- Almanac: F. Scott Fitzgerald on Hollywood
“Isn’t Hollywood a dump—in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”... Read more
Who is “Public” Data Really For?
LitHub: “…Both words—“public” and “open”—invite a question: For whom? Despite the efforts of Mae and Gareth, and Tom Grundner and many others, the internet as it exists is hardly a public space. Many people still find themselves excluded from full participation. Access to anything posted on a city web page or on a .gov domain is restricted by barriers of cost and technical ability. Getting this data can be particularly hard for communities that are already marginalized, and both barriers—financial and technical—can be nearly impassable in places with limited resources and literacies. Data.gov, the United States’ “open data portal,” lists nearly 250,000 data sets, an apparent bounty of free information. Spend some time on data.gov and other portals, though, and you’ll find out that public data as it exists is messy and often confusing. Many hosted “data sets” are links to URLs that are no longer active. Trying to access data about Native American communities from the American Community Survey on data.gov brought me first to a census site with an unlabeled list of file folders. Downloading a zip file and unpacking it resulted in 64,086 cryptically named text files each containing zero kilobytes of data. As someone who has spent much of the last decade working with these kinds of data, I can tell you that this is not an uncommon experience. All too often, working with public data feels like assembling particularly complicated Ikea furniture with no tools, no instructions, and an unknown number of missing pieces…”
Chris Hedges on the Ruling Class’ Revenge Against Julian Assange Scheerpost
Doc Searls: First IPhone Mention?
I wrote this fake story on January 24, 2005, in an email to Peter Hirshberg after we jokingly came up with it during a phone call. Far as I know, it was the first mention of the word “iPhone.”
Apple introduces one-button iPhone Shuffle
To nobody’s surprise, Apple’s long-awaited entry into the telephony market is no less radical and minimalistic than the one-button mouse and the gum-stick-sized music player. In fact, the company’s new cell phone — developed in deeply secret partnership with Motorola — extends the concept behind the company’s latest iPod, as well as its brand identity.
Like the iPod Shuffle, the new iPhone Shuffle has no display. It’s an all-white rectangle with a little green light to show that a call is in progress. While the iPhone Shuffle resembles the iPod Shuffle, its user interface is even more spare. In place of the round directional “wheel” of the iPods, the iPhone Shuffle sports a single square button. When pressed, the iPod Shuffle dials a random number from its phone book.
“Our research showed that people don’t care who they call as much as they care about being on the phone,” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “We also found that most cell phone users hate routine, and prefer to be surprised. That’s just as true for people answering calls as it is for people making them. It’s much more liberating, and far more social, to call people at random than it is to call them deliberately.”
Said (pick an analyst), “We expect the iPhone Shuffle will do as much to change the culture of telephony as the iPod has done to change the culture of music listening.”
Safety was also a concern behind the one-button design. “We all know that thousands of people die on highways every year when they take their eyes off the road to dial or answer a cell phone,” Jobs said. “With the iPhone Shuffle, all they have to do is press one button, simple as that.”
For people who would rather dial contacts in order than at random, the iPhone Shuffle (like the iPod Shuffle) has a switch that allows users to call their phone book in the same order as listings are loaded loaded from the Address Book application.
To accommodate the new product, Apple also released Version 4.0.1 of Address Book, which now features “phonelists” modeled after the familiar “playlists” in iTunes. These allow the iPhone Shuffle’s phone book to be populated by the same ‘iFill’ system that loads playlists from iTunes into iPod Shuffles.
A number of online sites reported that Apple negotiating with one of the major cell carriers to allow free calls between members who maintain .Mac accounts and keep their data in Apple’s Address Book. A few of those sites also suggested that future products in the Shuffle line will combine random phone calling and music playing, allowing users to play random music for random phone contacts.
The iPhone Shuffle will be sold at Apple retail stores.