"It’s important to note that this number does not reflect either the number of people owning a mobile phone and that the United Nations Millennium Declaration remains a crucial milestone to reach for the mobile industry. However it shows that homes, bridges, cars, laptops and netbooks, white goods, plants, spimes, and other objects have a mobile phone subscription and are likely to become the most important target segment for mobile operators around the world." Which begs the question: how do you market to things?

It Just Works and is good.

Learning datamining, using the WoW Armory as a data set.

"This page documents the web API calls that allow you to retrieve information from the item system in Team Fortress 2." Steam now has a Web API. Ooooooooh.

"I thought this was a fascinating take on the need within companies for stories… Companies spend a lot of money looking for these stories. Traditional product companies had to ask people and users to tell their stories, normally through market research. Web companies are at a huge advantage: they have rivers of usage data flowing through their servers, and the problem inverses – how to make sense and tease out meaning and interest from such a torrent." This is very good; I'm looking forward to future installments.

"If Ferelden has room for priests, elves, mages and golems then why doesn’t it have room for sceptics and scientists too?" Lovely notion – roleplaying an aetheist in Dragon Age (as best possible within the game). In this case, the player character believes in magic, but not in the montheist religion that much of the world ascribes to; miracles are really just magic at work. Subsitute "magic" for "science" and you begin to see his point. It's a nicely thought-through piece.

"The closer has confounded hitters with mostly one pitch: his signature cutter." Lovely motion infographics – informative, and powerfully confirming the narration.

"The move during the past 10 years or so has been from cameras being precision mechanical devices to molded polycarbonate containers for electronic components. This has meant a lowering of overall physical quality. What one gets in terms of features, functions and image quality is higher than ever before, but the satisfaction of owning and using a high quality mechanical and optical device has for the most part evaporated. Only the top models within any brand produce a tactile satisfaction and please one's esthetic sense." The quotation is from Michael Reichmann; the discussion that follows is as thoughtful as usual from TOP's readers.

Passed without comment, but something to come back to when I'm beating myself up.

And yet: this just explains how, and shirks any understanding of what the presentation of that information might signify, and instead, essentially, says "there was information, so I made an app, and everybody likes a league table, so I added league tables". It's data visualisation as technical endeavour, when, of course, it is far more than that; the moment you start presenting any information, you're making a statement about it, and nowhere does Gilfelt talk about what he feels the app signifies, or whether its editorial stance is appropriate, which makes me a bit sad.

"Holga D is a digital camera inspired from the extremely popular cult of Holga and other toy cameras of its kind. Even though it's a digital camera, it retains the qualities and simplicity of the original Holga camera and brings back the joy and delayed gratification associated with good old analog photography." I like this not because it's a digital version of a Holga, but what a digital camera might be like if it took the same approach as a Holga. I also really like the reversible top panel.

"Hybrids are smooth and neat. Interdisciplinary thinking is diplomatic; it thrives in a bucolic university setting. Chimeras, though? Man, chimeras are weird. They’re just a bunch of different things bolted together. They’re abrupt. They’re discontinuous. They’re impolitic. They’re not plausible; you look at a chimera and you go, “yeah right.” And I like that! Chimeras are on the very edge of the recombinatory possible. Actually — they’re over the edge."

Just in case you needed instructions.

Composite keys for Rails/ActiveRecord. Really does appear to work, too, which is nice.

"The Enough Project says that auditing component supply chains at the smelters to see whether the metal was sources from “clean” places like Australia or Canada instead of lining the pockets of Congolese warlords would add about one cent to the price of a cellphone, and that this figure originates from within the industry. I’d happily pay a thousand times that for each of my devices – a mere ten bucks – to ensure that I wasn’t bankrolling rape and murder." Depressing, and a very, very good point. It doesn't make me any surer of what to do, sadly.

"It's not a subscription; it's more casual than that. It's an **impulscription**; they get the chance to dangle the week's headlines under your nose, and you get the chance to buy if you like the look of that issue. No obligation, no hassle. It means I never have to miss an Economist Technology Quarterly, and nor do I have to take out a proper subscription and then suffer the guilt of seeing unread copies piling up in the living room.<br />
<br />
I want all magazines to be available like this, please." What a great idea. (Also: I *love* 'impulscription').

Lovely: roleplaying Ferris Bueller not only on Twitter, but also on Foursquare. I love that Foursquare has a policy to allow "fake check-ins but not to reward them points"; there's lots of potential there, both playful and storyful.

"Emo’s rise coincides with the explosion of social networking, the fracturing of commodification, the emergence of micro-trends, the mainstream adoption of alt-porn tropes… Emo’s the musical centre of a pop-culture whirlwind that doesn’t really seem to have been explored much, and when it has it’s often been addressed either in dismissive or alarmist tones." As an emo apologist, I really need to write more in response to this – they're topics I've covered in my head several times.