1. Can I get my data out in an open, interchangeable format?
2. How much will it cost me to do so?
3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

Of course, most of us neglect to ask these questions, and as such, we frequently find our data "stuck." We're then locked in to using certain products because of the time or money involved in moving elsewhere - that and the lack of a "download your data" button.

That's bad for users, but speaking at OSCON today, Fitzpatrick argued that it's also bad for the companies too. "If you lock your users in," he said, "it makes you complacent." Choice and trust matter for users, and by providing a way for them to get their data out, companies can make their users feel more secure in the first place. After all, this isn't just "data" we're storing online. It's our memories.

Fitzpatrick speaks with some authority here as he helped found the Data Liberation Front, the team at Google that focuses on making it easier for users to get their data out of the company. Feel nervous about the number of products and services you use that rely on Google? Gmail, Google Docs, Picasa, and now Google Plus? Well rest assured, the Data Liberation Front wants to help ensure your data is actually yours.

Although the team has been in existence for several years, Fitzpatrick said that the project's heritage dates farther back, to his own experiences at the end of college when he had to abandon all the messages he'd sent and received during that period of his life. As is common with most schools, his email address would no longer function after graduation.

Fast forward from the Nineties when our online data, while valuable was still pretty sparse to today. In fact, fast forward to June of this year when the Data Liberation Front unveiled a major product: Google Takeout.

As the name suggests, Google Takeout lets you take your data out of multiple Google products. You can choose to extract your data from all these services or from just one - a "per-product liberation," as Fitzpatrick calls it. When you "takeout" your data, it's in a portable and open format so that you can easily import it into other services. Currently, you can download an archive of your Contacts, Circles, Buzzes, Profile info, Google Plus Stream, Picasa Web Albums, and +1s. (You can also export products from other Google services too, such as the contents of your Blogger blog and your Google Docs. Those just aren't integrated into the Takeout download yet.)

In his OSCON keynote today, Fitzpatrick talked about some of the "implementation details" that do complicate these sorts of data liberation efforts. "Delete is a very important element of control," he said, pointing to the feature in Blogger, for example, that lets you simply delete your blog. But what are the implications of the broken links and missing information when someone does this? And what happens when there are multiple people contributing to a project? Who really owns this data?

These aren't easy questions to answer, but as Fitzpatrick and the Data Liberation Front make clear: we have to start thinking seriously about the future of our data.

At OSCON today, a panel of educators talked about their experiences using App Inventor in introductory, college-level computer science classes. Eni Mustataraj from Wellesley College, Ralph Morelli from Trinity College, and Dave Wolber from the University of San Francisco talked about the ways in which they had utilized App Inventor in the classroom.

"Anyone Should Be Able to Tinker on Their Smartphone"

App Inventor was created with the idea that anyone should be able to tinker on their smartphones and that anyone should easily be able to design and develop their own apps. Built by Google, with input from MIT professor Hal Abelson, the tool aims to help promote an interest in programming and computer science by giving non-experts an easy way to get started. It's no surprise with Professor Abelson's involvement, that App Inventor borrows heavily from that other entry-level MIT programming project Scratch.

Like Scratch, App Inventor uses a drag-and-drop visual interface that allows you to assemble build block commands and from these, build your app. Although there are some limitations with the library, programming with App Inventor means no syntax errors - one of the most frustrating things novice programmers face. Furthermore, as your Android connects to your computer while you work, App Inventor also greatly simplifies not just development but also the testing of apps.

Engaging Non-Engineering Students in Computer Science

The professors at OSCON today all spoke of the success stories they've had with App Inventor. Wolber, for example, said that he used App Inventor in his CS 0 class, a course at University of San Francisco that fulfills the math graduation requirement but that is often taken by students who loathe math. He boasted a high number of students - all non-programmers and non-CS majors, who went on to take subsequent computer science courses. He pointed to students being able to design apps that combined their passion for their phones along with their interest in building apps that were personally useful. "Students love their phones," he said, "and when they realize they can build apps, they are highly motivated to learn."

Professor Morelli said that his students were tasked with building apps that were socially meaningful. Indeed, both of these elements - the personal utility and the social good - may be key to engaging certain populations that wouldn't otherwise be interested in programming.

App Inventor's Uncertain Future

Despite the praise from the educators at OSCON today and from others who've used the tool in their classes, the future of Android App Inventor is uncertain. It remains a Google Labs project, and with the impending closure of Google Labs, it's not clear what will happen to App Inventor.

Google, for its part, wouldn't comment on what will happen to App Inventor when Labs shuts down.

But if there's a winner to be had in the fallout, it may be the Web itself as Apple's new rules are now prompting more and more publishers to build HTML5 apps rather than rely solely on native (iOS) apps.

