Kindle Library Bulk Delete
I want to thank Mr. Nathaniel Robertson for pointing people in need of cleaning up their Kindle archive to this bookmarklet that allows you to bulk-delete entire pages of Kindle Library content. Many thanks to the person behind Japanese blog Net Buffalo for solving this problem.
I, like them, needed to get rid of months of Instapaper cruft. This bookmarklet did the trick. Instapaper’s Kindle integration is wonderful, but I wish Amazon would let us auto-delete recurring content.
The Problem With Early Reviews
The Problem With Early Reviews
John Biggs, writing at TechCrunch:
In the end, the real reviews are the ones that percolate up out of the forums and blogosphere.
That’s absolutely true in my experience. Reviews by 20-/30-/40-somethings blogging from their basement or posting on their favorite forum are almost always more useful to me than the popular reviews. I still read the latter, but I rely far more on the former.
USPTO Third Party Prior Art Submissions System - Now Live!
USPTO Third Party Prior Art Submissions System - Now Live!
This looks, on its face, like a good thing. I wonder (sincerely, not sarcastically) how patent attorneys feel about it.
Amazon heads off app fragmentation on Kindle Fire, Android
Amazon heads off app fragmentation on Kindle Fire, Android
Kevin C. Tofel, writing at GigaOM:
This could mean vastly better tablet apps for the higher resolution Kindle Fires similar to the improved iPad apps that iOS developers made instead of scaled-up iPhone software.
I think he’s right: assuming developers embrace this change, it can only bode well for the quality of app experiences for consumers.
But that’s not the only angle here, is it?
I’m not a developer, so I have some questions. My questions imply their own answers, so correct me if I’m wrong:
- How is encouraging the development and maintenance of multiple simultaneous versions of an app going to be helpful to developers?
- Doesn’t each version come with its own bugs, complaints, and quirks?
- Don’t developers want easier ways to incorporate device flexibility into a single binary?
What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology
What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology
Andreesen Horowitz co-founder and career CEO/investor Ben Horowitz offers some great advice in this 2011 post at his personal blog.
The best part about it is that, while it’s aimed at aspiring CEOs and entrepreneurs, it really applies to any major life project.
Here is one piece of advice from Horowitz that stuck out to me:
The first problem is that everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO.
The best way and, in many cases, the only way, to truly learn anything is to do it, cataloging and routing around or mitigating damage from your mistakes as you go forward.
And another:
If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.
Our emotional responses can be helpful, but there are many decisions which it is inappropriate to base solely on emotion. We need to learn when and how to make emotion secondary to logic, or at least find a Spock-like middle ground.
It’s definitely worth a read.
Planet of the Tweets
Twitter’s extensive research identified four ways news outlets can better engage their audiences.
Funny how all four look like things Twitter’s early and most “engaged” users have been doing since the service’s inception.
The same users Twitter is frequently screwing with reckless abandon these days.
Don’t you see? We gave them the tools to leverage increased brand engagement (buzzword overload!).
Kind of like how the planet of the apes wasn’t another planet at all…
Gamers confront copyright law
Professor Greg Lastowka of Rutgers-Camden Law School, in a press release earlier this week about his current research:
User-generated content can make a game very valuable, but developers have a legal obligation to look out for copyright infringement. I’m interested to hear from developers how concerns about copyright infringement affect the kind of games they create.
I’m interested, too, and glad someone is looking into it. I look forward to reading about his findings.
Welcome to VentureBeat’s reporting-driven Friday
Welcome to VentureBeat’s reporting-driven Friday
Good on ‘em for trying this out.
Temple Law Profs Feed
I used Yahoo Pipes to make a feed that unites all posts by Temple profs writing at their various law blogs. The feed still needs some work, specifically to ensure that the author name, and preferably the name of the blog at which they’re writing, is published in every entry. But overall I’m very happy with it.
I didn’t get permission from them or from their respective blogs, but since the stuff is posted publicly, all the content in my united feed is available freely in each separate feed, and all the entries in my united feed link directly out to the source posts, I don’t see why anyone would object.
But, of course, if anyone does object, I’ll remove them from the feed immediately. In fact, at any point in time, and without warning, I may need to delete the feed altogether, so consider yourselves warned.
For now, though, it’s a convenient way to follow what interests Temple Law professors on a day-to-day basis, particularly with regard to current events in their respective areas of expertise.
So, here’s the feed, and here’s the Yahoo Pipes URL so you can see how I did it.
Justice Ginsburg Smile
Justice Ginsburg isn’t allowed to say whether or not she would find equal protection arguments against the “Defense of Marriage” Act1 persuasive.
But she’s allowed to smile.
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I, on the other hand, am allowed to tell you that DOMA is reprehensible and shameful, and every Congressperson who voted for it or didn’t vote against it is a spineless coward and an embarrassment to their country and to humanity. ↩
NYT quote approval policy is (only) a good start
The new quote approval policy at The New York Times, as quoted by Times opinion writer Margaret Sullivan:
So starting now, we want to draw a clear line on this. Citing Times policy, reporters should say no if a source demands, as a condition of an interview, that quotes be submitted afterward to the source or a press aide to review, approve or edit.
I first wrote about the quote approval problem when I linked to David Carr’s piece on it. Then I expressed my agreement with Temple Law professor David Hoffman, who wrote at Concurring Opinions about the frequency with which experts such as himself are misquoted or taken out of context.
