Kindle? Don’t all speak at once… How many people are going to buy a Kindle for each of their kids? Is anybody going to let their kids loose on a piece of hardware that lets them buy books at $10/pop at the click of a button? That’s what I thought.

Sounds pretty spot-on to me…

Having trouble explaining what a wiki is to your mom or tech-impaired coworker? Try showing them this 4-minute “Wikis in Plain English” video from CommonCraft. (The’ve also got quick “Plain English” guides on New Light Bulbs, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking and, just in time for Halloween, Zombies.)

(Thanks to KB for the link.)

You know why movies seem to be continuous motion even though they’re really just static images being shown at 48 frames per second — persistence of vision, right? Well, there’s a great article on the Grand Illusions site about how that explanation is ‘simple to understand’, ‘elegant’, even ‘poetic’… and also fundamentally incorrect.

Apparently psychologists have known for almost as long as film has been around that the explanation was bunk, but somehow film historians find it too compelling an explanation to give it up. Somehow, the image that images persist… persists.

Remember the 300-page AT&T / iPhone bill video that made the rounds a couple weeks ago? Looks like AT&T got the message:

AT&T free msg: We are simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail. To view all detail go to att.com/mywireless. Still need full paper bill? Call 611.

I used to love my locally-cached copy of Wikipedia on my Treo 650 (after two years, a new update of the TomeRaider version was created back in February), but now that I’ve turned in my Treo for an iPhone I’m looking for a replacement reader. I’m not there yet, but this desktop-based offline Wikipedia reader is a good start to the project. As the author puts it:

Isn’t the world of Open Source amazing? I was able to build this in two days, most of which were spent searching for the appropriate tools. Simply unbelievable… toying around with these tools and writing less than 200 lines of code, and… presto!

More on my efforts to get a locally-cached copy of Wikipedia readable from my iPhone (perhaps with the iPhone book-reader app that was recently hacked together) once it comes back from repairs…

(Thanks to Fairyshaman for the link!)

Wonder if there’s a general law to be learned about the median time between release of a public-image server and the first reports of someone doing something embarrassing being discovered in the database?

Nice video of a Photosynth demo at this year’s TED conference:

Shame their demo doesn’t work on the Mac, but given that it’s now coming out of Microsoft Labs that’s not surprising 🙂

(Thanks to Aileen for the link!)

Today’s NYT has a blurb on Livescribe, the new company founded by LeapFrog’s Jim Marggraff to turn the Anoto-based FLY Pentop Computer into a note-taking application for students. His application is basically Lisa Stifelman’s 1997 Audio Notebook system but without all the extraneous hardware that was necessary back then: take notes on paper while the pen records the lecture. Tap on the note later and the pen recites whatever it recorded just before you wrote it.

As the article notes, pen-based input has had a long and difficult life, but I’ve always thought that if anything will be the killer app that brings it into the mainstream, this would be it. If their implementation is good, they’ve got a chance of really making a big splash.