This isn't an entirely new development, of course. Last month, The Financial Times launched its HTML5 app so as to circumvent the new policy. And while many major publishers seemed prepared at first to bow to Apple's rules, including all of those that updated their apps yesterday, it seems possible that some of these companies will now explore their HTML5 alternatives.

The bookseller Kobo announced today that it was beginning development of an HTML5 e-reader app in response to Apple guidelines. Kobo is framing its decision to move from a native app to a Web app as part of its larger mission to be an "open platform":

"Kobo is dedicated to an open-platform experience and believes that consumers should have the freedom to read on any device, at anytime, anyplace in the world. With the new HTML5 web app, Kobo remains committed to open solutions and extends eReading capabilities to a platform that can be quickly enhanced and updated with the latest eReading features and functionality. Kobo's HTML5 app will not replace the company's existing apps, but extend its read-across-any-device strategy to reach a broader set of users and add additional value for their current customer base."

Implied in this statement, of course, is that while HTML5, the Web, and Kobo are "open," Apple is "closed."

Book-buying customers may not be interested in this long-standing battle over the definitions of what constitutes "open" versus "closed." Likely they want an e-reading (and e-book-buying) experience that "just works." (Will an HTML5 app work offline?) But it remains to be seen how consumers react when they find the only bookstore "that just works" on iOS is Apple's own iBooks. Kobo and others are hoping this prompts them instead to turn to the Web.

The collection includes about 400,000 digital videos, photos, film posters and text materials, a number that is expected to grow to over 600,000 items by the fall.

The European Film Gateway is an Internet portal and a central access point for the material, which up until now has been spread across numerous sites and different national platforms. According to Claudia Dillmann, director of the Deutsches Filminstitut, which co-ordinates the project. "Now the films and information about them are more accessible, not only to scholars, journalists and creatives, but also by a broader audience interested in film."

Using the site, you can search for people, such as Marlene Dietrich, as well as for film titles and keywords. Doing so returns a list of related digital objects that are available in the various connected archives.

Some of this material is now available online for the first time. This includes magic lantern slide collections, early 20th century erotic films, movie posters from Denmark and a collection of early films from European directors like Rossellini, Antonioni and Comencini.

The European Film Gateway is a project of Europeana, Europe's cultural heritage platform. Europeana has brought together Europe's major cultural institutions - galleries, archives, libraries, museums - to create an Internet portal where this digital content be accessed. Thanks to Europeana's use of linked data, the markup and metadata mean that the content is easily indexed and discoverable - across institutional and national boundaries.

Photo credits: Marlene Dietrich in "Martin Roumagnac" via filmportal.de

This bundle includes: Crayon Physics Deluxe, Cogs, VVVVVV, Hammerfight, and And Yet It Moves. As with the previous Humble Bundles, these games are all available cross platform (several of which are making their Mac and Linux debuts with this offer) and are DRM-free.

A package deal on 5 great indie games is always good news for gamers, but it's the way that deal works that continues to make Humble Bundle both interesting and unique. The Humble Bundle lets buyers choose what they want to pay for the games. Not only do you get to set the price you'd like to pay for all 5 games, you can also determine how that money gets allocated: dividing it between the game developers, the Humble Bundle team, and charitable organizations. As with past bundles, the two charities involved are the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play.

Since the launch of the first Humble Bundle last year, the effort has raised over $1 million for charity. The generosity of gamers is noteworthy, as is exactly what that generosity looks like in terms of the different platforms for which the games are downloaded. In the past, Linux and Mac users have proven to be far more generous than Windows users, with Linux users contributing twice as much as Windows users.

The Humble Bundle offer only lasts two weeks, but as the games are available DRM-free, once you purchase them, they're yours to re-download and re-install as you deem fit.

According to the Sprouter blog, the site will close on August 2 due to what founder Sarah Prevette describes as "capital constraints." Although the site has had significant uptake and has become an important destination and community for entrepreneurs, Prevette says "we've simply run out of options."

As with any thoughtful group of people who work on a startup project that doesn't succeed, members of the Sprouter team have offered their own thoughts and analyses about the "lessons learned." Community manager Erin Bury has written hers here, and it's a great insight into the hustle that goes into making any startup - whether financially viable or not - succeed.

Bury was the author of Sprouter Weekly, the site's weekly newsletter, something that the final blog post notes was "a success in its own right." There are hints in that blog post that Sprouter Weekly may be able to continue, but Bury, for her part, is off for a little R&R. My bet is it won't cure her of the startup bug and we'll see more of the entire Sprouter team in the future. I sure hope so.

