Open Government book from O’Reilly

This book Open Government, which publisher O’Reilly released to memorialize hacker Aaron Swartz, is just a fantastic smorgasbord of writing about government and participation and technology, some of it dated or auxiliary but all top notch and thought-provoking. Particularly, so far, Beth Noveck’s chapter on deliberative versus collaborative government. Hope to write more reading notes as I go.

But right off the bat I was struck by what a great bibliography the book assembles, and so I wrote a little script (xml.etree.ElementTree) to scrape all the web references out of the ebook for looking into later. Those references are published below in quickie fashion, were extracted from the EPUB version I’m in the middle of now.
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Business Journal: Pomegranate delves into eBooks

An item I co-authored in the Wilmington Business Journal about the e-book deal that indie booksellers, through the American Booksellers Association (ABA), have struck with Kobo books to sell devices and ebooks in their bookstores, focusing on local bookseller Pomegranate books:

With the rise of the eReader and tablets, fewer people are reading physical books, instead enjoying them in electronic form.

Kathleen Jewell, owner of Wilmington’s Pomegranate Books, 4418 Park Ave., said even some of her most loyal patrons have started eReading and are coming in less often.

To compound the problem, local book clubs and reading groups, which have always had good relationships with local bookstores (buying their books, holding meetings and organizing author discussions in the stores) have started to embrace the eBook formats, Jewell said.

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Home Automation and Hardware Hacking

Cape Fear Economic Development Council » Ideation » Cape Fear, Home Automation, and Hardware Hacking.

A post I wrote some time ago about Arduino and hardware hacking and the next big thing:

Here’s a macroeconomic idea, tuned for this region and our demographics: To ride the next big wave of Internet technology, which many people are calling the “Internet of Things“, we should educate, foster and invest locally in home automation.