David Weinberger

I’m finding the cultural politics of Droid’s marketing to be fascinating. Droid is Motorola’s competitor to the iPhone, based on Google’s open source Android operating system. Of course it’s marketing itself head-to-head against the iPhone. Verizon’s “iDon’t” ad was totally in iPhone’s face: iPhone doesn’t do x, y, and z, but Droid does. But Droid isn’t just going against iPhone’s features. It’s drawing a cultural line. Apple is for hippies, it’s saying. Droid is for power geeks. For example, at Verizon’s “Droid Does” page, if you click on “Open Development,” the message is: Droid doesn’t judge app makers. We don’t care about their politics, their lifestyles or their attitude. If they make a great app, we will share it. That’s how we have over 10,000 apps in Android Marke... (more)

Do-It-Yourself Google Books — A Million Dollar Idea for Amazon?

Harry Lewis has a terrific post about a $300 do-it-yourself book scanner he saw at the D is for Digitize conference on the Google Book settlement. The plans are available at DIYBookScanner.org, from Daniel Reetz, the inventor. There are lots of personal uses for home-digitized books, so — I am definitely not a lawyer — I assume it’s legal to scan in your own books. But doesn’t that just s... (more)

Cluetrain on Twitter

Tim Beyers at FastCompany has put together an article about Cluetrain’s reaction to Twitter. After all, we’re the “markets are conversations” people, so how do we feel about Twitter and its conversations getting valued at a billion bucks? It turns out that the four of us think different things about Twitter, as Tim indicates in this brief article. My own view is overall quite positive, bu... (more)

Whitehouse goes Drupal

From Personal Democracy Forum: WhiteHouse.gov has gone Drupal. After months of planning, says an Obama Administration source, the White House has ditched the proprietary content management system that had been in place since the days of the Bush Administration in favor of the latest version of the open-source Drupal software, as the AP alluded to in its reporting several minutes ago. Th... (more)

Broadband Strategy Week video: FCC on broadband and economic opportunity

The latest interview with a member of the FCC Broadband strategy initiative is now up at BroadbandStrategyWeek. Elana Berkowitz is Director of Economic Opportunities for the Omnibus Broadband Initiative at the FCC. 17:20 mins 0:00 What do you do? 2:30 It’s very complicated. How do you decide what should be done by the public sector, by the private? 3:53 What’s the process by which you ga... (more)