But over the weekend, updates were issued for many e-reader apps, removing links to their bookstores in order to comply with Apple's new rules. These stipulate that Apple receive a 30% cut from in-app purchases and subscriptions, something that many publishers balked at, contending that that cut was too high.

When the new policy was announced back in February, one of the first apps to run into trouble was Sony's e-reader, which was rejected as it contained a link to the Sony Reader Store. But for apps already in the iTunes App Store - the Kindle app, the Nook app and so on - the links and the ability to buy books remained. Until this weekend.

One by one, it appears that most of the major e-reader apps have now complied: Kobo, Borders, Nook Kids, and finally this morning, the Kindle apps have all been updated with links to their respective stores removed.

The Google Books app, however, was removed from the store entirely, for reasons that weren't clear. But the app is now available to download again.

Usability Issues

Users will still be able to access their purchased content via these apps. But in order to buy new e-books, they'll have to go through Safari directly, rather than see those apps open the browser directly to the store, as they used to.

The changes are causing some usability issues. Martin Taylor from ActivityPress reports that books he'd purchased via the Safari mobile browser would not open in the Kobo app. Instead, he was prompted to open the newly downloaded file with either the Bluefire or OverDrive apps, both of which handle DRM-restricted content.

The major booksellers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble might not suffer from these changes or from new usability issues. Customers are likely accustomed to using the Web to buy content from them already and the Kindle does allow users to download content wirelessly regardless of where they purchase the e-book. But these usability issues might be a bigger problem for a company like Kobo.

In the meantime, you can always opt not to upgrade your e-reader apps as doing so seems to keep those bookstore links functioning - for now.

But providing these search results is no easy task. It isn't simply a matter of identifying the right people based on a single user's dating criteria. The people whose profiles are returned in the results should also, in turn, "like" the person who's searching. In other words, the matching has to occur at both ends.

Today at the opening keynote of OSCON's new Data sub-conference, OKCupid's CTO Tom Quisel spoke about how the online dating service has built its architecture in order to handle these queries. As Quisel notes, the types of searches that OKCupid users conduct are different than those done via other search engines. After all, "Web pages don't have personal preferences."

OKCupid is well known for its data analysis and for releasing trends and insights that it's gleaned from user profiles. With over 7 million active users, indeed, there is a lot of data to be had. On average, says Quisel, active users have answered about 3000 questions; they've hidden the profiles of several thousand users they aren't interested in; they've voted for about 4000 profiles. All that data is in addition to users' personal demographic data and preferences, as well as their site usage information (how often they log in, how often they respond to messages and so on).

And all that data makes a simple search for a list of potential matches quite complex. In fact, says Quisel, it can take 13 billion seeks in order to load one page of results.

OKCupid's Technical Architecture

The challenge for OKCupid then is has been to build a system that is scalable, fast and reliable, but also low cost. In his talk today, Quisel detailed the distributed architecture that OKCupid utilizes. Interestingly, OKCupid has made the decision to utilize C++, as Quisel argues that it's three times faster and uses four times less memory - as well as fewer support staff - than Java. OKCupid also primarily uses MySQL.

Users' data is split across workers, says Quisel, and OKCupid uses a quadtree structure in order to split up the data. As one of the most important preferences for would-be daters is location, that's the first filter utilized. Then, for each quadtree leaf node, the vector is sorted by last login, so that only recent visitors and active users are returned in search results.

Quisel also says that OKCupid utilizes SSDs - and consumer-grade SSDs, notably - but the company has done extensive SSD benchmarking to make the process efficient and reliable. In order to avoid problems with reads and writes, Quisel says that OKCupid has taken SSDs off "the most critical paths."

More from OSCON...

Not able to make it to OSCON this year? ReadWriteWeb will be reporting from the conference all week, but you can also watch the livestream from OSCON here.

So I decided to put away my laptop (a MacBook Pro, for those keeping score at home) and try to go a full day without any native apps. I ran my new Chromebook through the paces, and although it's a Friday, true - a day when a lot less tech news and tech blogging tends to happen - I was still able to perform my job, with little more struggling than if I'd moved to any new computer (or upgraded to a brand new operating system).

And that's really what I found to be the major stumbling point throughout my day: simply switching to a new OS. It took me a while to retrain my fingers to the location of the CTRL key on the Chromebook - located in a different place than the Apple Command key. Having tweaked my Mac's touchpad to suit my preferences, I had to do the same to the Chromebook - as much as possible at least - and re-learn the scrolling and drag-and-drop mechanisms. (I prefer to tap rather than click the trackpad, for example, and it took me a few to realize I had the option to do just that on the Chromebook.)

