Pixel Nation 80 Weeks of World Wide Wade by Wade Roush Xconomy.com Pixel Nation: 80 Weeks of World Wide Wade by Wade Roush Copyright © 2008-2010 Xconomy Inc. All Rights Reserved Published by Xconomy (www.xconomy.com). No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. To inquire about reproduction or to report errors, please e-mail: [email protected]. All product names and registered trademarks used in this book are the property of their respective owners. Cover photo by Wade Roush. Contents Introduction 1: Reinventing Our Visual World, Pixel By Pixel 2: The Coolest Tools for Trawling & Tracking the Web 3: Google Earth Grows a New Crop of 3-D Buildings, and Other Web Morsels to Savor 4: Turn Your HDTV into a Digital Art Canvas 5: Unbuilt Boston: The Ghost Cloverleaf of Canton 6: An Elegy for the Multimedia CD-ROM Stars 7: The Future‘s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Screens 8: Science Below the Surface 9: Gazing Through Microsoft‘s WorldWide Telescope 10: Megapixels, Shmegapixels: How to Make Great Gigapixel Images With Your Humble Digital Camera 11: You Say Staccato, I Say Sfumato: A Reply to Nicholas Carr 12: Space Needle Envy: A Bostonian‘s Ode to Seattle 13: You‘re Listening to Radio Lab—Or You Should Be 14: Can Evernote Make You into a Digital Leonardo? 15: Are You Ready to Give Up Cable TV for Internet Video? 16: Turn your iPhone or iPod into a Portable University 17: In Defense of the Endangered Tree Octopus, and Other Web Myths 18: Pogue on the iPhone 3G: A Product Manual You Won‘t Be Able to Put Down 19: Photographing Spaces, Not Scenes, with Microsoft‘s Photosynth 20: What Web Journalists Can Learn from Comics 21: ZvBox‘s Unhappy Marriage of PC and HDTV 22: GPS Treasure Hunting with Your iPhone 3G 23: Boston Unblurred: Debunking the Google Maps Censorship Myth 24: Four Ways Amazon Could Make Kindle 2.0 a Best Seller 25: Playful vs. Preachy: Sizing Up TV‘s New Science Dramas 26: Is Brown the New Green? Why Boston‘s Ugly, Expensive Macallen Condos Shouldn‘t Be a Model For Green Buildings 27: The Encyclopedia of Life: Can You Build A Wikipedia for Biology Without the Weirdos, Windbags, and Whoppers? 28: In Google Book Search Settlement, Readers Lose 29: In the World of Total Information Awareness, ―The Last Enemy‖ Is Us 30: Attention, Startups: Move to New England. Your Gay Employees Will Thank You. 31: Springpad Wants to Be Your Online Home for the Holidays, And After 32: Speak & Spell: New Apps Turn Phones into Multimedia Search Appliances 33: Former ―Daily Show‖ Producer Karlin is Humorist Behind WonderGlen Comedy Site 34: The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859—and How to See in Stereo on Your iPhone 35: Ditch That USB Cable: The Coolest Apps for Sending Your Photos Around Wirelessly 36: Have Xtra Fun Making Movies with Xtranormal 37: E-Book Readers on the iPhone? They‘re Not Quite Kindle Slayers Yet 38: WonderGlen Comedy Portal Designed to Plumb Internet‘s Unreality, Says Karlin 39: How I Declared E-Mail Bankruptcy, and Discovered the Bliss of an Empty Inbox 40: Public Radio for People Without Radios 41: Plinky: The Cure for Blank Slate Syndrome 42: Massachusetts Technology Industry Needs a New Deal, Not a New Brand 43: Three New Reasons To Put Off Buying a Kindle 44: Top 9 Tech Updates: Photosynth, Geocaching, Google Earth, and More 45: Google Voice: It‘s the End of the Phone As We Know It 46: Tweets from the Edge: The Ins and Outs (and Ups and Downs) of Twitter 47: Will Hunch Help You Make Decisions? Signs Point to Yes 48: Boston Can Survive, Even Thrive, Without Today‘s Globe 49: RunKeeper‘s Mad Dash to the Marathon Finish 50: Cutting the Cable: It‘s Easier Than You Think 51: Why Kindle 2 is the Goldilocks of E-Book Readers 52: People Doing Strange Things With Soldering Irons: A Visit to Hackerspace 53: Will Quick Hit Score Big? Behind the Scenes with Foxborough‘s Newest Team 54: Are You a Victim of On Demand Disorder? 55: German Web 2.0 Clothing Retailer Spreadshirt Finds Boston Fits It to a T 56: Boston‘s Digital Entertainment Economy Begins to Sense Its Own Strength 57: The Eight (Seven…Six?) Information Devices I Can‘t Live Without 58: Personal Podcasting with AudioBoo, UK‘s ―Twitter for Voice‖ 59: Art Isn‘t Free: The Tragedy of the Wikimedia Commons 60: Project Tuva or Bust: How Microsoft‘s Spin on Feynman Could Change the Way We Learn 61: Shareaholic Becomes the Link-Sharing Tool of Choice 62: Startups Give E-mail a Big Boost on the iPhone with ReMail and GPush 63: Why It‘s Crazy for Authors to Keep Their Books Off the Kindle 64: A Manifesto for Speed 65: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part One 66: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Two 67: Seven Projects to Stretch Your Digital Wings: Part Three 68: Ansel Adams Meets Apple: The Camera Phone Craze in Photography 69: How to Launch a Professional-Looking Blog on a Shoestring 70: Facing Up to Facebook 71: The Kauffman Foundation: Bringing Entrepreneurship Up to Date in Kansas City 72: Sony, Google Point the Way Toward a More Open Future for E-Books 73: Is it Real or Is It High Dynamic Range? 