What I’m Reading

Google announced that Google Now, the predictive search feature from Google, is now available on iOS devices. You can download it by just downloading or upgrading the Google Search App via iTunes App Store.
Once you do, to activate it, you need to load the app and agree to the prompts. Note, when you do that, you will notice that the GPS indicator is always on.

Twitter on Tuesday opened up its advertising options for all U.S. users. The company had previously made advertising on the platform invite-only

Kevin Weil, Twitter’s senior director of product for revenue at Twitter, made the announcement at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York. He also tweeted it:

Just announced at #TCDisrupt that @twitterads is open to all US users. $50 credit for the 1st 100 eligible signups: twitter.twimg.com/Disrupt2013

— Kevin Weil (@kevinweil) April 30, 2013

Twitter first introduced advertising options in 2010, and has been expanding advertising on the social network ever since. Most recently, Twitter opened its advertising API to third parties, which will let larger advertisers create more sophisticated campaigns on Twitter. The company launched that program with five partners: Adobe, Hootsuite, Salesforce, SHIFT and TBG Digital. Read more…

More about Advertising, Twitter, and Social Media

We are in the post-PC era, and soon billions of consumers will be carrying around Internet-connected mobile devices for up to 16 hours a day.

28 Apr 2013

Today, I’m proud to announce the 0.4 release of Light Table – go download it!

A bit of the future.

With this release our goal was to bring more people into the fold, to increase the number of languages we can eval, and to smooth out some of the core experience. After 0.3, we finally had a chance to move the ball forward some – from live modifying websites directly inside of LT to injecting code into NodeJS and showing matplotlib graphs inline. This is a huge release in virtually every way and I think there’s something for everyone, whether you’re just starting out programming or you’ve been writing python since it was released. Let’s take a look.

Next-gen web dev

One of the things I originally showed in the Light Table videos was the ability to embed your work directly into Light Table itself. Well…

You can now stick a browser in a tab, navigate to any page you want and start live modifying it. The neat thing is that you don’t have to own the page or do any setup. It just works. Cmd/Ctrl+R will refresh the page anytime you need to do so. Here’s the obligatory meta screenshot of me writing this post in Light Table:

The most requested language from our survey was Javascript by a fair margin and a lot of people were hoping for deeper JS integration. As soon as we started to see that, we shifted gears and made it happen. Thanks to some serious intergration with the Chrome-DevTools, we can do some pretty impressive stuff – like inspect Javascript objects inline and through the console:

But the most powerful thing to me is the level of eval we now have. Thanks to the devtools integration, we aren’t just making calls to eval(), we’re patching the running VM. This means that all the things that should be “impossible” to change at runtime, are a single Cmd+Enter from being updated. It magically fixes event handlers, anonymous functions, and a host of other things. No, it’s not perfect, but you sure won’t have to refresh much anymore.

Oh and speaking of Javascript.. you can eval into a NodeJS process now too.

Speaking snake: Python support

SSssssss. Light Table now supports Python eval. It works for both Python 2 and Python 3 and utilizes IPython for a better overall experience if it’s available.

Python support comes complete with inline results/exceptions and integration with the console.

With the IPython integration we were also able to do inline matplotlib/pylab graphs, which is pretty neat:

Documentation

There’s finally a nice set of documentation! Up until this point, we’ve been hesitant to spend much time writing documentation on how to use Light Table, because things were still changing pretty drastically. We’re happy with the general workflow we’ve put together now, though, and so it was time to get some content out there. You can access the docs within Light Table itself from the welcome tab or the Docs: Open Light Table’s documentation command.

And then literally everything else

As I said before, this is a huge release – just look at the changelog! Basically every aspect of LT got some love, but here are some of the big ones:

You can now have multiple windows
You can have multiple tabsets! (splits)
The workspace tree-view now tracks the file system and lets you do the standard file operations
You can explicitly create a connection through the connect tab
A greatly improved console
Intra-file token-based Auto-complete!
Dramatic performance improvements (rendering is 4-10x faster)

We fixed a lot of the little things that were missing or slightly off that took away from the overall experience of Light Table. I think you’ll find this release just feels better in every way.

Do you teach programming?

Our goal has always been to provide an environment that helps you get started, but also grows up with you to be a powerful working environment. As of this release, Light Table has a lot to offer as a platform for new programmers – from a dramatically shortened feedback loop to a clean, simple workflow. If you work with a teaching organization of some kind, we’d really love to hear how we can help get your students using Light Table. Shoot us an email at learn@kodowa.com.

The plan

With 0.4 we now see a taste of all three of the original languages we set out to include in Light Table. The plan is for there to be one more public release before we then move into the private beta for our Kickstarter folks. The 0.5 release will be focused on picking up a couple of things that didn’t quite make it into 0.4 and deeper language support, while the beta will be all about opening Light Table up to plugins – the most exciting aspect of this whole thing. We’re proud of this launch, but trust me, there’s even more amazing stuff on the way.

Links

In the internet media and advertising worlds these days, there’s been a lot of talk about so-called “native advertising.” This is advertising that is “native to the medium” or which fits within the framework of the site or service, rather than being off to the side, flashing away, hoping for attention. Depending on who you talk to, this is either wonderful and innovative, or horrible and the end of all things good in the world of media. On the plus side, people talk about how native advertising can be less annoying, less intrusive and more full of actual content than the alternatives. On the negative side, you hear talk of “advertorials,” the possibility of “tricking” readers and the breakdown of advertising and editorial independence.