But a caveat here before I sing the praises of my Friday on a Chromebook too vociferously: I have moved much of my world into the cloud, and the Google cloud at that. I already rely on Google apps: I use Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, and of course Gmail in lieu of native app alternatives to writing, scheduling, RSS-ing, and email.

Replacing Native Apps

There are, however, some native apps upon which other aspects of my work world depend. Thanks to the suggestion of Wired's YoruFukurou as my Mac Twitter client. I use Things as my To Do list manager, as I can sync my tasks across Mac and iOS. I use the native app version of Evernote. I use Text Expander to save keystrokes for the phrases I type over and over again throughout my day. Starting just last week, I've given Spotify a whirl; before that, iTunes was my music player of choice. And finally, there's Skype, the tool that the ReadWriteWeb team uses for both chat and voice messaging.

And it was a replacement for Skype that had me scrambling first thing this morning. We have an editorial meeting every morning - voice, not video - and I had to take the Skype call on my iPhone. Strike 1 against the Chromebook, perhaps, but not an insurmountable problem. There are other Web-based VOIP alternatives, least of which being the new Google Plus Hangouts. And for the rest of the day, I found myself using imo.im, a Web-based tool where I could still monitor Skype chat.

To replace the my native app Twitter client, I utilized the Tweetdeck Chrome app. To replace the native Evernote app, I used its Web version. I installed the Aviary Chrome apps to handle screenshots and photo-editing. I could have used Google Music, I suppose, to play songs, but I ended up using the Spotify app on my iPhone instead (cheating, yes). Likewise I updated my To Do list on Things by utilizing the iPhone app.

And that's one of the major discoveries I think from my day: although there have been a lot of complaints about the state of Web apps not being quite "ready for primetime," many of us now carry two computing devices with us: one laptop-like machine and one smartphone. What my Web-based Chromebook couldn't do, my iPhone could. That could be an indictment of the Web, I suppose, or an admonishment for those who've neglected building Web apps in exchange for focusing on native ones. Or it could be a recognition that our productivity today now relies on a lot more than simply one device. And in a lot of ways, that's an argument for the cloud and for the Web. Store your information there. Access it anywhere, no matter if you're using a smartphone, a native app, or a dumb terminal.

What I Like About Chrome OS

There were things about the Chrome OS that I found really surprising and actually quite pleasing. I love the way notifications work, for example. As a Mac user, I've become quite reliant on Growl to give me the pop-up messages when I have new mail, new Skype messages, and the like. Notifications in Chrome OS work similarly, and I was able to configure my Gmail, my Skype messages, the Tweetdeck Web app, and Google Chat to give me the notifications I needed. Even better, that Google Chat app stayed open across all tabs, so that I didn't have to locate the tab in which I'd originally started the conversation.

I was also surprised with the ease with which I could handle file downloads. As a tech blogger, I was worried about capturing, saving, and editing images. Every blog post requires some sort of image, after all, and these inevitably have to be cropped and resized. (And yeah, I need practice with Aviary for sure.) But you can still save files to the Chromebook (and Google makes it easy to transfer these to Picasa, no big surprise), and one of the things I assumed would be the biggest hassle was only a slight hassle.

What Irked Me About Chrome OS

But there were hassles, don't get me wrong. I had a fairly high incidence of crashing browser tabs. Of course, as a Mac user, I'm pretty accustomed to my Chrome browser crashing. But it occurred with a fairly high frequency today, forcing me to scour for a Task Manager (Chrome does have one) and to assess what was actually eating all my memory. Lo and behold, it was Google Plus. I blame the animated kitty GIFs.

I also never found a replacement for Text Expander, and I hope some dear ReadWriteWeb reader has a suggestion to help me there. I type " < a href= " a lot during my day. Anything that can save me from those keystrokes would be awesome. I also struggled to capture screenshots with Aviary, particularly of the multitude of crashed Chrome tabs.

Admittedly, I'm pretty hard on a computer - I work online after all. And at the end of the day, despite a lot of reservations, I think the Chromebook is very much doable for most folks. It's not a stellar experience, not yet at least. It takes a lot of patience, but for really, that's not a surprise when it comes to tackling a new machine and a new OS. And at the end of the day, a lot of the struggles I had aren't necessarily the fault of the Samsung hardware or of the Chrome operating system.

It's the reluctance on the part of folks to try something new. And yes, all of you who are still using Internet Explorer 6, I'm looking at you. How many folks have the patience to try something new? Or, as we've been accustomed to with tech companies that promise things "just work," do we expect a seamless out-of-the-box experience?

