I still don’t have an iPhone or iPod touch, but if I did I’d be anticipating the arrival of Classics. This looks to be an ebook reader made for book lovers, with pages you can almost smell. Sebastian de With offers a peek into the design of Classics on his blog.

How nice to see what publicly usable texts can inspire!

I love word clouds and wordle has sure taken over the earth of late. But it is hard to “read” a wordle cloud, don’t you think?

Jeff Clark of Neoformix has demonstrated a great idea for word clouds: clustering the words based on their assaociations in a text.

Much clearer. I expect we’ll see more of this.

I’ve wished for a while that Google Maps could tell me where I vote. It looks like later in October it will be able to! Meanwhile, try this voter information version of Google Maps for a flavor. I’m glad to see Google doing this, our poor county certainly does a a fairly poor job, plus its hard to find.

TechPresident had a nice summary of something that I ran into this afternoon: many congressional sites went down just as voting on the $700B bailout wrapped up. I was trying to find the roll call at the Clerk’s offfice, which eventually did appear. (Gotta love the bailout’s title: “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes.” I’d certainly have supported $700B for the Peace Corps!) Oddly, many sites, including house.gov are still down.

Here is a wonderful chart from the Sunlight Foundation. You can manipulate the chart to dig into the data, go ahead, play with it a bit. A video tutorial is also available.

This dynamic data presentation appears to derive from Google’s work with Hans Rosling and his UN data at Gapminder. It is just a taste of what will become of data and charts in this compute-enabled time.

There has been some concern today over last week’s significant revision of the Obama technology plan. I encourage you to read the plan and compare it to McCain’s plan. Two things immediately stand out for me: (1) Obama clearly supports net neutrality and (2) he makes a stronger case for how government will use technology to become more open. Well, actually, he did make a stronger case in the old plan. I hope that remains the case even though many wonderful details were eliminated in the new version.

Update: It turns out that most of those details are still available in a detailed PDF version of the plan. Whew!

Fascinating: a tweeter named @notq who became a defacto hub of information for protesters, medics, and media during the RNC convention this week turns out to have been doing his work from Arizona. This story shows both how twitter is growing in importance as a communication mechanism during ongoing events (not just for conferences anymore!) and how people far removed from physical events can take on critical roles in our networked world.

Quarkbase looks like a good way to do a whois plus extras.

Yesterday the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld a key provision of “copyleft” licenses (PDF) by reversing a lower court ruling in the case of the Java Model Railroad Interface. For a long time we’ve been saying that licenses like the GPL or (as in this case) the Perl Artistic License are theoretical protections of freedom (free as in speech), but had yet to be tested in court. Well, the court tests are underway now, and this one was very important. As Ars Technica points out:

The Federal Circuit appears to have been heavily influenced by the Stanford brief, as it specifically cited Creative Commons, MIT, Wikipedia, and various free software projects as examples of organizations that benefit from copyleft licenses. In a short, clearly-reasoned opinion, the Federal Circuit summarized the public benefits of public licensing and found that the district court had dismissed its terms too lightly. Unlike the lower court, the appeals court seemed to understand that reciprocity lay at the heart of free software licenses. Just as traditional software firms thrive on the exchange of code for money, free software projects thrive on the exchange of code for code. The Federal Circuit recognized that “there are substantial benefits, including economic benefits, to the creation and distribution of copyrighted works under public licenses that range far beyond traditional license royalties.” Allowing those rules to be flaunted undermines the free software model.

There is a long haul ahead, I am sure, in defending these licenses from folks who want to take advantage of free software for commercial gain. Our rights are being defended by organizations like the EFF and (particularly in this case) the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and Creative Commons (both founded by Larry Lessig). Please support the work of these organizations.

The photosynth crew keeps innovating, their latest video is a hint of things to come in photo tourism and virtual earth applications.

What I find particularly interesting about this work is the degree to which it relies on photos taken by the Flickr community, note the credits at the end of the video. When we share our work we can become part of things we can’t even imagine.