74: Using Google‘s Building Maker to Change the Face of Boston 75: Digital Magazines Emerge—But Glossy Paper Publishers Haven‘t Turned the Page on the Past 76: Tablet Fever: How Apple Could Go Where No Computer Maker Has Gone Before 77: Entrepreneurship May Work Like A Clock, But It Still Needs Winding 78: The Apple Paradox: How a Company That‘s So Closed Can Foster So Much Open Innovation 79: What‘s So Magical About an Oversized iPhone? Plenty—And There‘s More to Come 80: Kindle Conniptions: How I Published My First E-Book Introduction We live inside two parallel realities. One is the old physical world of forests and farms and families, shopping malls and subways, commerce and war. The other is the reflected world of words, sounds, and images reproduced mechanically or electronically. This second reality is no less important for being less solid, for it's the one that carries many of our hopes, dreams, and fears. It's where we record our collective wisdom and our collective neuroses, our achievements and our catastrophes. It's the way make sense of many of the things that are not within immediate view. And right now, that reflected reality is being remade from scratch, for perhaps the fifth or sixth time since the emergence of mass media in the 19th century. Such transitions are always uncomfortable, since they dislocate many creators and consumers of mass culture, even as they empower others. But when the dust settles, we usually find that our imaginations have been enriched. This was true of the birth of newspapers and dime novels, radio and movies, television and the early Internet, and it will be true of the current revolution in social, mobile, multimedia communication, which is giving rise to what I call the Pixel Nation. The 80 essays in this book represent one slice of this revolution, captured in real time at the end of the 21st century's first decade and the beginning of its second. As chief correspondent since 2007 for Xconomy, a network of news websites covering high-tech entrepreneurship in several of America's most important innovation hubs, I've had two wonderful opportunities: to write every day about some of the smartest people in the technology world, and to do so for an online publication that is itself part of the digital transformation. I started out as a professional technology writer around the same time that the Web was emerging, in 1995, so the various publications that employed me always had websites, at least as supplements to their print products. But Xconomy is my first adventure in fully digital journalism. And now that I've tasted Web-only writing—its immediacy and reach, its relentless but exciting pace, its intrinsic hypertextual connectedness—I don't think I could ever go back. (Not that there are many print-centric publications still hiring writers!) But while Xconomy is a digital publication accessible exclusively through such newfangled technologies as Web browsers, e-mail readers, RSS aggregators, and mobile devices, our business is founded on the same philosophy that guided the great city newspapers of the twentieth century. It's the simple idea, often dressed up these days with the buzzword "hyperlocal," that readers are most interested in what's going on in their neighborhoods. That doesn't mean we ignore larger trends. Just the opposite: as Xconomy's founder, CEO, and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi puts it, you can learn a lot about global issues by examining them through a local lens. But it does mean we should look to the inventors, entrepreneurs, investors, and companies in our local communities— Boston, San Diego, and Seattle so far, with more to come—for the best stories about how technological innovation takes root, spreads, and ultimately transforms the economy. One exception to Xconomy's local focus is my weekly column, World Wide Wade, which appears most Fridays on Xconomy's national page and on all of our city sites. The column was born out of my confession in early 2008 to Bob and to Rebecca Zacks, Xconomy's co-founder, executive editor, and chief operating officer, that I missed writing about digital media topics like the Apple iPhone (which hit stores just two days after Xconomy's own launch in 2007); the problem was that since these big subjects didn't always have a Boston-area hook, they couldn't easily be shoehorned into our hyperlocal model.