onfocus

• Many Eyes
  New IBM project for social data visualization and analysis. Could analyzing data with others be more popular than sharing photos and videos? ;) [via O'Reilly Radar]
  filed under: visualization, productivity, design
• Wikipedia: Featured pictures
  great images from Wikipedia articles. It's unusual to me to see wikipedia content in a slightly different context. Similarly, there's Wikiworld Comics and the Picture of the day (a pod feed is only available offsite because Wikipedia doesn't provide one.)
  filed under: art, history, photography, wikipedia

• fulminate // Architectures of Control
  New blog by Dan Lockton about the intersection of psychology and business. [via Mind Hacks]
  filed under: design, marketing, media, psychology, weblogs
• Schneier on Security: Choosing Secure Passwords
  Great article on the current state of password "recovery", and how you can choose passwords that are somewhat more secure. Schneier's PasswordSafe is an essential program for me.
  filed under: security

• HoHoHo! : Design : Brand Spanking New
  great tiny icons. [via mathowie]
  filed under: design, development
• collision detection: Why interactive websites can create false memories
  can interactivity make consumers more susceptible to suggestion? "These findings suggest that marketing managers should test their campaigns for both true and false memories."
  filed under: internet, marketing, science, psychology
• Industrieform-DDR - Digitale Abbildung
  This site is a little tough to navigate because it's in German, but seeing examples of East German design from everyday tools (like drills) to architecture are worth the effort. They're like artifacts from another world. [via designboom via sterling]
  filed under: design, art, history

• overstated: How many taps in a URL
  cameron put together a cool tool for calculating the number of taps you'd need to enter a URL into a cellphone. [via waxy]
  filed under: design, internet, mobile

• Anil Dash: How Matt Haughey Beat Google
  Anil shows some reasons why Ask Metafilter works and why Google Answers didn't.
  filed under: community, design

• SWFUpload beta
  Flash upload progress thingy for web apps. [via mathowie]
  filed under: design, development, flash, programming

• die.net: Optimizing Page Load Time
  fantastic tips for tuning web servers and applications for speed [via joshua]
  filed under: design, development, hacks, software

• Telegraph: How to be funny
  this articles dissects the art of comedy and distills it down to a few "joke templates". [via Mind Hacks]
  filed under: science, joke, psychology
• whitney music box
  "a musical realization of the motion graphics of john whitney as described in his book 'digital harmony'." By Jim Bumgardner. Play with the hand crank!
  filed under: art, design, flash, hacks, music, visualization
• KrazyDad: Fantabulous Flickr Friday
  Flickr Hacks co-author Jim Bumgardner recently spoke at Yahoo about the visual and audio hacks he plays around with. I hope Yahoo releases audio of his talk.
  filed under: conferences, hacks
• Mother Jones: Is Google Evil?
  [via Bruce Schneier]
  filed under: google, ethics, privacy, security
• IDEA Conference Blog: Audio and some slides
  some of the presentations from the IDEA conference are available now
  filed under: conferences, design, mp3
• WorldChanging: Help Us Hack the Publishing System!
  I already ordered the book. (It arrived today, yay!) But I'd be ordering on Nov. 1st with others if I hadn't. [via Brian Sawyer]
  filed under: amazon, marketing, hacks

• National Park Service Interpretive Development Program
  internal documents from the National Park Service that detail how to develop National Park activities, interpretive media, and "informal" dialogue. [via sterling via IDEA]
  filed under: design, education, government

Update: Removed! I knew I should have mirrored it as soon as I saw it. I guess the National Park system doesn't want to share their methods with other competing park systems? I'd love to know more about how our National Parks are put together, and their methods could probably influence other fields. This decision is disappointing.

Update 2: huh, maybe it's just me. MojoMark was able to grab a copy of the site for me.

• LuckySoftware.dk: HexColorPicker
  Hex the Mac color picker
  filed under: mac, design, software
• macosxhints.com - Make the OS X Color Picker into an application
  handy tip for quick access to color picker, especially when combined with the HexColorPicker add-on
  filed under: mac, design, hacks
• xkcd - A webcomic
  buy these geek shirts. !!! sudo buy these geek shirts.
  filed under: science, fashion, joke
• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express
  There's a new version of SQL Server client tools that has better query integration (no more moving over to query analyzer). I'm still getting to know it, but so far I'm impressed.
  filed under: sql, software

• O'Reilly Radar > Deconstructing Databases
  interesting thoughts on structured data vs. conversations in a world with fantastic full-text search + tagging. Will conversations win?
  filed under: design, development, language, tagging
• Darik's Boot and Nuke (Hard Drive Disk Wipe)
  open source data destruction. useful if you want to sell/donate a computer or hard drive.
  filed under: hardware, privacy
• New Scientist Tech: Virtual cityscapes show town planners the future
  some cities are starting to use Google Earth to model for planning. (via slashdot)
  filed under: google, geo, visualization
• CNN: Branson pledges $3B to fight climate change
  Big carbon credits: "Branson...said the money would come from 100 percent of the profits generated by his transportation sectors -- trains and airline companies." (via kottke)
  filed under: environment, ethics
• photofront - a better frontend for your photos
  nice flickr interface
  filed under: flash, flickr, photography

• visualcomplexity.com | A visual exploration on mapping complex networks
  tons of data visualization ideas in one place. (also mentioned in Cal's talk.)
  filed under: design, internet, statistics, visualization
• Cacti: The Complete RRDTool-based Graphing Solution
  Cal's talk at fowa mentioned copious graphing for web ops. This was one of the tools he mentioned.
  filed under: development, software, visualization
• Motivations for contributing to online communities
  wikipedia article that includes Kollock's motivations for online contributions.
  filed under: wikipedia, internet, psychology