The drawbacks to Chrome OS, of course, are also the fact that a lot of effort has been put into making shiny native apps, to the detriment of Web app development. With HTML5, I think we can do most things in a browser now. There wasn't anything today I wasn't able to do, even if I had to search for an alternative to the app I was accustomed to using. (The one exception: watching Netflix. But that's why I have my iPad. I've already refused to install SIlverlight on my Mac to enable viewing there.)

Disclosure: I received a Samsung Chromebook having been an attendee at Google I/O. Chromebook error message image via Engadget.

Slashgear reports that the Games Stream has been confirmed, pointing to wording on the Google Plus Help pages - now removed - that referenced games and potentially a separate stream for finding game-related updates.

That news may come as a relief for some of Google Plus's early adopters, many of whom cited their preference for Google Plus over Facebook, as the former is a Farmville-free zone, if you will.

Of course, Facebook users do have the option to hide the updates that come from their friends' gaming habits. You can remove updates from individual games from your feed entirely or, of course, you can opt to just hide those friends whose Facebook activities seem to be solely comprised of casual gaming. But this option isn't obvious to everyone, and many users still complain of these sorts of messages overwhelming their News Feed. By opting to create a separate stream for game-related updates, Google Plus may make this less of an issue for its users.

The News Feed and Games' Viral Spread

But the flood of gaming updates contributed to the viral spread of many games on Facebook (and in turn, helped Facebook itself become one of the Web's most popular destinations). Without that easy virality of the News Feed "spam" on Google Plus, game developers may find it more challenging to woo new players.

But the lack of immediate viral channels isn't necessarily a bad thing for game developers, and it could be an opportunity to rethink some of the mechanics of social gaming that have become intertwined with Facebook. Perhaps we'll see new types of games developed for Google Plus. Or perhaps we'll see many of the same games, simply ported over to a new social destination.

Bringing Game Developers to Google Plus

One thing that might woo game developers to Google Plus would be better financial rewards for them. According to AllThingsD's Tricia Duryee, Google may be planning to offer game developers a better deal than Facebook does, taking a smaller cut than the 30% of revenues that's been the industry standard. As she notes, Google just launched an in-apps payment option this week, a key piece that's now in place for developers to be able to monetize their Web apps.

There's no official word from Google on a launch of a Games feature for Google Plus, but many signs are pointing to a feature that would be quite different from that of Facebook's. The balancing act for Google Plus will be to have the Games help make the site a destination for people to return regularly while not chasing away those users who find the absence of casual gaming a welcome relief.

This makes a "computable" document quite different than a "print" document. The information isn't fixed but can be manipulated by the reader. Unlike static formats, CDFs are "as interactive as apps, yet as everyday as documents," say Wolfram. "Central to the concept are knowledge apps, interactive diagrams, or info apps - the live successors of traditional diagrams and infographics."

Interactive "Knowledge Apps" versus Static Graphics

In a blog post describing the new format, Conrad Wolfram compares a "traditional" graphic explaining the Doppler Effect with what he calls a "knowledge app," a CDF-based graphic demonstrating the same thing. Using the latter, readers can adjust the variables - observer location, source frequency, initial velocity and time - in order to gain a better understanding of how the Doppler Effect works.

That idea of giving readers tools for better understanding dovetails with Wolfram's larger mission of supporting educational and scientific efforts. And Wolfram sees the CDF as being particularly useful in educational and scientific publications.

It isn't simply readers who are meant to benefit from having more interactive publications. Wolfram says that the CDF is also designed to make it easier for authors and publishers to create and incorporate these knowledge apps into documents, arguing that up until now, these sorts of things have often required a knowledge of programming. CDFs can be created using the Mathematica software, and Wolfram insists that building a knowledge app is as easy as writing a macro in Excel. (And Conrad Wolfram quips that he'd like to make authoring even easier so that "anyone who can make an Excel chart be able to make a CDF.")

Will the Format Be Widely Adopted?

While the CDF does open a lot of possibilities here, this new format is based on proprietary technology. It's not an open standard, and as O'Reilly Radar's Andy Oram notes, "I assume Wolfram will keep strict control over the format, which draws a lot from the Mathematica language, and I doubt other companies will want to or be able to catch up to Wolfram in the sophistication of the tools they offer."

To experiment with the new Computable Document Format, you can visit the Wolfram website and see some examples and other use cases. These require the download of a Wolfram CDF Player.

The papers were uploaded by a user named Greg Maxwell who says that his decision to make the large quantity of scientific papers available was a response to the indictment earlier this week of early Reddit-er and Demand Progress founder Aaron Swartz. Swartz has been charged with felony hacking and computer fraud for downloading some 4.8 million papers from JSTOR.

