I never knew

I’ve seen people referring to this as augmented reality. I don’t see how that’s reality. Or if it is, it’s a web representation of something “realler” than the automated panoramas the maps are based on. It’s more “reality augmented web” than augmented reality.

Anyway, very cool addition to the street level view and very impressive technology.

I mentioned 6 months ago that Tiny Speck was going to be interesting and now information has started coming out about their new project, a game named Glitch. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in this Cnet interview with Stewart Butterfield and the team but I especially liked their development schedule:

From the get-go, the Tiny Speck team set out to craft their game using a series of five three-month development cycles, each of which would comprise two months of hard-core work, followed by a month of “cleaning up after ourselves,” essentially testing and optimization, and each of which had a set of specific goals and milestones.

Each cycle had a name, and when I first started visiting with Butterfield and Henderson, they had just finished the first, which they called Happy Place. The goals for that three-month period? To get done “the minimum amount of stuff we needed to get done (for the game) to be fun.”

Five cycles is probably quite long for many project and impossibly long for boot strappers but I still like the cycle system with one third for “cleaning up after ourselves”. For smaller projects cycle length and/or number of cycles could be smaller and you could also aim to release something minimal after the first cycle and then perfect the thing after each cycle*.

* At which point it’s a version of Agile but I still like their model.

I haven’t thought of it much so I’m sure there’s angles to be considered which might affect my opinion but at first glance I love this idea. Iceland is in the process of passing a package of laws to become a haven for investigative journalism.

On Tuesday, the Icelandic parliament is expected to introduce a measure aimed at making the country an international center for investigative journalism publishing, by passing the strongest combination of source protection, freedom of speech, and libel-tourism prevention laws in the world.

Supporters of the proposal say the move would make Iceland an “offshore publishing center” for free speech, analogous to the offshore financial havens that allow corporations to hide capital from authorities. Could global news organizations with a home office in Reykjavík soon be as common as Delaware corporations or Cayman Islands assets?

…the amendments would cover source protection, whistleblower protection, immunity for ISPs and other carriers, freedom of information requests, and strong limits on prior restraint. They would also provide protection against libel judgements from other jurisdictions, much as the United States may soon do with the Free Speech Protection Act of 2009.
—Iceland aims to become an offshore haven for journalists and leakers

Also see: The video of the Berlin talk where the concept was presented, The Guardian with Iceland aims to become haven for investigative journalism and BBC with Wikileaks and Iceland MPs propose ‘journalism haven’.