links for 2010-03-30

  • Kevin: Alexandra Jaffe looks at the plans and pricing for iPad apps from the FT and the Wall Street Journal. Good quote from News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller, who believes that the iPad isn't a a communication device but a media consumption device. I'd agree to a point, but there is also a bit of a content publisher's bias in that comment.
  • Kevin: Jon Udell writes about a project from the team that work on MIT's Project Simile and now working at Metaweb. Jon writes: "As the open data juggernaut picks up steam, a lot of folks are going to discover what some of us have known all along. Much of the data that’s lying around is a mess." They are building a system that will clean up the data, especially the metadata on datasets. This will be a godsend for anyone using messy datasets and speed merge functions and also help with the creation of new 'facets' ( eg a year column from a data column).
  • Kevin: Mahendra Palsule, Editor at TechMeme writes at the Skeptic Geek about a shift in social media from a numbers game to a relevance model. Very interesting post with lots of succinct detail and thinking. "Social media and Businesses on the web today are driven by the numbers game – of traffic, page views, and follower numbers. But the trend I foresee is:

    The web is evolving from a numbers model to a relevance model."