Mike Loukides writes "App Inventor and the culture wars" on Radar this morning. Here's an excerpt:

"Apple is saying "trust us, it will just work." Google is saying "We'll help you to be creative and make your own stuff that works for you." There's nothing inherently wrong with either approach. Apple's approach is more appropriate for an entertainment device, more like the 60s TV, radio, or dial phone. It does more, but it's still sealed; you can't open it up and hack it. There are plenty of people who want that kind of experience--possibly a majority. Google is opening up the guts and letting you create--and taking the gamble that people who haven't been creative in the past will start."

Go read the full post on Radar.

As promised, I'm opening up the license for the cj-cookbook. I'm starting out with Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives-Non-commercial 3.0 US. So, I think that this license is a bit Draconian. It essentially means: "Can't sell it, don't use it for training, don't change it, and tell everyone I wrote it." Doesn't that seem a bit vain for an open source project? I might relax the license a bit by dropping the NoDerivs clause, but I'm still mulling it over.

First, I wrote a quick piece pointing people to the Personal Genome Project. Church's experiment is expanding beyond the initial group of 10 luminaries and is starting to invite more participants. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, from some discussions at last year's Scifoo, I'm convinced that aggregating everyone's Genetic sequence into a massive data set would yield a series of benefits that could potentially transform our understanding of disease.

This is a follow-up to the two O'Reilly articles from yesterday "Twittering the Swine Flu" and "Tracking and Graphing the Swin Flu with Twitter".