In the world of distributed revision control systems like Git, forking means something different. These systems were designed to support a web of related revisions. Forking is just the way you roll. A multiplicity of forks is a sign of a healthy developer community. In fact, GitHub advertises the "5 Most Forked Projects" on their home page.

Back in November 2007, Google introduced a feature to allow editing of addresses and other information by anyone with a Google account. When viewing a placemark, you can now click "Edit" and move it to the right place. You can also see the history of the edits, which appears in this picture in reverse-chronological order.

You can see Google’s original guess with the gray arrow in the lower picture. It looks like it was moved three times: to the right spot in November, a little off the right spot in January, and then back to the right spot in March.

Community editing is often abused, but I’m coming to expect this degree of interactivity from websites. When I see something amiss, I’m frustrated when there’s not a "submit correction" or at least a "flag spam" link. In this case, I was the happy beneficiary of my peer’s contributions.

True to form, it wasn’t long after I created the MATLAB fan page on Facebook for similar comments to start showing up on MATLAB’s wall. An excerpt is pictured here.

On a more serious note, the MATLAB fan page has already grown to 2,434 fans without any promotion at all. Crazy.

It starts back in 1997. My friend Zach was just starting his career in special effects. He had just finished up work on was a small independent film, The Titanic. Maybe you’ve heard of it? The crew was having a wrap party on the Queen Mary, and somehow Zach convinced his employer to let him take a handful of his scruffy friends to the party instead of a date. James Cameron, the director, was there with a real date, actress Linda Hamilton. The details are debated, but at some point in the night someone started a conversation with her, producing many awkward moments and a photo.

Fast forward to 2007. Flickr, where I host my photos these days, introduces a new stats feature. In addition to the number of times someone views one of your photos, they now also record the referer. Most web browsers, when loading a new page, will tell the page the last page it was on. That is, you can often tell the last page a visitor was on before he arrived at your site. I noticed a bunch of traffic coming from Wikipedia and investigated.

The visitors were arriving at this group picture with Linda Hamilton from her entry’s talk page. Every page on Wikipedia has a companion talk page (which you can access via the “discussion” link at the top of each page) where contributors can chat without muddying the page itself. They had conducted a long debate about fair use. Wikipedia’s goal is to create a free encyclopedia. Not just free to read, but free for anyone to use anyway they want. (Free as in free speech, not just free as in free beer.) As such, they’re very concerned about including content, including images, that have are under normal copyright. In 1989, the United States adopted the Berne Convention, which automatically puts anything you produce under copyright. On top of that, copyrights in the United States now last at least 70 years (usually much longer). This makes it tricky for Wikipedia contributors to find content they know is safe to use.

I’m happy to have people reuse my photographs. Creative Commons is an organization that wants to make it possible for non-lawyers like myself to say this in a legally-valid-type way. They developed a suite of licenses to help. You can choose under which conditions you’ll allow people to reuse your work. Flickr makes it easy to select the one you like for your photos, creating huge collection of images that people or projects can reuse in their own work without fear of being sued. I’ve released all my photos under the Attribution license, the most permissive license, which says “do what you want but give me credit”. This allowed the Wikipedia contributor to crop my photo down to (mostly) Linda and to upload it to Wikipedia. They credit me by giving my name and a link to the original on the image’s detail page.

And create a Christmas miracle.

They let you create a link to a view like this, but it seems to only include the camera position when you use “Link to this page” on the “My Maps” tab. The range of their coverage is impressive. Zoom out on the map and you’ll see the spidery coverage extending as far as Ware.

(via Google Operating System)

I saw this news item on Boston.com. I don’t visit that site regularly, but I received a “Check out the new Boston.com” e-mail and figured I’d check out the new Boston.com. The e-mail lists eight improvements they’ve made to the site. The first is “Our pages are wider”. Having been involved with the design, development, and maintenance of another complicated website, I know how painful the seemingly-simple change of widening your site’s standard width can be, but this feature is unlikely to impress a potential visitor. I wouldn’t lead with it.

IKEA’s America at Home campaign features a sequence of non-traditional images of "home", starting with an Airstream trailer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8l9a0lf6-s

Five years later, Lucky still makes these excited noises whenever she’s in the car, especially when Dad is taking her to the b.e.a.c.h. (If you have dogs or children, you now why you can’t say this word casually.)

I expect all of you to repost my viral video on your respective blogs. I’m looking at you, Ned. And think of something pithy to say about it.

Here is the code to cut-and-paste:

<object width=”425″ height=”353″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/H8l9a0lf6-s”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/H8l9a0lf6-s” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”353″></embed></object>

Together, we can bump poor Miss South Carolina out of her top spot(s) on YouTube’s Most Viewed This Week and make Lucky the Queen of the Internet.

Amazon remembers every order you ever placed. My first order was on March 3, 2000. Here’s what it contained:

• Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Hedgehog and the Fox : An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, by Isaiah Berlin
• Cocktail : The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, by Paul Harrington, Laura Moorhead

I liked Red Mars, but never got around to reading the rest of the books in the series. The Hedgehog and the Fox was good too. I was reminded of this book recently in an excellent SALT podcast by Philip Tetlock called "Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs". The real winner in this batch is Cocktail, which I still reference regularly. This is no surprise though. I was already familiar with this same material from HotWired’s Cocktail, which introduced me in 96-97 to what are still my three favorite drinks, the Gibson, the Rusty Nail, and the Sidecar.

Viewing the payment info and it said I used a gift certificate for that order. I searched my e-mail and found the original gift certificate. It was a gift from Diana, the same Diana I would start dating later that year.

Embarrassingly, the search also turned up the fact that this gift certificate originally expired before I cashed it in. Amazon was nice enough to send me this e-mail a month later:

We’ve discovered that you received a $<INSERT_AMOUNT_HERE> Amazon.com gift certificate, and that it expired without ever being redeemed. That’s no fun. So, as our gift to you, we’re reactivating it.

In spite of the honkey-tonk mail merge that left in INSERT_AMOUNT_HERE, I was able to reactivate it and make my first purchase.

(via Matthew Oliphant)