Links & notes for this month

• • Waxy.org: Daily Log: The Times (UK) Spamming Social Media Sites
    "Yesterday, I discovered that The Times (UK), a well-respected newspaper owned by News Corp., is involved in an extensive campaign to spam social media websites with links to Timesonline.co.uk articles." Andy Baio on the Times' involvement with SEO.
    (tags: seo journalism online web newspaper marketing thetimes times)
• • Designverb - Mark Khaisman: Brown Tape Art
    "Mixed media artist Mark Khaisman layers several pieces of [parcel] tape on Plexiglas panels to create these memorizing rustic illuminations with textures much like a knife painting with broad wide strokes."
    (tags: scotchtape tape parceltape art)
  • The New Productivity | A Better Course
    "I don’t think I’ve read an article in the last year that speaks about email as much other than an irritant." This one, however, makes some very interesting claims.
    (tags: productivity office work mundanity email blog)
  • RoundHaus
    Hosted subversion and continuous integration specifically for Rails development. Looks interesting; reasonably competitive pricing.
    (tags: rails rubyonrails subversion hosting testing continuousintegration)
• • apophenia: the absurdities of Davos
    "...it became painfully clear that most business people are unaware of their role in the system... What I found was that many powerful people desperately want to help solve these problems but they seem unaware of their role in perpetuating some of the ill
    (tags: davos society business culture global environment)
  • nondeterministic . net : fiwt
    "This little hack adds find-as-you-type to Safari, Apple’s OS X web browser"
    (tags: safari inputmanager hack addition)
  • Understanding productivity in the Information Age - MIT Sloan Newsroom
    "researchers found that information workers whose strong e-mail networks allow them to receive new information sooner than their peers...are likely to be more productive than their less well-connected counterparts"
    (tags: information informationwork knowledge economy)
  • Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games | Don Hopkins
    Notes from a talk by Will Wright in 1996. So much good stuff in here; it's almost certainly going to get a dedicated blogpost soon.
    (tags: maxis willwright simulation interface design interaction models play)
  • OLPC Human Interface Guidelines - OLPC
    There are no software applications in the traditional sense... The laptop focuses children around "activities." This is more than a new naming convention; it represents an intrinsic quality of the learning experience we hope the children will have"
    (tags: xo olpc interface hig ui design interaction)
• • Telegraph to become OpenID provider : January 2008 : Shane Richmond : Technology : Telegraph Blogs
    "The Telegraph will soon become the first newspaper in the world, and the first British media company, to become an OpenID provider. Readers will be able to begin using the service from the end of February." That's an interesting - and savvy - move.
    (tags: openid publishing journalism blogging newspapers telegraph uk)
  • n+1: interview with a hedge fund manager
    ""the people who make huge money, the George Soroses and Julian Robertsons of the world, they’re the people who can step back and see when the paradigm is going to shift, and I think that comes from having a broader experience"
    (tags: finance training education hedgefund business subprime)
  • FontStars™ 2007: Best Type of the Year | FontShop
    Mmmn. Yum.
    (tags: fonts typography)
  • russell davies: reskilling for an age of things
    "After the toy-hacking workshop I realised how awful I am at soldering... I want to be good at soldering... partly because I like all that MAKE magazine stuff and I feel like if I'm good at soldering those people will like me." Russell being excellent.
    (tags: physicality things soldering scarcity paradigmshift)
• • if charlie parker was a gunslinger,
    there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats: Miniseries #7:
    Movie Directors and the Means of Production
    Fifty photographs of directors at work. They made wonderful films; these are wonderful photographs.
    (tags: photography film direction directors blackandwhite)
• • kitschbitch » Blog Archive » The Revolution will be Caramelized
    "Candyfab was first built using three sacks of granulated sugar, an aquarium pump, a car jack and some recycled printer parts. And it only bloody works." Fabulous.
    (tags: 3dprinting fabbing rapidprototyping candy sweets awesome)
  • adaptive path » 90% of all usability testing is useless
    "Instead, user research for the Web should delve into the qualitative aspects of design to understand how and why people respond to what has been created, and, more importantly, how to apply that insight to future work." Lane Becker on fine form.
    (tags: usability testing accessibility hci experiencedesign design users web)
  • things magazine - because you're worth it
    Lots, and lots, and lots of old Pelican book covers. Delightful.