I am, of course, not a neutral observer. As a site, we have engaged in what is now called “native advertising” in some form or another since way before it was ever called that. Over the past few years, we have partnered with various companies in the hope that they would be able to convince marketers and advertisers of the value of this. It was four years ago that we began writing our series of posts on why advertising is content and content is advertising.

Most recently, a few months back, we ended the last of our exclusive partnerships with various advertising firms and sought to go out on our own. One of the issues was that when working with partners, they were often looking to sell something for a bunch of sites, rather than focusing on what we could do specifically. And when you do that, you’re not really looking to be “native” to the audience in question, because you’re still looking for that scale. To some extent, we felt that we were losing ground in not being able to really work directly with advertisers to do the more compelling programs that our community wants.

And this, I think, is the key point that is often lost in the debates about native advertising. The site Digiday recently asked a bunch of publishers how they define “native advertising,” and, frankly, I think they all miss the most central component to it: truly native advertising is advertising that people want to experience. It’s not just about integrating the experience into the area where people normally look for content. It’s about making the advertising itself as compelling (if not more compelling) than any other content on a site.

Too many people automatically assume that this is impossible or that we’re talking about some sort of advertorial or “tricking” people. We’re talking about the opposite of that. We’re talking about content that is so good, and so valuable, that the community finds it useful and compelling even when they know it’s sponsored or advertising. There are, of course, plenty of examples of this happening in other contexts. A very large percentage of people watch the Super Bowl more for the commercials than for the games. They know they’re watching advertising. But they like it, because the commercials themselves are entertaining (perhaps more entertaining than the game). Remember how many people watched that Old Spice “I’m on a horse” video a few years back? And, these days, lots of folks have been passing around Kmart’s “ship your pants” ad, not because they’re being tricked, but because it’s funny and they like it.

When done correctly with online publications, the end result of all this should be a win for the community (they get more content they want), the advertiser (they get the attention of a valuable community) and the publisher (they get to provide more valuable content and they can stay in business). There is no intrusion. There is no trickery. There is no giving people what they don’t want.

Of course, this isn’t always easy. An advertiser might not have something that a community wants. Though, in that case, it often seems like there are interesting ways to team up to deliver what people want. Buzzfeed, for example, does this by having its own editorial folks work with advertisers to produce content that people might appreciate – such as “top 10 lists” that are just as good as any other content on that site – but which comes from a marketer like Virgin America or Canon.

We, too, are striving to bring more such content to our site, which we hope you’ll find valuable. For example, we recently started an advertising relationship with the App Developers Alliance, a trade group that represents application developers, helping them to be more productive, and helping push back against things that get in their way, such as patent trolls. As a part of this relationship, you can see things like the content widget in our side bar to the right. Here’s a screenshot of it (or just look at the actual interactive one just one column over!).

This is a “sponsored” widget that we developed for the Alliance, highlighting and linking back to some of the content on their own DevsBuild.it site. As you can see, it’s all pretty relevant and interesting content for anyone who’s an app developer, or who’s interested in these general things. We think it’s pretty awesome. There is nothing “advertorial” about it. There’s nothing “sneaky” about it. It’s just a bunch of really useful content that we think many of you will find useful too. In the end, you get more useful content that you want, the App Developers Alliance gets more people aware of the excellent work that they’re doing and we get to continue publishing. It’s a true win-win-win situation that doesn’t involve anything annoying or intrusive or irrelevant. And, of course, it’s all clearly disclosed.

We’ll also be working with them on a series of sponsored posts where, again, the focus will be entirely on content that is valuable to the folks who make up the Techdirt community.

I recognize that this still will upset some, who insist that any advertising is a horrible thing. Frankly, I can’t understand that thinking, and it doesn’t make any sense at all. As we said from the beginning, all content, by itself, is advertising too. If you’re reading any post on this site, you’re reading advertising. It’s advertising for this site, for the wider Techdirt community, for us as a company, for me as a writer, and for everything else that we do. In fact, each post and the ensuing discussion is a form of advertising. When you comment on the site, you’re a part of that process as well.

Frederic Filloux recently wrote that there’s no reason to complain about native advertising if it’s properly disclosed. I’d take that one step further. There’s no reason to complain about native advertising if it’s properly disclosed and if the content is good and valuable to the community.

It’s a high bar to reach — and I actually think most of the complaints about native advertising to date have really been about the lack of understanding of that final point. People don’t like native advertising when the content itself is bad and not relevant — like when Scientology posts some lame babble on The Atlantic. Make it good, useful and relevant, and no one cares that it’s also advertising. The problem is just how difficult it is to make it good. Still, I think as people start to figure out that the central facet of truly native advertising is that it’s content that people want, they’ll start to get past many of the problems that some people have with native advertising campaigns today.

On that note, of course, we are looking for companies who believe in this vision as well, and who want to work with us to build compelling campaigns that not only get you attention, but which also provide the community here with value that they appreciate. Please contact us if you’re interested.

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