While the government has labeled Swartz's actions as "stealing," some have questioned whether that's the right description for what Swartz did and whether a possible 35-year-sentence is warranted. Software engineer Kevin Webb has penned a post suggesting that some of the walls that universities put around content - including the paywalled services like JSTOR - are as much of a problem as Swartz's attempt to liberate that material. He writes:

"Aaron's arrest should be a wake up call to universities - evidence of how fundamentally broken this core piece of their architecture remains despite decades of progress in advancing communication and collaboration.

The MIT staff who called the FBI would have been served better by calling the chancellor to ask, 'How have we created a system that forces 25 year-olds to sneak around in the basement, hiding hard-drives in closets in order ask basic and important questions about our work? Can't we do better?'"

That sentiment is echoed in the manifesto accompanying the files on The Pirate Bay. Maxwell also blasts the academic establishment and its publishing model. "As far as I can tell," he writes, "the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The 'publish or perish' pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia."

Maxwell claims he came by the papers he's uploaded legally. The documents include the archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, a prestigious scientific journal with a history that goes back to the 1600s. The papers in The Pirate Bay torrent were all published prior to 1923 and are in the public domain. He says that he'd originally planned to upload the documents to Wikipedia, but felt that the actions would incur lawsuits from publishers charging copyright violations or, as with in the case of Swartz, would bring about other sorts of criminal charges.

Maxwell argues, "The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it."

Maxwell says he'd considered releasing the documents anonymously, but didn't want Swartz to be blamed when the large quantity of JSTOR files were released.

Indeed, the FDA is proposing a set of guidelines, outlining the types of apps that it plans to oversee. This won't be all apps in the "Health" category, but will include those that, in the FDA's words, "could present a risk to patients if the apps don't work as intended."

Although typically it's Apple, Google and the like that make the decisions about what can and cannot appear in an app store, the FDA has already been involved in reviewing some medical apps, clearing those for use by health care professionals. These include smartphone-based ultrasound or x-ray image-viewing apps.

But the FDA says that it needs to do more to make sure that consumers and medical professionals are getting accurate information when they turn to their mobile devices for information and diagnoses. There are apps, for example, that warn breastfeeding mothers which medications to stay away from, ones that help monitor heart irregularities and ones that offer basic diagnostics and disease information (such as WebMD).

The FDA says it doesn't plan to review all medical apps. Rather it will monitor and approve those apps that are used as an accessory to an FDA-regulated medical device or that transform a mobile platform into a regulated medical device. Based on the wording in these draft guidelines then, the oversight will be geared towards apps that are aimed at medical professionals, not at the general public.

The general public is, of course, welcome to give the FDA feedback on these proposals. FDA is asking for consumers, health care workers and others to weigh in on its proposed guidelines during a 90-day public comment period.

The New York City startup Pixable has built apps (for Web and for mobile devices) to improve the way in which we consume the photo feed from Facebook. Pixable makes it easier to view friends' photos, listing them by friend but also by category. You can see, for example, new profile pics, most popular pics of the month, photos from family, as well as photos that are popular on Flickr and Instagram.

And now Pixable has added a new category and a new media type: videos. Pixable's categories distinguish between videos that friends have uploaded themselves (home movies 2.0, if you will) and those that they've shared (from YouTube and the like).

A Better Media Browsing Experience

By adding video content, Pixable steps into the ring with a number of other startups who are trying to improve the browsing experience - particularly on tablet devices - for this sort of content, including ShowYou, which we've covered in the past.

As it stands, Pixable's video offerings are only available via its Web app, not on its iPad or iPhone apps yet, although the startup is working on that. Pixable says it also plans to add better categorization for video content, to match what it offers for photos.

Pixable's competition may not be just other photo- and video-sharing startups, as Techcrunch's MG Siegler contends that Facebook itself may be launching a better photo-sharing app soon. For its part, Pixable says it still hopes to become the Web's "social photo aggregator."

But many industry analysts noted that Rowling's decision to bypass the traditional publishing industry - to self-publish, if you will, her novels on a new website called Pottermore - could mark another important shift in power. No traditional publishers. No traditional booksellers. No DRM.

How Pottermore would work remained a little unclear, particularly as Rowling promised that the content would be available for all e-reader formats. But news from Google today helps answer some of these questions.

Google says that it will be providing support for Pottermore through a number of Google products and APIs. The books will be available via the open Google eBooks platform, for example, which will mean that when users purchase their digital Harry Potter novels, they can either use Google Books or move the content to another platform or device. (How this will work for Amazon Kindles still isn't clear as these devices do not currently support ePUB or PDF files.)

Google also says that it will provide the payment platform (Google Checkout) and video broadcast platform (YouTube, obviously) for this new online Harry Potter experience.

