onfocus

"Dennis Delimarsky compared several weather APIs and decided that Google’s is best, despite having no documentation or support from the company." Looks nice!

A bit outdated, but full of good advice for tuning SQL Server applications.

"Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle -- Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices." It's a start!

"...the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors." Let Beginner's Mind have a shot! [via torrez]

More Google Books Ngrams fun.

"The ability to quantify things that had once been subjective 'hunches' on the part of scholars...is nothing short of revolutionary."

"...a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage."

Noteworthy photos from Google Street View. [via rafe]

Pictures from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.

yep, has comedy potential.

"Without a Steve Jobs, Facebook is going to become the new Google. A technical powerhouse that can't build usable software, because the super-smart engineers have lost touch with real user problems."

Bloglines is shutting down and people are leaving Google Reader in droves. [via pkedrosky on Twitter via my social netw...OH, I see what's happening.]

Turn any Flickr RSS feed into The Big Picture by resizing the photos from Small to Large. I have my issues with Yahoo Pipes and their agressive scraping, but I have to admit this does make viewing Flickr photos with Google Reader fun.

ColdFusion code to geocode locations with Google Maps.

And Google gets in on the Twitter Archive goodness. I'm glad Tweets are becoming less ephemeral.

The Library of Congress is going to archive every tweet. It'll be interesting to see how they make the archives available.

"Slate ad critic Seth Stevenson tries out a Google service that allows you to run your own commercial on national TV for as little as $100." (Neat. But Slate 5? Did I miss 2-4? har har.)

Interesting metric to use. Why would page speed relate to authority?

Photographer, vanishing America.

Photographer, homes at night.

"Nothing focuses the mind of the reporter like being asked to specify what exactly they’d like to see done, and it’s much easier for a developer to scan a list with actual tasks right in the sentence construction." Good advice for personal to-do lists too.

Fun way to browse full-size images from Google Image Search results.

Looks like a simple way for a web app to send/receive SMS messages.

Not only did I post this link to delicious, I "liked" it at Google Reader, commented about it at Facebook, retweeted, dugg, and potentially verbed it in other ways that I might not be aware of. But yeah, more author tools--hear, hear!

A nice way to integrate Google Closure with TextMate. The trick to using it is selecting the file to compile from the TextMate Project Drawer.

Google hosts a web version of their in-house JavaScript compiler/minifier. How did I not hear about this?

A peek behind the curtain at Facebook with an anonymous FB developer.

"...Brad's work was altogether more messy and funny and human and passionate and complicated, just like the man himself. I can offer no more succinct summation of the man than that he was a good man and a good friend, profoundly funny and profoundly kind." Anil shares some memories of Brad.

"...the hero is the most damaging person on a team, particularly on a team that’s supposed to be writing high-availability or otherwise mission-critical software." Interesting analysis of team dynamics. [via jessamyn]

"One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation." Amit Singhal on how Google ranks Tweets for real-time search.

Rules for PR folks who want to work with bloggers. "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE means FOR IMMEDIATE DELETE."

Why is Google offering DNS? "...they want to speed up people's Google search results."

Google takes aim at OpenDNS and John Gruber calls their response "Pure FUD". I agree, but any move Google makes has big repercussions. Distributed infrastructure is good.

Nice article about tapping into the Java chart component with ColdFusion to access chart types CF doesn't support.