onfocus

Rushkoff looks back at Boorstin's seminal media book written in the Mad Men era. He describes our collective nostalgia for those times as: "Those last wonderful moments before we drifted off to sleep."

Great recommendations for good history reads.

"HistoryTag records the histories of specially tagged things, so you can see how they were made and how they live in the world." The Internet of Things is off and running. This is a great idea.

Joshua Schacter's latest project: tagging people's Twitter handles with skills they can perform. It's a way to see what people are known for among their peers. More tagging!

A nice collection of railroad company logos from 1845-2000. [via kottke]

Kurt Vonnegut to the member of a school board that burned his books: "If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own."

Nice look at the way they used to make guitars, and some good guitar stories in the comments.

Oregon is starting to build infrastructure to support all-electric vehicles.

"A jQuery plugin for creating big, bold & responsive headlines." This page is a nice demo. Resize your browser to see the headlines at various sizes.

The time. On the Web.

Nice to see MetaFilter at the top of this list--we've been working on site bandwidth. And I agree on the jQuery problem. There's a bandwidth cost associated with easier development.

Looks simple, sharp! Nice update.

Hey, nice idea: public unit tests.

Background bird chirping in a YouTube video is mistaken for content under copyright. Highlights of a broken system ensue.

Horrible one-star Amazon reviews. [via MetaFilter]

"The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation."

Obama knows basketball. Nice to see a more casual side of Obama.

Jason Fried on being open to new ideas: "So next time you hear something, or someone, talk about an idea, pitch an idea, or suggest an idea, give it five minutes. Think about it a little bit before pushing back, before saying it’s too hard or it’s too much work. Those things may be true, but there may be another truth in there too: It may be worth it."

"I thought it would be interesting to produce a kind of personal encylopedia: each volume cataloguing the links for a whole year." Great idea, a physical copy of your Pinboard/Delicious links.

"After using all the UI richness available for such a long time to make beautiful and differentiated products, app designers have realized that the user's work, not their own, is the star of the show."