It's no surprise that Pottermore has turned to Google to run what is bound to be a wildly popular e-commerce site. How well this deal will help boost Google's own e-bookstore efforts, beyond just sales of the Harry Potter titles, remains to be seen. No doubt Google hopes to be able to lure fans and book-buyers in to its e-bookstore for all their reading needs.

Pottermore is expected to open in October.

But it seems those negotiations are taking too long, and at a conference between the groups today, Judge Chin put pressure on those involved to finalize things, threatening to set a "tight discovery schedule" if things aren't resolved when the group comes before him next on September 15.

Judge Chin's frustrations over the delay aren't surprising. The case has dragged on since the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers each sued Google for its massive digitization efforts back in 2005. While the groups reached a settlement in 2008, Chin threw it out in March of this year, saying that it "would simply go too far." In that ruling, Chin said that the settlement, as written, "would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission."

Chin had argued that the settlement should have authors opt in to having their works digitized (and therefore searchable) by Google, rather than have them opt out, as the proposed settlement would have it.

And according to some indications from today's meeting, an opt-in agreement is in the works. James Grimmelman reports in The Laboratorium that spokesperson Michael Boni, speaking for both Google and the plaintiffs, indicated that "the parties have been aiming for an opt-in settlement.' What that might mean is not obvious. It could mean an actual opt-in settlement, one that binds only class members who send in claim forms. It could mean a settlement in which Google commits to an open-ended offer to all class members. It could mean a narrower, scanning-and-searching-only settlement, so that copyright owners can 'opt in' to book sales by striking their own individual deals with Google."

Although all parties did tell the judge today that negotiations are moving forward, a resolution to the Google Books case doesn't seem much closer. Judge Chin, however, seems determined to force things forward come September.

No surprise, these numbers were fueled by the continuing popularity of the iPhone and iPad. Apple says it sold 20.34 million iPhones in its third fiscal quarter, up 142% from the third quarter of 2010. It also sold 9.25 million iPads - every unit that Apple could produce - resulting in a 183% increase in units sold from the same time last year. These numbers exceeded what analysts had predicted, which has been good news in turn for Apple stock.

Mac sales were also up, but "only" by 14%. The iPod, however, continued its decline, with Apple selling only 7.54 million units, down 20% from a year ago.

Earnings also remained strong for Apple's digital content, with iTunes revenue up 36% from this time last year.

In a statement, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said, "We're thrilled to deliver our best quarter ever, with revenue up 82 percent and profits up 125 percent." Jobs pointed to the upcoming releases of iCloud and iOS5 this fall as something the company is working on.

In the shorter term, Apple also confirmed that its latest OS would launch on Wednesday. Lion will be available for download only - via the App Store or from Apple Stores - rather than being sold as boxed software. The operating system has been designed to port many of the features of the iOS to the Mac. Whether this blend will help ignite more interest in Macs to match the passion for iPhones and iPads remains to be seen. (Tune in next quarter to find out!)

Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up to 35 years in prison and up to $1 million in fines.

How He Did It

The indictment (a full copy is here) details Schwartz's purchase of a laptop, which he used to "systematically access and rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR." JSTOR is an online database of academic journals. It provides the full texts of digitized journals, with back issues for some of the most popular ones dating back hundreds of years. A non-profit organization, JSTOR offers its service to primarily academic libraries, who in turn make the content available to their patrons

In a statement today, JSTOR says that last fall and winter it "experienced a significant misuse of our database. A substantial portion of our publisher partners' content was downloaded in an unauthorized fashion using the network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of our participating institutions. The content taken was systematically downloaded using an approach designed to avoid detection by our monitoring systems."

The indictment details that how Schwartz did just that, from the purchase of the laptop to the creation of ghost accounts on the MIT network, to the break-in of a wiring closet where Swartz had his equipment stored.

Why He Did It

Why would Aaron Swartz want 4 million academic journal articles? Blogger Jason Kottke says "it's not too difficult to guess," and points to Swartz's earlier efforts to download and distribute files from Pacer the government-run Public Access to Court Electronic Records system. When Pacer was opened to a limited number of libraries, Swartz among others, the New York Times reported, tried to "download as many court documents as they could, and send them to him for republication on the Web, where Google could get to them."

It's not clear if this is what Swartz had in mind by copying the JSTOR database: "liberating," if you will, the journal articles for more open consumption. But in its statement, JSTOR says that it had already reached an agreement with Swartz and had "received confirmation that the content was not and would not be used, copied, transferred, or distributed."

Whatever the intention, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts makes clear the government's position: "Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars." Even though it appears as though JSTOR was not interested in pressing charges (it has declined to comment specifically about that), the government has leveled some serious felony charges against Swartz.

