Recycling information: the innovation behind the mashups

Business Pundit is currently featuring an article that frustrates and annoys me yet leaves me in semi-agreement, which only serves to frustrate and annoy me all over again ("The dangers of re-use: how mashups can stifle innovation").  The premise of the item appears to be that unless you know a technology to its deepest level, you are doing little more than playing make-believe, pretending you are doing something new when instead you are drowning the world in your own mediocrity.  The argument has a distinct Keensian elitist tone, inferring that unless you understand your tools you have no right to be using them.

I felt somewhat mislead about the article in general.  It's not until the very end that I discovered (hence my annoyance) that the core assertion was not that mashups were mediocre and boring (they can be) but instead was that mashups need to be kept in perspective (which I agree with) and urges the reader not to confuse "imitation with innovation" (which I didn't think I was, but there you go).

Like the author, a lot of mashups leave me cold.  After all, I don't really care if I can geo-tag a photo on Flickr and locate it in Google Earth so I can see exactly where on this planet an out-of-focus photo of a bee was taken.  However, that is not the point.  It is not the mashup that is the innovation, rather what makes the mashup possible.  RSS feeds, open APIs, enabling services like Pipes - the ability to mine and manipulate vast quantities of previously unavailable data has enormous potential.

I see this as a classic forest/trees, baby/bath water confusion.  Just because the results don't inspire you (and are used indiscriminately by the great unwashed) doesn't automatically diminish the value and importance and potential of the underlying framework.

Now if you will excuse me, I think I will go off and see if I can combine my low quality cameraphone photos of my son with Google Maps.  Spite is such a wonderful motivational technique after all.

Has iTunes gone senile?

Warning! Mega-rant in progress.

Normally I'm an early adopter, much to my chagrin. It's a semi-regular occurrence that I'm refreshing, updating, restoring or replacing something because I jumped on a bandwagon that was still missing a wheel, had no seats and the draught horses turned out to be cardboard cut-outs. That's cool. I can accept that when you flirt with the cutting edge, you're going to get blood on yourself every now and then.

iTunes 7 was a bit different. At the time of its release, I still wasn't sure what I was going to do with my small amount of iTunes purchases. I was dimly aware that there were some Python scripts floating around that were able to strip the DRM off your iTunes Store purchases, providing some peace of mind when backing them up. I was also dimly aware that these scripts tended to break every time Apple released a new update to iTunes. I sat happily on 6.4 for a while and waited.

Boy was I glad I waited. I read reports of wide scale library deletions, multiple system crashes, system slow downs and I'm sure I even saw mention that the Four Riders had come again (but that may have just been blogosphere hyperbole). I sat smugly in my chair, quietly congratulating myself on my forethought and overall intelligence. If I had a white cat, she would have sat purring on my armrest as I gently stroked her, chuckling "Fools!" every few minutes.

When I bought my laptop preinstalled with Vista I accepted the inevitable. I still had 6.4 on my desktop if need be, but I didn't want to sully my shiny new man toy with old technology (shudder). iTunes 7 flashed forth on my monitor in a cloud of shininess, and all was well. It was so, well, pretty.

Little things began to creep in. It would load up as a black screen with menus. It would run really slowly. New and popular albums wouldn't have cover art. I could live with this. I'm not actually a big digital music user (a combination of finances and circumstance means that I more often than by CDs instead) so I didn't need all the features of iTunes 7. But the worst was to come...

iTunes is constantly losing my downloads. One minute they are there, podcasts and iTunes Store purchases standing side by side, proud of their digitality. A program restart later and while their shadow remains, their substance is lost to all eternity. For approximately 6 months I have to double check that each and every download has gone in to a real folder and not a temporary folder that is flushed every time the program starts up. I almost lost an entire Massive Attack EP this way. Podcasts are one thing (it's annoying and painful, but free), but if I have to pay for something, I expect it still be there next time I open it up.

Why, Apple? Why? This has been reported time and time again all over the internet, and still your software updates do not fix the problem. I know I'm just howling into the gale here but I feel compelled to add one more voice to the growing multitudes who feel that perhaps Apple is getting just a little too comfortable in their position at the top of the tree.

Vista works just fine. Quit whinging.

Unlike what appears to be, well, everyone else, I am having very few problems with Windows Vista. I did have a problem with my Dell, Vista and hibernation, but I fixed that with a simple update of the video drivers. Anyway, that's hardly a showstopper of a problem.

AP seems to have finally picked up on the fact that some people still don't like Vista all that much. I'm really tired of the few vocal "A List" bloggers and web celebrities who continue to get media traction with their anti-Vista problems, declaring that it's just no good and people shouldn't use it.

Personally, I have had Vista work with fewer issues than I ever had with Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I will admit that I'm hardly bleeding edge, I don't have a lot of old, mission critical peripherals and I don't push my system to the extreme. On the other hand, I'm not a typical user either. My Vista works just fine, thank you.

I have no problems in recommending that people use Vista, especially if they are buying a new computer and can't decide whether to get one with XP or Vista. You may not want to upgrade your current XP system, but that's more a general caution on my part. There are no killer apps for Vista just yet, but give it time. When that happens, jump on board.