onfocus

Not only words, but it's important to think about all of the digital artifacts of living. They're all moving toward the domain of companies in the name of convenience. This conversation explains some of the problems with that. [via waxy]

This list is about writing stories like those Pixar tells. But these are great rules that can apply to any form of communication.

Reading this article just reminds me that I'm still upset Google killed its Google Reader sharing features. The Reader bridge has been burned for me, but I agree they could do more inside existing services to improve Plus.

Impressive growth for a company with 12 people. Database sharding is some sort of evil magic, isn't it?

A great though depressing article by Mat Honan about the history and current state of Flickr at Yahoo!.

Toyota is making a small run of all-electric RAV4s over the next three years. It'll be the first all-electric SUV.

Another blow to native apps. The number of subscribers, money, and time that went into their native app is pretty amazing. They're shuttering their apps and moving everything to the Web.

A good infographic about media consolidation. This is why it's important to find, consume, and support independent everything.

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."