    (tags: penguin pelican design books publishing bookcovers)
• • Color Management made easy by Thom Hogan
    "Thom's Quick & Dirty Guide to Color Management: 99% of what you need to know in 1% of the space."
    (tags: color colour colourmanagement colormanagement management photography processing photoshop)
  • Many hands make light work « Flickr Blog
    "The first incarnation of The Commons is a pilot project we’ve created in partnership with The Library of Congress." Oh gosh. There's so much wonderful, remarkable photography in here; I could lose myself.
    (tags: flickr libraryofcongress commons community photography folksonomy)
  • ScreenSteps
    "ScreenSteps brings simplicity to the labor intensive process of software documentation." Focusing on the screengrab, rather than video, as instruction tool. Could be a nice approach, especially if export is any good.
    (tags: help documentation creation tool application mac osx)
• • Nigel's Eco Store Power Saving Meter
    "This smart energy saving meter from efergy will enable you to monitor and calculate the cost of running your home or office lights and appliances, and so help you work out your carbon footprint." Not quite a Wattson, but cheaper, for sure.
    (tags: environment energy power electricity meter)
  • Snipplr - Code 2.0
    "Snipplr is a public source code repository that gives you a place to store and organize all the little pieces of code that you use each day... Did we mention it works with TextMate, too?" Looks good!
    (tags: code programming development snippets textmate)
  • adaptive path » sketchboards: discover better + faster ux solutions
    "The sketchboard is a low-fi technique that makes it possible for designers to explore and evaluate a range of interaction concepts while involving both business and technology partners"
    (tags: design ux ixd interaction sketching wireframe)
  • (theinfo)
    "This is a site for large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them." Aaron Swartz strikes again. This looks great.
    (tags: dataviz infoviz visualisation scraping data accumulation processing)
• • YouTube - C'était un Rendez-Vous (1976) - Claude Lelouch - Ferrari 275
    A wonderful film, even if it's not strictly the whole truth. Claude Lelouch drives through Paris in the early morning a bit like a madman. The effect is awesome; on the big screen, it's incredible.
    (tags: driving movie short film shortfilm paris city)
  • C'était un rendez-vous - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    The Wikipedia page spills the whole truth on the film, and has lots of good links to related material - Google Maps mashups, behind the scenes footage, etc.
    (tags: claudelelouch movie film driving paris)
  • Freerunning goes to war as marines take tips from EZ, Livewire and Sticky | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited
    "For years we have done our training in a certain way... it might be better to replace some of those generic exercises with others which will be better in an urban environment because of the work we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan."
    (tags: freerunning parkour army military marines british urban warfare)
  • jQuery: » jQuery 1.2.2: 2nd Birthday Present
    New release of jQuery: as usual, it's a blend of rather impressive performance boosts and some neat new functionality.
    (tags: javascript library domscripting jquery)
  • Arvon Foundation | Home
    "Arvon provides residential creative writing courses at four beautiful, historic houses around the UK." Some interesting courses and good teachers - Brian Talbot on graphic novel writing, for instance...
    (tags: creativewriting writing course holiday uk)
  • LibraryThing: Happy 1815! Thomas Jefferson is done.
    Thomas Jefferson's entire library - and his reviews of books in it - exists as an account on LibraryThing. I'm glad that things like this exist in the world, and that the Internet makes them possible.
    (tags: awesome jefferson librarything library books reading reviews culture history)
• • Flickr: Photos from the decapitator
    the_decapitator: he finds ordinary bus-shelter adverts, and then graphically - and entertainigly - decapitates someone in them. entertaining! subversive! hurrah for culture hacking.
    (tags: culture hack hacking advertising humour subversive silly)
  • Irving Wladawsky-Berger: More on the Evolution towards the Knowledge Economy
    "Nocera mentions Bezos’ belief that if you do something good for one customer, they will tell one hundred others. [...] Put it all together, and you begin to see what a truly empowered, truly knowledge-based global economy looks like."
    (tags: amazon service experience knowledgeeconomy)
  • Darren Hoyt Dot Com » Wordpress Magazine Theme Released
    Very nice - reminds me a lot of the work I've done building CMS-style sites with Wordpress. It's not hard - just requires some thought and trickery. Great that this is free, anyhow.
    (tags: publishing wordpress theme blogs template design)