ARTS & FARCES internet

ESRD

Renal Business Today reports a Rhode Island Hospital researcher has found that hemodialysis patients are at “increased risk of carrying methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in their nose.” The study appears in the June 2010 issue of the University of Chicago’s Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology (not yet available online). MRSA in the nose increases the risk of developing an invasive MRSA infection. In the US general population, about one percent of people carry nasal MRSA. The Rhode Island Hospital study found that 15% of outpatient hemodialysis patients carry nasal MRSA.

Internet

Facebook announced it will be using OAuth, an open source protocol that enables secure API authorization. That’s the big news. The little news is that Facebook is repositioning itself as an organizer of the web around relationships between people. As users click the “like” button for various websites for example, Facebook will aggregate that data, mapping it to individual recommendations. Facebook has a mistaken mind map of the internet and the web, as clearly exemplified in Mark Zuckerberg’s F8 keynote: “Open Graph puts people at the center of the web. It means that the web can become a set of personally and semantically meaningful connections between people and things. ... We’re going to connect all of these graphs together to form the Open Graph. And when we connect all of our graphs together, the web is going to get a whole lot better.” Thanks but we don’t need—or want—Facebook intermediation for making our semantic connections. Nor do we need—or want—Facebook’s crappy widgets cluttering up our websites. Facebook’s “map of the graph” is not the web. I’ve been told I’m wrong about this by people I respect, but I can’t help it: Facebook 2010 = AOL 1991.

Dave Winer asked (and answered) a seemingly innocuous question: “What comes after location?” The answer is what Winer calls “vector-awareness.” It’s really simple in concept: Don’t give me information just about where I am; give me information about where I’m going. Winer expanded on the concept the next day. This is a Really Big Deal, folks.

Media

Dave Winer offers the best advice I’ve seen to the media industry: “On the way down, with the ground rushing up to meet you, you’re going to have to learn how to fly. Or else suffer the consequences.”

Ex-Wall Street Journal staffer Heidi N. Moore has been burning Twitter at both ends to plead the case that the US national corporate business press did a good job covering the 2008 financial crash. The unfortunate fact, as Dean Starkman’s “Power Problem” ($$) for the Columbia Journalism Review unmistakably points out, is that the corporate business press fell flat on its collective and individual faces in covering the financial institutions that caused the crash. Unfortunately, Starkman’s 6,400-word source article is trapped behind a paywall. Here’s the gist: Starkman and two associates spent months surveying the corporate business publications between 2000 and mid-2007. Starkman selected 737 stories that he “deemed relevant for one reason or another.” Starkman’s conclusion was that the corporate business press was just as surprised by the crash as everyone else, encapsulated in the subhead of his CJR cover story: “The business press did everything but take on the institutions that brought down the financial system.” Starkman does an incredible job of unpacking Moore’s delusions in a follow-up blog post, “Mangling ‘Power Problem.’”

Dan Gillmor has been asking corporate media producers about their relationships with Apple and whether or not Apple could reject their journalism for quite some time. While Gillmor hasn’t been able to coax a response out of any of the usual suspects, the Washington Post‘s Rob Pegoraro got a definitive answer from his own publication: “So, can Apple remove news organizations’ apps for their content? Washington Post spokeswoman Kris Coratti wrote that “this is our understanding”; National Public Radio’s Danielle Deabler agreed but said NPR saw no evidence that Apple wanted to do such a thing. Publicists for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN and USA Today declined to comment or did not reply to e-mails.”

Publishing

Ken Auletta’s New Yorker column, “Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?” deconstructs the battle between Amazon, Apple, and Google to control the ebook market. Sales of books between 2002-08 grew by 1.6% and margins were shrinking. Book publishers were playing it safe, avoiding unknown authors. The one glimmer of hope was Apple’s iPad—it and it alone would bring profitablity to the booming ebook market. Auletta notes that ebook sales increased 179% in 2009, even though they account for only 3%-5% of the book market. Amazon had set the ebook price point at US$10—in an attempt to grow the market and Kindle sales—and Apple would change that. Apple agreed to the publishers’ desire for an agency model where the publishers would be the sellers and Apple would be an agent, taking a 30% fee for all of its sales.

Technology

Nobody ever wants to work for Steve Jobs more than once, but Bruce Tognazzini has a stellar piece on the product development strategy of Steve Jobs. The article, “Mac & the iPad, History Repeats Itself,” is couched in a comparison between the early days of the Macintosh and the early days of the iPad. Both began as closed ecosystems. The first Mac connected to nothing and didn’t even have arrow keys—Jobs’s way of ensuring that the existing crappy software couldn’t be ported to the graphical user interface. Eighteen months later Tog was responsible for adding those arrow keys. “I didn’t do it because I thought Steve’s original decision was wrong,” writes Tognazzini. “On the contrary, I believed then and I believe now that decision was critically important. Without it, the new machine with its rodentiometer* and unproven interface would have been overrun with great hordes of horrific software, likely preventing the new interface from taking hold.” What Tog misses, as Dan Gillmor points out is that “the first Mac didn’t require software developers to get Apple’s permission to write apps.” Oh, Tog worked for Jobs more than once; he spent 14 years at Apple, founding the company’s Human Interface Group.

The first glimmer of hope for the open iPad arrives with SproutCore Touch, a framework for building incredible, touch-enabled interfaces in HTML5. Take a look at the documentation demo.