Weekly Knowledge Dump for 7.29.11

The Weekly Knowledge Dump is the weekly tech column that gives you the biggest news in the tech world for the past week, plus a guide to all of the interesting but non-news stories from the past week. It’s like backing up a dump truck of knowledge to your brain.

Twitter Gets NSFW

A new link will be appearing on some tweets starting this week. Twitter announced that any tweet that contains a link will now have the option to be flagged as “possibly sensative.” What this means, according to Twitter’s PR people is that these tweets can be flagged as not safe for work. It looks like tweets must be flagged by other users as offensive or not safe before being labeled as such, instead of just blanketing all tweets containing links with a NSFW designation. This much more restrained approach seems like the sensible, conservative way to go.

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Promoted Tweets Arrive

In other Twitterverse news, the company rolled out a new feature (if you want to call it that) that drops promoted tweets into your time line. Luckily, they are keeping the initial launch conservative. The way it works is that if you follow a brand and they buy a promoted tweet, it will stay at the top of your time line. This is great for brands because it keeps their tweet from getting lost in the massive sea of information that flows through your time line. It’s nice that Twitter is limiting the promoted tweets program to brands that you already follow so that you don’t get swamped with tweets that you aren’t interested in but it’s still a bit annoying.

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Siracusa’s Lion Review Makes Ars Technica $15,000

Those of you who enjoy hanging out with friends, going outside and generally NOT sitting in front of a computer all day probably don’t know who John Siracusa is. He’s a programmer and occasional writer for the technology news site Ars Technica. Besides being one of the most intelligent tech news sites out there, they are also known for publishing Siracusa’s massive reviews of each new version of Mac OS X (and when we say massive, we mean massive- this one clocked in at 27,000 words). This time around, Ars decided to sell PDF and ePub files via Amazon for $4.99 each. In the process, they made an extra $15,000. That means that they sold 3,000 copies. Considering that the article is available online for free, that’s a pretty impressive feat.

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Mozilla to Take on Chrome OS

Chrome OS is Google’s wet dream of what a computer operating system should be. It’s just a giant browser that runs on top of a Linux subsystem. It gives very little access to the web and is Google’s attempt to move people away from the desktop and into their cloud. Mozilla sees the value of this too, announcing this week that they are starting their own project titled Boot to Gecko. The project’s goal is to create a web browser that you can boot directly into, without having to go through Windows or Mac OS X first. It will be interesting to see how this will affect Mozilla’s relationship with Google, who provides most of the funding for the foundation through search revenue deals. According to Mozilla’s FAQ page on the project, “We don’t expect that it will affect our relationships with other organizations.”

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Oracle Tries to Rewrite History

Oracle and Google have been in a legal battle over the use of Java in Google’s Android operating system for the past few months and it seems as if Oracle is trying to rewrite history. Oracle acquired the intellectual property rights to Java when it bought Sun last year. Oracle has since gone back and deleted a whole slew of blogs by former Sun Microsystems CEO Johnathan Schwartz, including one where he congratualtes Google on launching Android, writing “I just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of others from Sun in offering my heartfelt congratulations to Google on the announcement of their new Java/Linux phone platform, Android. Congratulations!”

Oracle doesn’t seem to realize that once something is on the internet, it’s out there forever. The Wayback Machine has a complete archive of Schwartz’s entire blog available for perusing. So much for rewriting history.

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Bonus: Interesting Dispatches from the Past Week

Here is a small selection of interesting articles that aren’t really news, but are still worth reading anyway:

• Rhymes with “Douchebag” by MG Seigler (Paris Lemon)
• The Verizon Small Bang by Horace Dediu (Asymco)
• Steve Jobs Sometimes Lies to You by Zach Holman