I’m not sure the Times policy does a very good job of distinguishing between approval by PR folks and approval by subject-matter experts. The former try to approve quotes to control messaging, while the latter try to approve quotes to ensure their opinions on a given issue aren’t manipulated to further a skewed narrative.
I don’t think those two cases can be dealt with in the same policy without explicitly pointing them out and setting up a framework for each one. The Times policy allows for exceptions with senior editorial approval, and that may allow experts like Professor Hoffman to explain that they want to ensure their comments are presented in the manner in which they intend them to be presented. Or, it may not.
Marco Arment suggested disclosing when quotes have been approved for an article, instead of calling for an unqualified end to the practice. I’m not sure that’s the perfect solution, but I think I prefer Mr. Arment’s policy to the Times policy.
Disclosure makes sense and would show great respect to readers by allowing them to decide whether the reliability of a particular quote is or is not affected by its pre-approval by the source. Experts could ensure accurate representation of their opinions, and readers could be kept in the loop when a communications department has manufactured the CEO’s statement to the paper.
In short, the Times quote policy is nothing less than a good start, but it’s also nothing more.
Longread: Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty
Longread: Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty
I usually like to include a quote from the longreads I share, but this story cannot be reduced to a single blockquote. Whether you support or oppose the death penalty, you should read this 2009 article by David Grann at The New Yorker.
Related
If you like Grann’s work, consider having a listen to the Longform Podcast interview with him or visiting Longform’s archive of his pieces.
Twitter changes force removal of related IFTTT triggers
IFTTT CEO Linden Tibbets, in an email to users today:
[ … ] on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed.
IFTTT is everything Yahoo Pipes could have been and I’ve been using several Twitter triggers for a long time, to do things like save my tweets to Evernote and add favorite tweets to Instapaper.
My “Twitter” tag is becoming so littered with the company’s user-hostile decisions and their unfortunate consequences that, soon, it will make more sense to post something when and if they ever put users first again.
Here’s the full email from IFTTT’s Linden:
Dear joeross,
In recent weeks, Twitter announced policy changes* that will affect how applications and users like yourself can interact with Twitter’s data. As a result of these changes, on September 27th we will be removing all Twitter Triggers, disabling your ability to push tweets to places like email, Evernote and Facebook. All Personal and Shared Recipes using a Twitter Trigger will also be removed. Recipes using Twitter Actions and your ability to post new tweets via IFTTT will continue to work just fine.
At IFTTT, first and foremost, we want to empower anyone to create connections between literally anything. We’ve still got a long way to go, and to get there we need to make sure that the types of connections that IFTTT enables are aligned with how the original creators want their tools and services to be used.
We at IFTTT are big Twitter fans and, like yourself, we’ve gotten a lot of value out of the Recipes that use Twitter Triggers. We’re sad to see them go, but remain excited to build features that work within Twitter’s new policy. Thank you for your support and for understanding these upcoming changes. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us at support@ifttt.com.
Linden Tibbets IFTTT CEO
*These Twitter policy changes specifically disallow uploading Twitter Content to a “cloud based service” (Section 4A https://dev.twitter.com/terms/api-terms) and include stricter enforcement of the Developer Display Requirements (https://dev.twitter.com/terms/display-requirements).
Twitter continues to value advertiser utility above user experience
Twitter continues to value advertiser utility above user experience
Romain Dillet at TechCrunch explains it like this:
Now when you land on a company profile page, you will see a big brand name with a small @username below, a gigantic header photo, a small logo next to every tweet, photos of new products in the sidebar without having to scroll, a pinned tweet at the top of the timeline for a current promotion, and finally the traditional flow of tweets.
Twitter is not hiding the ball on this one: their advertising blog post makes it hard to see the new profiles as motivated by anything but improving advertiser utility.
Twitter’s downward spiral into user-neutral (at best) and user-hostile (at worst) changes suggests their ignorance of the operating principle I mentioned last week.
That’s a shame, because the company-first-via-users-first approach is serving Amazon and Apple, and their partners and users, very well.
David Hoffman on quotation approval
David Hoffman on quotation approval
Two days ago, I mentioned a piece by David Carr on quotation approval. This morning, I found that Professor David Hoffman, whose corporate law class I took at Temple Law, had posted his own thoughts at Concurring Opinions.
Specifically, this part stuck out to me:
There’s a simple reason that most sources (including me) ask for quote approval: we don’t trust reporters to avoid making a hash out of our comments, pulling quotes selectively to fit a pre-existing narrative, and consequently turning the source into the reporter’s sock puppet.
Professor Hoffman’s reaction illustrates an important distinction that we need to make in thinking about the integrity of quote approval. I think that experts have a right to approve not only their quotes, but the context in which those quotes will appear.
After all, a journalist’s use of an expert extends beyond the quote, and can be honest or manipulative depending on the integrity of the journalist in question. The press seeks quotes from experts like Professor Hoffman, and I believe their seeking creates an obligation to accurately report not only the words but the context.
However, David Carr’s thesis on the problem with quote approval holds true when those approvals are coming from public relations departments or firms, campaigns, or others who actively seek press coverage. The difference is between controlling the narrative (in the case of PR) and ensuring accurate context (in the case of experts).
Virgin Mobile USA's inadequate response to a good-faith vulnerability disclosure
Virgin Mobile USA’s inadequate response to a good-faith vulnerability disclosure
Developer Kevin Burke describes in damning detail how easy it is to brute force Virgin Mobile USA account PINs, as well as the company’s incompetent and opaque handling of the situation.