But rest assured scholars everywhere, even though Swartz allegedly "stole" 4 million journal articles, they're still all available in JSTOR.

In court in Boston today, Swartz plead not-guilty on all counts. His next court date is set for September 9.

Image credits: Flickr user Oneras

One of the longstanding laments about our move to digital literature is how difficult and cumbersome this makes marginalia, those notes and annotations we make in the margins of printed text. A story in The New York Times earlier this year went so far as to call the future of marginalia "dim," not only due to our inability to write comments in the margins but because there's not been any good system by which to track and preserve our notes.

TechStars alum Highlighter believe it has cracked this nut, with one line of JavaScript (inserted into site's footer) that lets publishers enable marginalia on their websites and in turn allows visitors to highlight, annotate, save, and share passages and comments.

Of course, the ability to comment, per se, on websites isn't new. But blog comments and the like always come at the end of a post, and likely means that readers would leave different sorts of notes and have different sorts of discussions with one another than if they could mark up a particular passage and make in-line comments there.

Annotations & Academics

That exercise in annotation is something most scholars and students are very familiar with, and no surprise Highlighter says it plans to market to this group specifically. By installing Highlighter on a class blog, for example, teachers will be able to enable commenting and highlighting by individual students and will also have a means to track students' level of engagement with the text. Part of what publishers (and let's use that word loosely here, after all, with blogs and Tumblr and the like, we're almost all publishers now) get with Highlighter is analytics - the ability to see who's reading, who's highlighting and who's sharing.

Visitors needn't sign up for a Highlighter account in order to write marginalia and share highlights and comments. They do, however, need an account if they want to track and store their own annotations. With an account you can also choose to make your highlights and comments public, semi-public or private, meaning that you can share your notes openly or just with those in a particular group, or keep everything to yourself.

This sharing of notes and annotations is important, but it isn't something that's widely available or supported. Take Amazon Kindle highlights. There's no way to share your notes with others. There's no way to follow other readers (or authors) and see what interests them, what they've highlighted, and what notes they've jotted down. Highlighter solves that problem

Encouraging Engaged Readers --Something Teachers, Authors, and Publishers Alike Want

This social component is important in classroom reading, but it's also great in general for building an engaged audience. Highlighter co-founder Josh Mullineaux says that authors, many of whom are increasingly turning to self-publishing efforts, will be able to take advantage of turning over sample chapters and the like to their fans, not just their editors, eliciting feedback not just on a whole piece, but on a word, a phrase, a paragraph.

Much like blog comments, publishers will be able to monitor comments and have a number of administrative controls so that comments and highlights must be pre-approved, for example, or that commenters are forced to give their name and email address before leaving or sharing notes.

Highlighter's official launch today will bring it into competition with a number of other startups that are trying to tackle the problem of digital marginalia, including OpenMargin and Readum.

The contest is called Apps Against Abuse and its part of the administration's Challenge.gov program, whereby the federal government issues a challenge and people build apps and crowdsourced solutions.

The challenge, in this case, is to develop apps that will give college students and other young adults "a way to connect with trusted friends in real-time to prevent abuse or violence from occurring." Noting that these apps can serve a social function - staying in touch with friends, the emphasis should be on being able to let your friends know your whereabouts with frequent check-ins, particularly when in situations that put you at risk. Apps can also be designed to give potential bystanders the ability to get support from friends as well as resources to help them intervene safely and effectively before any abusive behavior happens.

"Everyone has a role to play in the prevention of violence and abuse," says Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. "This application can be another way to encourage young women and men to take an active role in the prevention of dating violence and sexual assault."

Of course, the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services aren't the organizations to come up with the idea of using mobile technology to help prevent sexual assault. WiseDame, an app that won the 2010 Techcrunch Disrupt Hackathon provided an easy way for people to share safety information - where you'll be, when you're planning on getting home - with friends.

Another example of an app that is using mobile technology to improve safety is Hollaback, which recently completely a successful crowdfunding campaign via Indiegogo. The Hollaback app lets users report places where they've experienced street harassment. The harassment can be documented with or without a picture (and the picture needn't be of a person, mind you) and includes the type of harassment (verbal, flashing, groping, assault, etc). Each report is reviewed and each person who submits a report is contacted by the Hollaback staff and given a chance to "tell the rest of the story." The full story is reviewed and then mapped on the organization's website. The aim is not only to build crowdsourced maps where people often experience street harassment, but to help normalize the idea that this is something we should report.

Both the Hollaback team and now the federal government contend that mobile phones - with a camera, with texting, with apps, with mapping - can become a powerful tool for combatting sexual assault. These efforts rely on all of us - women and men, bystanders and survivors - to build and use the social networks and technologies.