parker higgins

In the spirit of BoingBoing’s annual charitable giving guide, here’s a list of organizations that I’ve given to this year. As far as I can tell, these groups are each doing great work, and deserve every penny they can get.

I’ve been impressed with the quality of language used to describe the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill is a disaster for the internet, and its opponents are devising some pretty creative ways of expressing that. Two of my favorites:

Over on his personal blog, my buddy Peter Bihr has come to the defense of that most reviled breed of start-up — the German copycat. And while the whole thing’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, he’s actually right about some of the benefits that so-called “copycats” offer; they are in a position to make marginal changes and improvements that “original” start-ups might be hesitant about, from small feature improvements to big things like internationalization.

I recently finished reading the new book by Robert Levine, called Free Ride: How the Internet is Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business can Fight Back. (I’m giving the whole subtitle so that it’s clear what kind of book this was, but I’m not really writing about the book here.)

Since it was introduced, the SoundCloud Record button has been hard to get to work in Ubuntu and other GNU/Linux distributions. Fortunately, my buddy Omid, who is a SoundCloud developer, has found a solution.

NPR Berlin reported today that Berlin’s public transportation authority, the BVG, launched the Touch&Travel program [de] earlier this month, which allows Vodafone and Telekom customers to use an Android phone or an iPhone to pay for their transport tickets. Participants “check in” while boarding, and confirm their location either through continuous GPS data directly from their phones, or by scanning a QR code at the end points of their trip.

My friend Patrick Hammer sent around a video of Rebecca MacKinnon’s TED talk about the need for users to take back the Internet. It’s a great talk, and it reminded me of how effective the TED talk format can be at communicating complex ideas to people who don’t want to dive into a monograph or two.

This Tuesday, I had the chance to take a tour of the Kamaka ukulele factory guided by Fred Kamaka Sr., whose father Samuel Kamaka founded the company in 1916. As a ukulele enthusiast, it was a real blast: Kamakas are some of the best in the world and have been the weapon of choice for, among others, Jake Shimabukuro and George Harrison. Even better than the factory and showroom, though, was getting a chance to hear Fred Kamaka tell all kinds of stories about growing up making ukes.

Inspired by a handful of sites that have popped up in the last few weeks to mock a design change made in the official Twitter app for iPhone, my buddies Robb and Johnny and I have put together a project called the Dickens Bar. The idea is simple — enter the URL of any website, and see it immediately enhanced by the “trending topics” of one of the most popular English novelists of the Victorian Era. See, for example, this very site with Dickens Bar addition.

My friend Arlene Wszalek has written a blog post describing a “conundrum” facing users of Klout, a service which aims to quantify online influence by evaluating some 35 metrics related to Twitter and Facebook. Arlene lays out the problem: one factor Klout apparently considers is the proportion of your followers who are actively engaging with your profile or stream. But by using another service called ManageFlitter, Arlene determined that 27% of her followers are inactive, having not used Twitter in over a month. So her score may be being skewed downwards by that soft cap of followers that are active and could actually be reasonably expected to engage.