ronnoch

Their blog says "we couldn’t be happier that Apple has chosen to leverage our own Readability as a native feature in the Safari browser."

http://blog.arc90.com/2010/06/10/why-we-built-readability/

    the most common meaning of the word, the one 
    that 99% of all people who read it are going to 
    think is computer criminals. Perhaps PBS 
    should consider the power and pervasiveness of 
    the common tongue before writing articles.

Sadly, I agree. Outside certain subcultures--the ones that dominate HN, for instance--hacker means cracker. You really can't blame the average PBS watcher or Facebook user for not knowing this.

I wonder if this is how non-programmers feel reading Stack Overflow.

You're exactly right about the difference, and I'd add that bias against SEO is dangerous in the second case because the good kind of SEO is absolutely critical to the success of most sites.

Catering to the user and offering content / services that people want should be the #1 priority, but if Google doesn't index your site properly then the people who want it will never see it.

What about non-addicts? I very rarely drink caffeine (just midterms and finals, basically) but I'm pretty sure that when I do, the effects are no illusion.

In Firefox, you can do:

    <link rel="next" href="page2.html">

Then page2.html will be silently downloaded when the browser is idle, and served from the cache when the user finally clicks the link.

It's called prefetching and it only works in FF. More info here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/link_prefetching_faq

Open Library, perhaps? It's run by Archive.org and has a developer API: http://openlibrary.org

ETA: I see they also offer raw JSON downloads of their entire collection: http://openlibrary.org/data#downloads

Good quote, but to be fair humans have known that the earth was round since 300 B.C. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth